Apple’s ad business set to boom on the back of its own anti-tracking crackdown

https://adguard.com/en/blog/apple-tracking-ads-business.html

by bluish29 • 4 years ago

736 603 4 years ago

bndr• 4 years ago

I'm not sure how the anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws work, but isn't it conflict of interest, if you limit others in how they can use your platform, but allow yourself to do the same things you're limiting others in? Or am I wrong?

imwillofficial• 4 years ago

I don’t deliver Apple is offering anything different that third parties can’t see.

Anyone confirm or deny?

loeg• 4 years ago

My hearsay impression is that Apple can and do track in ways they prevent 3rd parties from doing on their platform.

NovemberWhiskey• 4 years ago

You seem to be suggesting there isn't a level playing field: can you explain why?

Apple doesn't limit anyone from advertising; they just limit third-party tracking, no?

onlyrealcuzzo5• 4 years ago

Rules for thee not for me (Apple Advertising).

falcolas8• 4 years ago

They limit cross-application tracking.

Which I'm fine with.

Is there any evidence that Apple themselves are tracking across 3rd party application advertisements (this is me assuming that they do track across 1st party apps, which is not fair).

JimDabell12• 4 years ago

Apple doesn't limit anyone from advertising; they just limit third-party tracking, no?

They don’t limit third-party tracking either. They limit third-party tracking without the user’s consent. The only thing advertisers need to do is ask the user for permission to track them.

pier25• 4 years ago

You mean like Apple not allowing third party browser engines?

scarface7412• 4 years ago

Yes, just like Facebook can’t limit others from scheduling ads and Google can’t limit other search engines from just being plugs in.

Also cable companies can’t limit others from carrying channels.

Do you think advertisers on Facebook, Google or Amazon get access to all of the data that the platform vendor has?

Do you also want everyone to get access to Google’s search algorithm?

If I had a dollar every time someone on HN yelled “anti trust” about anything no matter how little legal sense it made, I could be my own VC.

jannes• 4 years ago

Par for the course in big tech. They love walled gardens.

SoftTalker• 4 years ago

Apple isn't the only online advertising platform, and they don't have anything close to a monopoly there. They are free to build their own ad tech and keep it to themselves, or give themselves preferential access.

shrewduser• 4 years ago

That's missing the point, Apple owns the platform and are using that dominance to push people out while pushing themselves in.

Using your dominance in one industry like that could fall afoul of anti monopoly laws.

pwinnski2• 4 years ago

Is there any evidence anywhere that Apple is doing, or is intending to do, the same things they've blocked others from doing?

Apple hasn't stopped anybody from advertising, they've only stopped them from doing overly-intrusive cross-app personal tracking. They don't seem to intend to do over-intrusive cross-app personal tracking themselves, so it seems to be a level playing field. So far, at least.

badwolf2• 4 years ago

they've only stopped them from doing overly-intrusive cross-app personal tracking.

It's important to remember, they aren't stopping them from doing the overly-intrusive cross-app tracking, they just make you actively consent to an app allowing that tracking.

whimsicalism14• 4 years ago

They can target you in app store based on your activity on the Kindle app - is that not tracking?

dwaite2• 4 years ago

…they've only stopped them from doing overly-intrusive cross-app personal tracking.

They've required consent for cross-organizational tracking. For a single organization, they have only required disclosure in apps (via the privacy nutrition labels).

For instance, Google can still push you to sign into a Google account so they can add all your interactions across services/devices to your profile. They also can still share information between Google native apps for unauthenticated users. This would include if they start to move over apps from other acquired companies under the Google umbrella.

The difference is that I can make an opt-in choice (if possibly a difficult one) on whether I want to interact with Facebook services directly, but I couldn't make a such a choice before on what information Facebook was gathering about me without my consent or knowledge via tracking.

yazzku5• 4 years ago

You've pretty much defined the anti-trust case in your own sentence.

