Google-backed groups criticize Apple's new warnings on user tracking

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-google-apple/google-backed-groups-criticize-apples-new-warnings-on-user-tracking-idUKKBN2440VG

by scarface74 • 6 years ago

306 217 6 years ago

uk.reuters.com

koluna4• 6 years ago

“Increase the chance of user refusal” - imagine that applied to literally any other context, such as bank accounts, credit cards, buying cars, etc. to see how ridiculous that statement is.

spacedcowboy• 6 years ago

The difference being agency. You intend to open a bank account, buy a car, etc. “you“ [for the majority definition of ‘you’] had no idea that you were being secretly tracked, and (clutches pearls) you might even object to that.

This is lifting the stone that’s been lying in the grass for the last decade or so, and watching all the creepy-crawlers scurry away out of the light, desperate to find somewhere to hide themselves again.

koluna4• 6 years ago

100%. And I love the fact that with Apple that agency slowly moves back to me - the ad industry can disappear overnight, and I don’t think life would get worse without it.

bcrosby95• 6 years ago

Yes, by now everyone knows they are being "secretly" tracked since it's been in the news for the last decade.

And yet privacy isn't a strong selling point for most people. It sounds like they have spoken and they don't give a damn about it.

odshoifsdhfs• 6 years ago

Being sober increases the chance of girl refusing to have sex with me.

Solution: I should be able to slip drugs in their drink without their knowing to keep being able to have sex with girls against their will.

I really don't understand how someone with 2 neutrons can ever utter a phrase like this and think they are doing themselves a service?!

oh_sigh2• 6 years ago

It can be relevant if the text is chosen which overly dramatic for what is happening. I'm sure I could write something about cookies which scares away most people from accepting them.

Too• 6 years ago

It's actually "risk of user refusal", which sounds even more ridiculous.

sudhirj• 6 years ago

The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the limited ability to customize it still carries “a high risk of user refusal.”

If you’re doing something and you know users are going to refuse to let you do it if they have the choice, don’t do it. Apple will give them a choice soon enough.

csunbird• 6 years ago

I think what they mean is, they need finer controls on what data they would like to access and finer controls on informing what data are in use with the application.

smichel173• 6 years ago

As far as I can tell from the article, there is only a single piece of functionality behind this prompt -- access to the device's unique advertising ID. So, I'm not sure it can get any more granular than that. Quite literally the only functionality it enables is tracking a device across installs or apps.

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 6 years ago

More importantly, that should be a sign that you know that you currently aren't obtaining informed consent, and should be thankful that Apple is saving you from the massive GDPR fines you should be getting (if only enforcement would actually happen).

bad_user• 6 years ago

These companies already know they aren't getting consent from users.

GDPR's requirements are pretty clear in this regard and personalisation for advertising can't be a legitimate interest. Every business in the advertising community has seeked legal counseling regarding GDPR, make no mistake about it. They simply hope that they'll be ignored for long enough.

if only enforcement would actually happen

It does happen. Maybe not as fast as people would like, investigations and lawsuits take a while, data protection authorities are probably understaffed. Google was fined multiple times already — and they might take this as the cost of doing business, but sooner or later they will be hit with that maximum 4% of global profits if they don't adapt and they are adapting.

floatrock• 6 years ago

Apple will give them a choice soon enough.

And hopefully one not reliant on so many dark patterns.

The OneTrust opt-outs are the worst (and don't even work! which must be against the california consumer privacy act).

On my iphone in safari: say I'm cooking dinner and go to epicurious.com. Greeted with the now-standard opt-out banner at the bottom.

1. Click the "Do not sell my advertising"

2. Greeted with a giant Conde Nast wall-of-text full screen modal

3. Scroll through it (wait, we're now reading long legalise terms-of-service just to opt-out now?)

4. In the middle of the wall of text, there's a toggle button for "Sell my Personal Information". Okay, lets forget about the 2012-era debate around UI ambiguity of toggle buttons and accept this UI dark pattern. Try to tap it.

5. I tap it, and it doesn't do anything.

You read that right -- the Conde Nast OneTrust-powered opt-out, if you go through all the steps to find it -- doesn't even work on mobile. They're shipping a broken UI. Maybe you need to do something obscure like tap-and-hold-then-drag-in-a-tiny-hitbox-that-doesn't-trigger-horizontal-page-scrolling or something. I haven't figured it out.

I assume it's companies like OneTrust or Conde Nast that are complaining Apple's presumably-more-straightforward opt-out carries a "high risk of user refusal." Looking at how user-hostile what they're shipping now shows you what they're really fighting is giving consumers an effective choice.

gumby• 6 years ago

That toggle does operate on non-mobile safari. Note that I said “operate” not “work”: you can flip the toggle, but the two choices are not labeled.

Since I pressed “do not sell my information” and then got the Condé Nast opt outs page, does that mean the state of the toggle is already “don’t share”? It’s deliberately impossible to tell.

SheinhardtWigCo• 6 years ago

This is the case all over the web. Many of these cookie/privacy modals just don’t work or are deliberately engineered to be as obnoxious as possible. We need some legal test cases where this behavior is declared to be in violation of the spirit of GDPR and CCPA.

yoaviram• 6 years ago

Let me plug https://YourDigitalRights.org. Search for a company and send them a CCPA/GDPR deletion request. Or better yet install the browser extension and do it while visiting the company's website.

tomjen33• 6 years ago

I have installed Firefox Sync as my default browser. It clears all cookies, and everything else except things you have downloaded when you close a tab.

