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Comment by casca | Hacker News Reader

To disable Ad Tracking under IOS, go to Settings > General > About > Advertising > Limit Ad Tracking to On

This is a worthwhile read (with excellent examples) on the ubiquitous "Click here to not receive third-party messages" pattern.

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Let's not forget about disabling "Interest-based ads," for which there is no path to get to... other than going to a link in Safari. The link is oo.apple.com

This KB article explains the process. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4228

Interestingly, this launches some sort of stealth app, not a hidden page in the "Settings" app.

Also, there is another setting for including your location with iAd calls. That one is Settings > Privacy > Location Services > (Scroll all the way to the bottom, yes, past every single app that uses your location, about 35 in my case) > System Services > Location-Based iAds

Wow. You didn't make that up. That's past ridiculous ...

And ofcourse following the link in the KB article just produces a timeout from my ipad (though i do get a proper message that i'm not on an iOS device when accessing it from my mac). You wonder why they even bother? If you have no intention of opting people out, why even put up the page?

I suppose there is a legal requirement in some jurisdiction that the functionality exists, but how accessible to make the feature was left unspecified. Therefore, dark patterns prevail.

>Interestingly, this launches some sort of stealth app, not a hidden page in the "Settings" app.

If you go directly in Safari, it'll prompt to open in "iAdOptOut". I wonder how it works.

This fall onwards it'll be: Settings > Privacy > Advertising.

Source?

I can confirm this. The language is "limit ad tracking" instead of "disable," which worries me a bit.

I think a better word would be "refuse", as it more accurately portrays the situation. It too is not perfect though, as your "refusal" can still be ignored.

Ugh, I hate these. Instead of disabling it at the OS level, where they should do it; they create a "let's give unethical companies another bit of information" option.

Actually, in this case "Limit" is perfectly accurate. The only result of checking this is that the application must call advertisingTrackingEnabled before using the identifier.

If enabled is NO, then the developer can use the identifier for "frequency capping, conversion events, estimating the number of unique users, security and fraud detection, and debugging". Notice that compliance with these restrictions is almost impossible to determine.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AdSupp...

I can confirm. I have iOS7 running on my iPhone 5 at the moment.

Its actually clearer now since there is no "on" or "off" label. Its just off and white or on and green.

http://cl.ly/image/2U45141L3E3N / http://cl.ly/image/081l2v2W3E3H

I like how it's called "limit" and not "disable". Compared to infinity, anything with a finite value can be considered to have 'limits'. Even Apple's $100B in cash has a limit, despite the staggering size. Weasel-words are an interesting phenomenon.

I also liked the idea of "Dark Pattern" that he linked and introduced.

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