Microsoft did not prevent other browsers from being installed; it just shipped IE by default and made it annoying af to uninstall.

perryizgr8• 4 years ago

They've been doing it for years now with Apple music, and other stuff. Why do you think they will be stopped now?

gamblor9564• 4 years ago

No, you're not wrong. If Apple follows through with this it's pretty much the textbook definition of an antitrust violation: leveraging their market power in one market to circumvent competition in the target market.

scarface7412• 4 years ago

When I watch Netflix, I have no reason to be surprised or shocked that Netflix is using that information to target movies I want to watch. It’s the same with Amazon and Facebook.

What I don’t expect is that when I shop on Amazon I get ads showing me what I searched for and bought on Amazon to show up on Facebook (which of course does happen).

What would be the consumer friendly thing for the government to do? Allow more cross app data sharing? Refuse to let any company use the history of what a consumer does at that company for targeting?

bolt74692• 4 years ago

My understanding of a "conflict of interest" is that they happen when a personal interest interferes with a duty. Ex: a company executive receiving a gift from a potential supplier.

This situation would not be a conflict of interest because Apple has no duty to third party advertisers

amelius14• 4 years ago

If you really wanted to rule out conflicts of interest, you would have to break up the company in several hardware and several software companies.

api2• 4 years ago

I really hope Apple doesn't turn its products to shit chasing ad revenue like almost everything else.

Advertising is cancer.

jesuscript• 4 years ago

This is a company that sells 2000 dollar monitor stands. They are into a whole different game.

api2• 4 years ago

I will happily buy into an ecosystem with stupidly priced accessories if it has no ads and solid protection for privacy. As soon as I see ads (in anything) it's shit. If it's loaded with spyware and constantly invades privacy it's shit. These are things I associate with low-end trash.

ProAm• 4 years ago

This is also a company that stopped including chargers and cables so they could make additional revenue from people already buying $1000 phones. [1]

[1] https://hypebeast.com/2022/3/apple-made-6-5-billion-usd-by-r...

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

It was $1000, and actually a brilliant move because actual Pro users don't use fixed stands (and so aren't offended), while wannabe-Pro rich people will buy it in droves. Thus increasing the luxury branding without actually offending actual Pro users. For those people, the $1000 stand price is a conversation starter and a reason to buy in itself.

MBCook• 4 years ago

I’m scared they’ve started doing that and the customer experience fall is just a matter of time.

subsubzero2• 4 years ago

This is by biggest concern and one of the reasons I use apple products. absolutely ads, and now I heard that they are injecting them into apple maps, I may have to switch to google maps if this happens.

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

Google Maps has had ads and "Sponsored Content" for quite a while now.

badwolf2• 4 years ago

You might check out Here WeGo (formerly Nokia Maps) I've found their offline maps support is pretty great.

adra• 4 years ago

They're reinvesting like 5-10% of profits on r&d? Something tells me they're already living fat off their existing wins. Ads would only further send apple into the realm of unicorn money printing behemoths.

alphabetting• 4 years ago

As much as advertising can suck, I highly prefer not having all news sites hard paywalled and not needing premium subscriptions for essential services like search, email and YouTube.

bee_rider3• 4 years ago

eMail pre-dates the ad ecosystem; search is actually pretty nice but Google is slowly losing ground to SEO, a new paradigm might be necessary; and YouTube is basically bad.

onlyrealcuzzo5• 4 years ago

They can't charge any more for their phones.

How are they supposed to make more money from phones if not taking a cut of FB's advertising money?

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

If it is cancer, it's very lucrative cancer. But actually it's not cancer, because it powers a lot of things. 99% of all interactions that people have on the internet today is due to advertising. Email, chat, videos, search, games, apps, news... all created, popularized, and funded by ads.

I would prefer it if we weren't a consumer society, if our entire way of life wasn't powered by selling things, with advertising being the biggest underlying aspect. If Apple is smart they will retain their brand image of quality and elite lifestyle, because that's how they advertise their products. But they certainly aren't going to abandon ads.

falcolas8• 4 years ago

Apple's news app is unusable for me because of the ads. Their app store is just this side of unusable because of ads.

To be clear: I have adhd. Ads are intentionally designed to catch the attention of your average person with reasonable control of their attention. I have no chance in hell of keeping my attention on the article when I have to blast past 6-7 unblockable ads per article.

seydor2• 4 years ago

So how much will you have to pay to view Apple Ads?

reaperducer2• 4 years ago

OK, that was actually funny.