So I just click allow on those popups and let the user agent do its job.

I highly recommend it to everybody. You can still keep a chrome tab open for those sites you need to login to.

kodablah4• 6 years ago

If you’re doing something and you know users are going to refuse to let you do it if they have the choice, don’t do it. Apple will give them a choice soon enough.

I think the statement would be more meaningful with "if they have the choice" removed. Otherwise, you're just arguing in favor of only those with the power to remove choice.

CyberDildonics2• 6 years ago

I think you misunderstood what they were saying. How can someone refuse if they don't have choice?

izacus2• 6 years ago

Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, faulted Apple for not adhering to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy rules.

How did this turn into "Google-backed groups"?! Where's Facebook in the title? Is there no attempt at unbiased reporting anymore?

falcolas2• 6 years ago

The reporting is just fine, since it discloses both groups. The title is click-bait, but that’s the reality of the news/youtube/etc. industry if you want views. It would have been equally click-baity if the title had said “Facebook-backed groups”, yet equally false (and true).

There’s also ad agencies not backed by Facebook or Google, but they’re not in the title either.

izacus2• 6 years ago

There’s also ad agencies not backed by Facebook or Google, but they’re not in the title either.

Yes, and this is why the reporting is dishonest - it's feels like it's there to smear one company in the title instead of actually disclosing to us who the people are.

snowwolf• 6 years ago

I think what's more interesting about Google backing it over Facebook, is that it implies that Android will potentially not follow suit.

ssequeira• 6 years ago

Moreover, there's no mention of the names of any organizations, nor could I find the press release that the quotes were taken from.

varshithr• 6 years ago

Can tracking be useful, if used correctly?

lbotos• 6 years ago

Define "correctly". Intra application "tracking" (logging) is helpful and can help for product flow for sure. Cookie based ad networks may make for more efficient marketing efforts which in theory "lower prices" but at what cost?

kergonath3• 6 years ago

Yes, in which case you should be able to communicate its usefulness to the users, who will allow it.

avodonosov• 6 years ago

Of course, there are use cases where user wants to be recognized as he travels across web domains.

For example single sign on, or a chat with a company representive when the company has several domains.

This "tracking" just needs to be clearly visible and controllable by the user.

It would be good if web browsers had a mode, where every time a site is trying to access cross domain cookies, a confirmation dialog was shown with details of the data requested, how the site is going to use it, their privacy policy. With options Allow once, always, 3 days, etc.

koluna4• 6 years ago

If it is, then the user should still consent to it. Just because something is “useful” in Google’s or FB’s eyes doesn’t mean I want to be a part of that.

scarface7412• 6 years ago

Exactly. I was about to pull the trigger and pay for a subscription for the Overcast podcast player just to support the author. He wasn’t offering anything useful for the subscription - I am not complaining. It was more of an honor system.

Then he introduced ads - mostly podcast ads. Marco created his own ad platform just for his app and he doesn’t use any third party ad SDK. I both found the ads useful and I didn’t feel guilty because he was generating revenue.

maccard3• 6 years ago

Yes. Google search is infinitely more useful when mildly personalised rather than based on sheer popularity. If I search for drainage companies, I don't care who the most popular drainage company in the world is, ad it's highly likely to be weighted towards somewhere more populous. When I look at reviews for services, tracking can be used by Google and co to attempt to verify that the person who left a 5* review actually used the service and wasn't an employee, or that the 1* review isn't from a competitor.

Ease of use is another, albeit less clear cut. If Ticketmaster knows I like heavy metal, they don't need to send me newsletters (that I opt in to manually of course) telling me about the upcoming country music gigs.

To be clear, I don't think that the current players are being useful to me as a consumer, they are abusing my data, but that's not to say that there is no use for tracking or personalisation,

hellofunk2• 6 years ago

Google search is infinitely more useful

I can definitely see how it could be more useful, but I don’t agree that the actual factor of this increase in productivity is infinite. Maybe a factor of 3 to 5.

dwaite• 6 years ago

Tracking in this context involves cross-organizational sharing of user information, usually information behavior in particular. So it isn't that Google has my location data or that Ticketmaster knows I've been to a heavy metal concert - it is that Google finds out I was at a Ticketmaster heavy metal concert.

frandroid• 6 years ago

I can think of a few cases. For example, an app monitoring memory usage in other apps. Or an app made to intercept certain types of calls from other apps. (A music scrobbler, for example.)

hyperman1• 6 years ago

It isn't even usefull for advertising.

Google keeps giving me french ads even when I speak dutch, live in the dutch half of Belgium, and have a http request header saying i speak dutch or english. I get ads for all kinds of stuff I don't care about. In fact, I get ads for things I can't even buy in my country or continent if I wanted it. If google would tune their ads to the language i ask them, based on the query I entered, the results would be a lot better.

I presume the real value of all this tracking is they can companies to buy ads with them, even if the actual ad delivery mostly fails.

Now I bought a rubber mat on ali express, for opening all kinds of electronics. For weeks they tried to sell me rubber ... stuff ... and latex ... stuff ... and other related ... stuff .... until my wife started mocking me enough to stay of their site for a few months. That's another cost of relevant advertising ;-)

iamstupidsimple• 6 years ago

Ad targeting is done by the buyer. They're probably setting location but not language. This happens all the time.

unnouinceput• 6 years ago

Why you even getting ads in the first place? Never heard of uBlock Origins? Stop using Chrome, use Firefox. Then you can put safely Origins on both mobile and desktop for Firefox and never see any ads.

summerlight• 6 years ago

Your issue is ad targeting, and most of it is done manually by advertisers. Ironically, this shows why ad targeting can be done much better at the hands of Google and Facebook because they can track the user behaviors more accurate than advertisers.

kergonath3• 6 years ago

“Foxes complain about Apple improving hen house security”. As a user, Google and their advertiser puppets can go whistle.

frostwhale• 6 years ago

The only caveat i'll add is Apple is providing ad software that doesn't trigger the double verification. This can be seen either as a push to force people to respect privacy(as their software does), or a push to control a larger share of the ad market (as the foxes here i'm sure believe)

beervirus• 6 years ago

I don’t love them, but I’m ok with ads. I’m not ok with tracking/spyware/modern adtech.

kergonath3• 6 years ago

It does not pass the smell test though: Apple has nothing to gain from its non-existent advertising arm, whilst advertisers have a lot to lose if random users can opt out. I have no doubt Apple's solution needs improving and will be circumvented, but I am not going to lament that better is not perfect.

csmattryder• 6 years ago

It's cool to conciously see the death of an industry and watch as marketing firms fail to migrate away from traditional ads.

You can whinge and whine, but progress stops for nobody.

It's also great to see Apple building this into iOS, definitely a highlight of WWDC, for me. I often see the location indicator come on and wonder what else I'm not seeing.

rubber_duck3• 6 years ago

Progress ? There's money to be made and this looks like posturing and story telling to justify tapping in to another revenue stream on their platform.

valuearb7• 6 years ago

By making it harder to monetize ads? Ok.

scarface7412• 6 years ago

This is merely a “strategy credit”. Apple makes almost all of its money by people giving them money directly and them giving you stuff. They can afford to be privacy focused.

If you’re okay with cheap, unpolished products where you are constantly being tracked and getting advertised to, buy a Google product. If you want products where you give the company money and they give you stuff - buy Apple.

papeda2• 6 years ago

There seem to be two conflicting lines of thought about the future of advertising.

1) Companies are learning that non-online advertising is not very worthwhile and so are reducing the resources allocated to, say, network TV ads. This has already happened to a large extent to print and radio advertising. This suggests that the future of online advertising is bright.

2) Companies are learning that online advertising is not very worthwhile. They are learning that clicks are a bad metric, that online ads target people poorly, and that customers dislike online ads. This suggests that the future of online advertising is dim.

I'm curious as to what people make of these two positions. Are companies just going to spend less on ads in general?

fauigerzigerk• 6 years ago

Are companies just going to spend less on ads in general?

That's unlikely. Spending on advertising doesn't appear to change much as a share of GDP:

https://www.galbithink.org/ad-spending.htm

koheripbal• 6 years ago

3) Companies are learning that Ads that don't appear to be Ads, which also happen to reinforce customers' existing belief system, is a great way to lower their emotional guard and inject a positive product injection. The future of Native Advertising [1] is bright. So many examples already... [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/top/?sort=top&t=year

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

User targeted advertising maybe moves the needle 4%. The reason people believe it's so key is that adtech companies need businesses to believe it's vital since they're the only companies with enough user data to do it. That 4% figure came from an independent study, I believe a Google-backed study claimed it had a 50% impact.

Remove that and smaller ad companies can sell ads based on the content they're displayed next to. A reasonable "targeting" method which doesn't require tracking users at all. Sites could partner directly with advertisers for similar effectiveness at a drastically lower price.

rm445• 6 years ago

Probably spend differently. Because both of your points are kind of true: the future is online, but money spent up to now hasn't necessarily got results. Pure wild speculation, but I suspect that some of the metrics that drove advertising AND content onto the big beasts of the current Internet were gamed or fraudulent - it will be interesting to see if any big scandals happen.

rdiddly• 6 years ago

I sure hope so! But in all seriousness I don't think those two points conflict per se; they both say, "...advertising is not very worthwhile..." which kind of nails what's going on. The ground under our feet has changed. The audience by-and-large is fragmented, jaded, fickle, fed up, and has no money.

Fed up for the last 5 years hearing about scandal after scandal, outrage after outrage...

Fragmented for about the last 5-10 years, ever since we figured out the "long tail" and how to cater to everybody's unique interests. There is no longer anything approximating a place where everybody goes/is; hence there's not even a consensus anymore about what reality is, which is a related & tangential issue.

Has no money, well that's more of a continuum... either you do or you don't, but every year a larger number of people don't, and are too broke to be in the market for whatever product.

Jaded with advertising in general ever since probably the Boomers were in their 20s, and moreso when Gen X were teenagers.

Jaded with online advertising ever since the 90s when it became clear ads were going to follow us into what everybody thought was going to be a new online world.

Fickle since the dawn of time.

bobthepanda2• 6 years ago

this has always been the problem with advertising.

the old chestnut goes, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.

fmakunbound• 6 years ago

Sounds like a lovely feature. Who are these groups going to complain to and how on earth how are they going to frame it lol.