Reason077• 4 years ago

”Apple is also reportedly taking steps to build its own demand-side platform (DSP) … If true, it would mean that Apple is jumping on the ad tech bandwagon, something that it has so far resisted doing.”

Not entirely true: Apple’s iAd platform ran for a few years in the 2010s before being canned in 2016.

lelandfe• 4 years ago

Yeah, I found that to be a very narrow definition of "ad tech." Apple already has campaign management for ads today: https://searchads.apple.com/advanced

FrenchTouch42• 4 years ago

Not entirely true: Apple’s iAd platform ran for a few years in the 2010s before being canned in 2016

It still exists, was just renamed to Ad Platforms (worked there).

lupire9• 4 years ago

iAd lasted shorter than a Google chat app. It was DOA.

When people say "ad tech" now, they mean DSP -- selling their party ads unrelated to the boat company. Apple Store ads are Apple ripping off iOS devs for product placement in its own store, not generic interest-based ads.

https://ksmmedia.com/intel/the-apple-dsp/

CharlesW4• 4 years ago

Keep in mind the source, and that AdGuard is effectively competing with Apple to make your online life more private.

reaperducer2• 4 years ago

This is also about the ninth rehash on HN of the same newspaper article that was written three months ago.

Every blogger with an axe to grind has been re-spinning this same point with more and more hyperbole since because "Apple bad" = click click click click.

Nothing new to see here.

amelius14• 4 years ago

I have a better idea: let's just stay with the facts.

jackconsidine2• 4 years ago

Marketing campaigns often convince people to think things, however subconsciously, i.e. Lincoln is associated with Luxury or X cereal is a wholesome breakfast.

What I hadn't seen until this was a marketing campaign that actually proselytized so many into proclaiming the message for free. On HackerNews, Reddit and in public places you're likely to find someone vouching for Apple's privacy practices sometimes with the same verbiage that's on the billboards! Maybe that's a testament to Steve Jobs's lasting marketing impact.

I personally see the incentive structure which makes Apple more privacy-friendly than say Google. But I'm deeply suspicious of such a convenient message that the largest corporation in the world puts its resources behind. Also, being more privacy-friendly than Google and being privacy friendly are two different things.

addicted2• 4 years ago

A huge part of Apple’s positive incentive structure was the fact that they didn’t do ads.

But now that they are getting into the ad space that incentive structure benefit pretty much crumbles away.

giobox• 4 years ago

I have huge concerns about this, I think it's really hard for any publicly traded company who gets into ad-tech not to end up making some questionable choices. The incentive structure in the ad business is such that no matter how strong a core org you think you have, it likely corrupts over time. While Apple's track record on privacy is commendable, Tim loves (and needs to keep shareholders happy) a good Services growth story.

It's also clear at this point, the most profitable ads in the industry are the ones that most take advantage of personal data - this isn't a secret. The difference in profitability can be stark too, which is why I worry so much about the incentive structure.

moreira• 4 years ago

You might be surprised to know that Apple has been doing ads for over a decade. [0] They‘ve had ads for a long time, and still do - App Store search ads[1] and Apple News ads, to my knowledge.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd [1]: https://searchads.apple.com/

fragmede2• 4 years ago

They were always a marketing company though. See this more as the prodigal son returning to his roots.

factorialboy• 4 years ago

Few months ago when launching apps on Mac Os became sluggish because their telemetry service had high latency -- that was the moment I lost faith in all of Apple's privacy claims.

PS: Still use a MBP, iPhone and an Apple Watch. :(

e40• 4 years ago

That "telemetry" (which is misleading in the current context) was about checking for malware. I'm talking the specific case of launching apps on macOS.

user3939382• 4 years ago

If you just put macOS on a proxy you can see the it basically never stops phoning home. Privacy my ass.

gumby2• 4 years ago

That telemetry could easily -- more easily in fact -- have been done in a privacy protecting way: have your machine ship with a signature database and then have it randomly and frequently download deltas. Then check the signature database locally. It would be faster too. Especially on the mac we're not talking about an enormous database.

Rather disappointed that Apple didn't take this route. They do do something similar with their virus database (XProtect).