Zenst2• 6 years ago

Given the tobacco industry fought to have warnings and packaging restrictions upon their products, I'm sure they created a whole play-book of things to try, though note that they eventually failed. Whilst applications are not going to give you cancer, you could fairly equate the analogy within the digital World and your personal details and digital persona being eroded away via cancerous applications.

Gets down to giving the consumer a fair and informed choice, so however they frame this - I'm sure it will only serve Apple well. Indeed, any EU investigations into Apple would probably see this move in good light and with the competition contrasting it in a different light, I don't think Apple could of asked for anything better to stash into any legal war chest with the EU when it comes to showing they are good guys and looking after consumers better than others - least that is how they can frame it.

CodeWriter232• 6 years ago

This ends when the origin site starts proxying requests to the ad aggregators via the site-native domain.

leejoramo• 6 years ago

And the native domain owners end up taking full responsibility for the data liability

searchableguy• 6 years ago

They already have to. I am confused by your statement.

hu3• 6 years ago

Responsibility which is contractually transferable to the advertiser. Even if only against potential financial damages. Which is what matters to the companies anyway.

jahewson• 6 years ago

Doesn’t work for the web because without the 3rd party domain there’s no access to 3rd party cookies so the tracker can’t identify you that way.

CodeWriter232• 6 years ago

First party cookie storage of identifier provided by ad network; Tracking of individuals via various fingerprinting techniques, IP address, screen size, CSS, UserAgent etc.

ixvvqktiwl• 6 years ago

This is somewhat off-topic, but I'm worried about closed ecosystems, the shift towards censorship, and the end of private ownership. Good examples of this are walled gardens that break basic web links (Twitter for example), or DRM-encumbered digital books.

If I buy a physical book I can lend it to someone, or sell it if I want. If I buy a digital copy (which for some reason often costs more), not only can I not lend it but I can't sell it to anyone either. I also need to ask permission from the platform to read the book I rightfully purchased.

The Google/Apple app store duopoly is another example of this. Apple for example only allows you to use Safari, and makes it very hard for you to have any choice about what software you run on your own device.

It feels like there's a slow slide into a world where we no longer have any choice about what content we consume or how we consume it. Instead, we're spoonfed what the platform decides is good for us, and in most cases good means most profitable for the platform.

nojito2• 6 years ago

Everyone should regularly be reminded that Google was caught paying professors to publish papers "friendly" to Google.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/paying-professors-inside-google...

Convincing the public that they are correct is how Google normalized the idea of sharing private information without oversight.

Zenst2• 6 years ago

I remember a time in which Google could do no wrong in the public eye, times sure have changed. THough equally back then, Microsoft was the baddie everybody loved to hate and today, well - I do wonder if public perception of Microsoft has surpassed Google. My gut feeling says it kinda has. Quick google(ironic I know) shows that is also the case.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-samsung-microsoft-top-t... https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/

A4ET8a8uTh03• 6 years ago

I think I expressed this opinion before on this forum, bit Google is just another corporation now. I practically expect it to bend the rules to serve its needs. Same is true for other companies with followings ( looking at you Tesla ).

papeda2• 6 years ago

The web of corporate intrigue that powers watchdog groups is remarkable. The people who caught the professors are from the Campaign For Accountability, a "watchdog group" [1]. They pursue this role for a variety of issues. Their work on Google comes from a wider initiative they call the Google Transparency Project. One of the funders of said project is Oracle [2], which has...its own motives for bringing Google down a peg [3].

[1] https://campaignforaccountability.org/

[2] https://fortune.com/2016/08/19/google-transparency-project-2...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

They have so many levers to do this too. Their public policy team has sponsored hundreds of educational institutions, lobbying organizations, and think tanks.

https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/5a1907d78237ab17...

Then with journalists they use a time-honored tradition Apple has been known for: Managing exclusive access based on positive press. Blogs which promote Google's political positions get exclusive interviews with Sundar Pichai, which when factoring in the ad clicks it brings in, is a multi-million dollar payday.

TechDirt is a special bridge between the two concepts: The same guy who writes the "news" runs a lobbying organization, Copia, which is on Google's public policy team payroll.

justapassenger• 6 years ago

Apple engineers also said last week the company will bolster a free Apple-made tool that uses anonymous, aggregated data to measure whether advertising campaigns are working and that will not trigger the pop-up. “Because it’s engineered to not track users, there’s no need to request permission to track,” Brandon Van Ryswyk, an Apple privacy engineer, said in a video session explaining the measurement tool to developers.

There it is. Unless there’s a process that other companies can follow to certify that their solutions don’t track users and get same treatment, then in the end it’s about Apple trying to force themselves as player in the ads business.

It’s well known playbook as they’re similarly forcing themselves into identity business, with new logging requirements.

fairenough42• 6 years ago

Are they moving into ads as the hardware business dries up for them? In my personal experience, many people don't replace their phones as often as they did, say, 10 years ago. A similar story played out earlier with laptops. There's no obvious new hardware category for Apple to pivot into so maybe software is their next play.

saagarjha• 6 years ago

Not software but services.

throwaway2048• 6 years ago

saying their hardware business is "drying up" is some pretty extreme hyperbole

copp• 6 years ago

Yes they are. Ads in Apstore and News.

scarface7412• 6 years ago

You have looked at their latest earnings haven’t you?

yellow_postit• 6 years ago

They tried before from 2010-2016 [1]. I do think this is their long term play — getting credit card transaction data and shutting others out.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd

jodrellblank• 6 years ago

There's no obvious new hardware category for Apple to pivot into

Was it obvious that AirPods would become a $4Bn revenue stream, or that Watch would take the lion’s share of the watch market despite having battery life of <1 day, or that Apple computer would move into regulator approved consumer heart monitoring?