Spooky237• 4 years ago

They didn’t say what happens on MacOS stays on MacOS.

That type of capability is core to most general purpose OS’s today. Any significant company is running EDR, etc that’s even more intrusive

clairity7• 4 years ago

"Also, being more privacy-friendly than Google and being privacy friendly are two different things."

in theory, that's ok, if we have healthy, functioning markets that are free from undue influence of any individual participant. the "invisible hand" of the market would drive it iteratively toward more privacy (assuming this is valued by more than minor segment, greater than ~15% of the market). the market would (and should) be an ongoing conversation between suppliers and consumers to reach all the profitable corners of supply and demand, rather than a couple behemoths with megaphones telling us how great they are, rather than showing it through their products and practices.

p.s. - has anyone else noticed adguard doing port-scans on your gateway from their dns service IPs? i haven't dug into it yet, so i don't know whether it's spoofed or whatnot.

whimsicalism14• 4 years ago

functioning markets that are free from undue influence of any individual participant. the "invisible hand" of the market would drive it iteratively toward more privacy (assuming this is valued by more than minor segment, greater than ~15% of the market)

The market is for advertisers, and advertisers - whether they are small or large businesses - value tracking and measurability of their advertising investments.

lostlogin2• 4 years ago

the market would (and should) be an ongoing conversation between suppliers and consumers to reach all the profitable corners of supply and demand, rather than a couple behemoths with megaphones telling us how great they are

I agree but where do we see this? Everywhere I look it’s mega corps. Food, fuel, power, electronics, clothes. I can’t think of a good example of the ideal relationship.

dilap7• 4 years ago

It was quite a thing to see Apple's huge "What Happens on iPhone, Stays on iPhone" billboards up around town, at the exact same time they were announcing the rollout of a new content-side illegal-material scan-and-notify system.

(I think they've since delayed the rollout of that system indefinitely, after public outcry.)

misnome4• 4 years ago

To be fair - wasn't that scanning on-device, and only uploading metadata on things that you yourself were already uploading to their cloud?

scarface7412• 4 years ago

Actually that’s perfectly in line with it “staying on your iPhone” that they were proposing to do content scanning on your phone. Not that I agree with it. But it is consistent.

Spooky237• 4 years ago

Yup, and now your materials are in clear text on their service getting scanned routinely I’m sure.

That particular issue was the privacy advocacy people run amok.

nonbirithm• 4 years ago

I don't think it's possible to exist as a public-facing corporate entity without some kind of content scanning mechanism. If that were possible, then every child abuser would simply move their data onto those platforms and they'd become untouchable.

Even MEGA, which signals the virtues of privacy/security through the prominence of decryption keys on its UI flows, will still report illegal content to authorities and display a message saying so if content was removed for that reason.

Any publicly traded company that touts perfect privacy cannot deliver what they are claiming, or they'd become the service of choice for every type of disenfranchised person - including child abusers.

Apple has received much more flak than the average corporation over this issue because this fundamental impossibility of perfect privacy clashed with its own privacy signaling in a loud way, and the flurry of debate over the technical merits of the novel, widely shared on-device scanning solution caused much more scrutiny than the boring server-side scanning that has been ubiquitous for decades.

But the fact is that no matter how Apple tries to approach the CSAM problem, it will ultimately have to weed out child abusers from its servers or be publicly and legally lambasted. That is what society has decided is best for the welfare of children, and as a result we will have to live with an imperfect level of privacy as provided by such entities.

cormacrelf• 4 years ago

On HackerNews, Reddit and in public places you're loath to find someone vouching for Apple's privacy practices

FYI loath means "unwilling", so it doesn't make sense here. "Loath to X" is like "I would loathe doing X". The word you're looking for is "likely".

lbotos2• 4 years ago

Not op, but I wondered if this was a Britishism. My partner recently introduced to me to "lousy with" meaning "abundance"...

jackconsidine2• 4 years ago

Had my negatives flipped- thanks for pointing out!