Rumours of Apple TV and Apple Car and an Apple AR gadget have been around a long time.

spideymans2• 6 years ago

There's no obvious new hardware category for Apple to pivot into so maybe software is their next play.

Lets revisit this comment in a year or two when they release their AR and VR products.

jackjeff2• 6 years ago

They’re selling watches, they just released the iPhone SE which competes with mid-range Android phones, and they have new revenues from their rent seeking activities on App Store and Apple Pay. In addition, their new line of Mac ARM will remove the Intel tax. I think they’ll do just fine without becoming another advertisement company.

valuearb7• 6 years ago

Forcing themselves into the identity business? By giving it away for free? What kind of business it that?

I guess it’s the same as trying to get in the ads business by making ads less valuable?

harikb• 6 years ago

We are way past the argument that “free” => “no value to business”

dgellow• 6 years ago

I guess it’s the same as trying to get in the ads business by making ads less valuable?

If that damage your competitors more than it damages you, might that be of some value? Not saying that’s Apple is doing, just pointing that could be a thing.

kodablah4• 6 years ago

Forcing themselves into the identity business? By giving it away for free?

The price has nothing to do with the "forcing" part, unsure why you are guessing that's what is being referred to. The word "forcing" is clear enough on its own.

mlthoughts20184• 6 years ago

It’s funny too because any ad attribution methodology that’s not tracking users is going to suffer so much confounding to render it utterly useless. Of course it will show you Big Lift! but the reality is you could have negative lift and the attribution methodology won’t be capable of detecting it or accounting for necessary confounders to isolate the effect of the ad from other effects.

In essence, if you’re not tracking user-level behavior, then you should not be caring about any statistical attribution methodology at all, just use something different entirely, based on simple aggregates or top line metrics like revenue without modeling return on ad spend at all.

Anything that tries to do attribution on different cohorts, like demographic slices, etc., without controlling for individual level confounders, is complete misleading hot garbage.

So these customers of Apple’s sexy new ad attribution are probably paying a big premium to get ripped off with useless data. Such a system categorically can’t exist (and shouldn’t be desired) in cases where you don’t want to permit individual level tracking.

tareqak3• 6 years ago

If it is going to be utterly useless as easily as you claim, then it should be easy for the sixteen advertising agencies to prove that it will be utterly useless and that advertisers should push back against Apple and their new warning.

Abishek_Muthian• 6 years ago

free Apple-made tool

I wouldn't be surprised if it requires macOS to work and a yearly paid license to use that free tool.

kodablah4• 6 years ago

It’s well known playbook

The playbook is much more broad and is basically "we are privileged on our platform _and_ we unavoidably restrict the lesser privileged". Many don't like this (myself included) and many do. Simply put, where you reasonably can, choose the platform that has the restrictions you can accept or work around.

Despegar• 6 years ago

Apple is incentivizing ad networks to use SKAdNetwork [1], an API that lets you do attribution while preserving privacy. Guaranteeing that necessarily means they have to intermediate the relationship between users, apps and ad networks. They also proposed a similar API for the web [2].

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skadnetwo...

[2] https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...

Sephiroth87• 6 years ago

I know how unlikely it would have been, but I wish Apple just dropped this out of nowhere, because with this delay all the user tracking platforms will now just store the id they can currently access somewhere locally (if they aren't already) and keep using it going forward.

spacephysics• 6 years ago

I see a resurgence in marketing similar to Mad Men: where firms don’t have access to highly personalized data, and eventually, will actually have to be creative, instead of just using algorithms parameterized with user tracking/profile data

notatoad2• 6 years ago

i can't imagine how somebody could see the creative process in Mad Men and think that's something to be emulated. It's a bunch of privileged rich people (ad execs) coming up with ideas that they think are clever, and the only criteria for whether or not those ideas are good is if other privileged rich people (client company execs) agree.

There's no objective measures of success, just a bunch of people patting each other on the back because they all see the world the same way.

hn_check• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure there is an "objective measure of success" in the most plainly obvious way possible -- sales. Versus the bullshitty stats like impressions or accidental click-throughs that dominate online advertising.

the_reformation• 6 years ago

In the second episode the show, one of the copy writers literally states that all the firm's value is in its ad-placement team (radio, print, billboards, soon television), and the copy is just thrown in as gift-wrapping.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

Yes all the value is there but it's not the way you think it is (in the internet age)

Think how much money there was (and is) in liasing ad agencies with Media buying/planning (this is the department's name)

Think how well the companies will treat you if you, let's say, want to place an ad in the Superbowl, or at a TV prime-time slot

The ad agencies are the true customers of the TV companies. Who do you think gets all the pampering (and possibly kickbacks)?

scarface7412• 6 years ago

See Computer Shopper of the mid 90s.

umvi• 6 years ago

Let's just start charging for services

1propionyl• 6 years ago

The future of marketing is already here, and it's influencer marketing, as well as more subtle forms of manipulation on social media.

I guess you could call it creative. But it's also even more insidious and dishonest.

JIBitator• 6 years ago

On reddit there more and more companies that manipulate threads in their favors.

On niche porn subreddits, the feeds are now invaded by profiles with links to onlyfans pages. They are sneaky because they verify their accounts with photoshopped pictures.

gruez• 6 years ago

The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the limited ability to customize it still carries “a high risk of user refusal.”

Translation: we used to be able to use dark patterns to get users to consent, now we can’t.

A4ET8a8uTh03• 6 years ago

It is interesting. Apple is trying to position itself as more privacy friendly suggesting that the tide may be finally turning. It is difficult for me to believe that they would do it without customer demographic suggesting their user base places some value on it.

valuearb7• 6 years ago

Apple has been “more privacy friendly” for at least a decade.

jjcon3• 6 years ago

As has been said before - it is kinda hilarious to see people suggest Apple is privacy minded for marketing purposes because 5-7 years ago when they were privacy minded people said it would be a huge competitive disadvantage because users didn’t care.

A4ET8a8uTh03• 6 years ago

In a sense, it does not take much when main competitor in that space does not really hide a desire to hoover anything and everything.

scarface7412• 6 years ago

And it would put Apple behind with AI/ML. They are behind, but they are catching up. Google has to do everything on the server. Most Android devices have slow outdated hardware so you can’t do too much on the device.

orangecat3• 6 years ago

If you ask people if they want to be tracked, almost all will say no. If you ask if they'd rather be tracked or pay $X/month in exchange for a service, most will choose the tracking.

nojito2• 6 years ago

Apple is trying to position itself as more privacy friendly suggesting that the tide may be finally turning.

This isn't a recent thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo

tonyedgecombe• 6 years ago

It's interesting to think about it from Google's perspective. How can they respond to it without undermining their whole business model. The answer is they can't.

franzwong• 6 years ago

My TV doesn't track me and it can still provide me ad.

clement_b• 6 years ago

That's sarcasm isn't it? Your TV tracks you more than anything. Assuming it is a connected one.

smichel173• 6 years ago

My TV doesn't track me

Are you sure?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-wat...

tomjen33• 6 years ago

Op may, like me, have a dumb TV.

You can't buy them anymore, but you can still buy computer monitors with about the same size so that is probably what I will be doing when it goes.

crazygringo• 6 years ago

Apple last week disclosed features in its forthcoming operating system for iPhones and iPads that will require apps to show a pop-up screen before they enable a form of tracking commonly needed to show personalized ads.

Christ almighty I don't think I can take more pop-ups.

They're just cancer. Cookies, newsletters, forced logins, individual folder permissions... how many bullshit popups do I have to deal with per day? It's just popup fatigue.

Pretty much the only popups I ever want to deal with are when apps need access to my private hardware (webcam etc.) or info (location, photos, contacts, etc.). You know, the actually important ones.

Things like cookies, tracking, etc. should be a browser- or OS-wide setting. Asking me individually for every site, for every app, is the absolute worst user experience ever. Sorry but this pattern just has to DIE.

My only hope is that the more that popups proliferate, the likelier there will be legislation against them, requiring system-wide settings instead. Kind of like legislation against unsolicited robocalls.

holidaytrucksky• 6 years ago

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10676/ at 29:50

You can choose not to be asked by any app in the settings.

fmajid2• 6 years ago

That "Limit Ad Tracking" setting is already available in iOS, just not enabled by default, and not easily discoverable. People who have already set it will not be bothered, and I suspect a number will set "Limit Ad Tracking" just to avoid the popups.

swinglock• 6 years ago

All this happened already. I remember the Windows Vista UAC, followed by Windows 7 toned down UAC.

swebs• 6 years ago

Things like cookies, tracking, etc. should be a browser- or OS-wide setting. Asking me individually for every site, for every app, is the absolute worst user experience ever. Sorry but this pattern just has to DIE.

We already have that, the Do Not Track header. Advertising companies ignore it because they're not legally obliged to honor it. Reminder that these companies do not care about you or your user experience and will do anything they can to skirt the law to make an extra buck off you. And we can't rely on the competence of legislators because their answer is always more popups.

However, you do have weapons to defend yourself. My favorite is uMatrix. You can set it up to automatically block cookies from any site you don't have whitelisted. And you can make it only accept first party cookies. You can also have it block javascript, cross origin requests, frames by default. If a site doesn't work without scripts, you can easily enable them temporarily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

just-ok• 6 years ago

Advertising companies ignore it because they're not legally obliged to honor it.

Ironically enough, they don't ignore it. They instead just use it as another bit of entropy to differentiate you from everyone else who doesn't include the DNT header.

sc11• 6 years ago

And we can't rely on the competence of legislators because their answer is always more popups.

The European ePrivacy regulation was meant to make DNT legally binding and enabled by default but it has been stuck in the European Council for about 3 (?) years now due to massive pressure from publishers. It's a real shame because it would improve the situation a lot.

tomjen33• 6 years ago

Agreed. We need a standard that forbid websites from making popups and setting cookies if the do not track flag is set - alternatively we need all cookies to be marked as optional or required (per the GDPR) and then browsers can handle what to do with them, including just ignoring them completely.

bobthepanda2• 6 years ago

we don't even need a standard, that's what DNT is

we need a law enforcing the standard to have teeth. otherwise it's just yet another standard not doing anything.

37eyhdhdeueu2• 6 years ago

Are we still pretending GDPR did more than add another layer of inconvenience to the web? Users don't care and when they do it's because they bought into the fear mongering the privacy crowd keeps perpetuating. No products of value are made by these regulations.

duckfruit• 6 years ago

Unfortunately the ubiquitous cookie consent warnings reek of design-by-government-committe suffers greatly for it.

In theory, what could possibly be wrong with explicitly warning users that they're being tracked with a hidden piece of data stored on their machines? However, in practice this has just led to a proliferation of popups on every website on earth. I'd bet that pretty much everyone just annoyingly clicks through whatever button gets them to the content. I wonder how many could even describe what a cookie is, let alone how it affects their privacy. And at the end of a day, people are perfectly willing to give up a little bit of their privacy in exchange for all the services available for free to the general consumer on the web.

I wish that the powers that be could see that the law has not had its intended effect and has instead just led to a degraded web experience for everyone.

influx• 6 years ago

I’m not sure where you’re from, but as an American who thought it was bad, I couldn’t believe how much worse it was browsing from the .eu.

account42• 6 years ago

I wish that the powers that be could see that the law has not had its intended effect and has instead just led to a degraded web experience for everyone.

Wether it was the intended effect or not, it has made it very clear just how scummy advertising companies are.

Causality1• 6 years ago

I wonder if there's any person on planet earth who knowingly agreed to desktop notifications from their browser and makes active use of the feature.

oarsinsync• 6 years ago

Yep. It enables me to receive email notifications and IM notifications.

jeroenhd• 6 years ago

Most popups I've seen are either illegal under the laws they were created for (the full-screen privacy ones) or signs that you should leave the website or app (newsletter ones).

The problem is that instead of stopping their abusive behaviour, tracking companies will make whole ranges of services as hard to use as possible and point towards lawmakers when people complain about them. Their flawed business model has collapsed because privacy has finally gotten attention and they're fighting tooth and nail to keep their awful businesses afloat.

There's a perfect setting in most browsers that the popups can already use, called "do-not-track". However, they don't want to use that because it's too easy to turn it on. So instead of listening to your preference, they will show the popup regardless and follow the rules to the most annoying extent of the law.

Really, people should just stop clicking through these goddamn popups and leave the website when they encounter them. The only way to stop this madness is to take away traffic from websites with shitty practices. This includes those damn notification scripts and those auto-playing videos.

37eyhdhdeueu2• 6 years ago

If you use Firefox there's an extension called "I don't care about cookies" that can help cut down on such problems. Leave enduring that sort of nonsense to the Europeans.

MintelIE• 6 years ago

Heh, yeah, it's a pain in the ass. But blame Google and other greedy un-trustworthy mega-corps who data mine.

whatsmyusername• 6 years ago

Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, faulted Apple for not adhering to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy rules. Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk users will refuse, the associations argued.

DuckerZ in the chat boys. Zero sympathy for ad networks, they're one of the largest channels for malware. We push adblock to all our devices as corporate policy.

The ad space needs more competitors. Currently it's Facebook for boomers, Google for everyone else, and also-rans. I'm fine with Apple forcing their way into this space since I trust them more than the other players.

SquareWheel• 6 years ago

Who is "DuckerZ"?

rajansaini• 6 years ago

Does anyone more well-informed than I know if Apple's recent pivots spells a reduction in ad-based revenue for mobile developers?

scarface7412• 6 years ago

I hope between this and Apple Arcade, it completely kills off apps that don’t give you a choice to turn off ads via an in app purchases.

corobo• 6 years ago

Unlucky, get a better business model.

js23• 6 years ago

I wish the Safari content blocking API allowed cookies to be blocked. I'd block cookies for 99% of sites I visit, allowing them only for the handful of sites to which I login.

I'd suggest Safari could even make cookies require getting user permission, the same way location access needs to be granted. "Allow, allow for 24 hours, deny." It could default deny except for sites to which it has a saved password which could default allow.

inetknght• 6 years ago

Safari could even make cookies require getting user permission

Ode to browsers of the 90s

GeekyBear• 6 years ago

Safari started blocking third party cookies by default earlier this year.

https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-24-safari-blocks-all-third-...

Previously, you had to flip a switch in the settings.

js23• 6 years ago

I want to block even first-party cookies. And the third-party cookie logic prevents Fidelity's Full View from working correctly, so I have to disable it to use that feature of their site.

angott• 6 years ago

It already does that! 1Blocker lets you specify a list of websites for which cookies won't be sent in the request headers. So I suppose the API indeed supports this feature.

js23• 6 years ago

Holy crap, you're right:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...

https://kb.adguard.com/en/general/how-to-create-your-own-ad-...

(I switched from 1Blocker to Adguard because 1Blocker wasn't working very well for me.)

benhurmarcel• 6 years ago

The best way of working I found for cookies is to automatically delete them a short period of time after the website is closed. And keep a whitelist for trusted websites you want to stay connected to.

It's trivial on desktop using an extension [1], but not yet on iOS.

[1] https://github.com/Lusito/forget-me-not

baryphonic4• 6 years ago

Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, faulted Apple for not adhering to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy rules. Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk users will refuse, the associations argued.

I was taken aback when I read that sixteen(!) agencies had banded together, including collusion from Google and Facebook.

This starkly reminded me of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (book I chapter X):

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible, indeed, to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary. A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies. It connects individuals who might never otherwise be known to one another, and gives every man of the trade a direction where to find every other man of it. A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves, in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary.

In other words, legal rules meant to restrain corporations' behavior instead often facilitate their collusion, which almost always results in a "conspiracy against the public."

Apple is a bit unique in this regard, as their current brand positioning entirely removes their incentive for collusion. But only as long as the benefits to employing a pro-privacy-and-security brand posture are greater than the benefits it might enjoy from hoovering up as much data as it's rivals in Mountain View and Menlo Park.

dlubarov2• 6 years ago

collusion from Google and Facebook

Is there a good reason to believe that Google or Facebook are involved? Seems like it may be a tenuous connection given the article's vagueness: "some" of 16 unnamed "associations" are "backed" by Google/Facebook, according to a source we know nothing about.

baryphonic4• 6 years ago

Yes, the good reasons to believe this are (1) the article states it (news reports tend to be awful, but in my opinion we should at least give prima facie credence to their claims unless a knowledgeable party disputes them) and (2) it entirely aligns with Facebook's/Google's interests to engage in this kind of support/collusion.

mwfunk• 6 years ago

The crazy thing is some people will use this passage to justify not having regulations at all, because "regulating them will only make them conspire together against everyone!", when in fact the main reason Smith connects the two is that without regulation, the competitors (who are described as local artisans, not giant international corporations) might otherwise not know of one another's existence and would never talk to each other about shared concerns. Which was true when it was written, not so much now. Now that they can trivially find each other and conspire against consumers all they like, it's no longer an argument against regulation. Nowadays it's more useful as an argument against industry consortiums, standards bodies, professional organizations, and certifications, but I don't think of any of those things as being net negatives.

If we ever find ourselves in a situation where humanity collectively is frightened to tell some industry that it can't do something for fear that that industry would retaliate by conspiring to do something even worse to us behind our backs, that's not an argument against regulation, that's an argument against the whole industry.

baryphonic4• 6 years ago

I wouldn't cast it quite so simply. Smith and the classical liberal tradition he represented would likely be skeptical of regulations by default, but would evaluate them based on costs and benefits.

You make an excellent point about Smith's treatment of firms as local artisans rather than large corporations. Incidentally, he uses the word corporation a paragraph below what I pasted, but it most likely refers to guilds or firms with monopolies, and not our modern idea of corporate bodies.

That said, I tend to think of Coase as the sort of successor to Adam Smith's thinking. I find it not coincidental that Coase formulated the modern theory of the firm that economics still subscribes to, as well as extrapolating transaction costs into the realms of legal disputes and the administrative state. Coase himself was also skeptical of government regulation, not as a matter of ideology or principle (in fact, he said that in principle, many regulations could be effective, though he did also argue reductio ad absurdum that the state should regulate speech as vigorously as products [0]), but as a matter of empirical investigation [1].

[0] https://web.ntpu.edu.tw/~guan/courses/Coase74.pdf [1] https://reason.com/1997/01/01/looking-for-results/

humaniania• 6 years ago

Do you seriously think that all business decisions are based on economic greed? Some people do have values and morality and integrity.

kilburn• 6 years ago

I do think they are on any company that is not majority-owned by someone that cares.

Morality and integrity are acceptable in large companies so long as they can bring some benefit. Otherwise they somehow always seem to find a way to justify doing even the most immorally-seeming stuff (like exploiting workers in third-world-country mines, selling weapons to dictators and so on).

What's more important: why wouldn't it be like this? Why would a top-level exec leave money on the table for moral reasons? How would they sell that to their stakeholders?

baryphonic4• 6 years ago

No, the space of business decisions is not reducible to greediness, and "greed" itself is a bit underspecified.

rsynnott4• 6 years ago

Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk users will refuse, the associations argued.

Oh noes!

ummonk• 6 years ago

The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the limited ability to customize it still carries “a high risk of user refusal.”

Good. Sounds like the warning will work.

thiagocsf• 6 years ago

My thoughts exactly: refusal is the whole point.

longtimegoogler2• 6 years ago

I found it a bit ironic that Apple didn't require users to grant permission to its own measurement tool, "because it is engineered to not track users".

I don't know the details but I am guess it is still accesses the same numeric id and "trusting" that Apple is doing the right thing behind the scenes, i.e., only storing aggregate information is still required.

jackjeff2• 6 years ago

Sounds perfectly reasonable. Apple only cares about the data in aggregate. They don’t need to track individual users. An advertiser, on the other hand, wants to know your age, sex, location and what you hard for breakfast.

longtimegoogler2• 6 years ago

This is an advertiser tool. It is used by app developers to track their advertising campaigns that lead to app installs.

I wouldn't be surprised if they still break down information by age, sex, and location as long as there are enough anonymous people in each group.

I would argue that this is only "perfectly reasonable" if you think anonymous aggregate logging solutions is a reasonable way to track user behavior, or if you have such trust in Apple to do the right thing, that you are willing to grant them an exception.

sigjuice• 6 years ago

Apple needs to put their money where their mouth is and demote Google as the default search engine in Safari.

Google-backed groups criticize Apple's new warnings on user tracking

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