Xeronate• 4 years ago

I see you were right, but I think both choices (loathe and likely) are acceptable. I originally thought jack was saying "its unfortunate to find" or "it's disgusting to find".

ksec2• 4 years ago

I remember Tim Cook said they are not in the Ads Business. Unfortunately I am too busy, Apple's PR has worked hard to delete those tracks of what Tim Cook said, or Google's search engine is longer showing what I am looking for.

And I remember that "Apple is not in the Ad Business" before 2018 was the most cited defence and reason on HN. That was before the war on tracking, the submarine articles on ads, and the attack on Facebook.

Because you know what? Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right. And because iPhone is the only smartphone that values your privacy, banning iPhone sales in your country is also against Human Right.

But I'm deeply suspicious of such a convenient message.

I was probably the only few who was deeply deeply suspicious of the "Dont be Evil" Google in the early 00s, in an era of "Dont be Evil", when everyone in Tech thought they were Saint. The self righteousness of Google, I thought nothing could be worse than Google's hypocrisy. I mean how can something be worse than "Dont be Evil"?

Well here we are. The era of "Fundamental Human Right". A company that worked with CCP, invested $275B to build and improve the whole CE supply chain in China. Helping those companies to compete in area where CCP has a strategic interest, Continue to invest and help those companies to set up operation in India or Vietnam in the name of "Diversification from China" as PR headlines.

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

I was probably the only few who was deeply deeply suspicious of the "Dont be Evil" Google in the early 00s, in an era of "Dont be Evil", when everyone in Tech thought they were Saint. The self righteousness of Google, I thought nothing could be worse than Google's hypocrisy. I mean how can something be worse than "Dont be Evil"?

I don't think that's accurate or fair, and I think (as I often see) it misses a lot of context around where "Don't Be Evil" came from, and what it really meant.

"Don't Be Evil" was basically to highlight and contrast Google's desired culture from Microsoft's at the time of the late 90s/early 00s. That is, at the time, and especially early in Microsoft's existence, MS was pretty famous for "dirty tricks". E.g look at the early history/origins of DOS, anti-competitive tactics WRT DR-DOS [1], how they fought the browser wars, the full history outlined in Microsoft v United States, etc. The icon for MS in Slashdot at the time was famously the Gates "borg" icon, and that is how a lot of people viewed MS.

When it comes to Google, I think the whole idea behind "Don't Be Evil" is that they believed that you could make money withOUT dirty tricks, and up until 2010-2012 or so I think this was largely true. People flocked to Google and their products not because they were forced to, but because the products were genuinely much better than the competition at the time. Search, GMail, Maps, StreetView, Chrome - when all of these came out I remember thinking "holy shit this is amazing".

The problem, though, is that at some point all very successful companies reach a size where I believe it's only possible to respond to your economic incentives, which are to grow at any cost. I mentioned 2010-2012 (maybe a little later, 2012-2014) because that's when I feel like I really saw Google's approach change to really squeeze the pennies from their existing business, e.g. when they made ads more and more indistinguishable from organic results, or when they made it so that any remotely commercial search term has an ENTIRE page of ads above the fold. Paying "the Google tax" became a real thing, e.g. you'd have to pay Google for an add JUST on your domain name because competitors might bid higher.

Thus, if anything, I give Google props for "holding out" a good ~12-15 years before their growth and economic incentives made it "must increase revenue at all costs" and the beancounters took over.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

pyuser583• 4 years ago

Wow … it’s insane how “Apple is not in the ad business” has been scrubbed from the internet.

I’ve seen this happen before. But not with a big corporation.

Dangeranger• 4 years ago

There is a speech that was given at EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) in 2015 that is likely to have the quote you are looking for.[0][1]

There is a short clip of his speech at the event which was reported by NBC News, in which he states the boundaries of their advertisement program at the time.[2]

EDIT: There is also this story from the Verge in 2014 which includes a lengthy quote about the advertisement program.[3]

[0] https://archive.epic.org/2015/06/tim-cook-backs-privacy-cryp...

[1] https://archive.epic.org/june1/

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/apple/its-wrong-apple-ceo-tim-c...

[3] https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/17/6368669/tim-cook-talks-up...

dragonwriter• 4 years ago

I remember Tim Cook said they are not in the Ads Business.

Yes, he said that after Apple failed in the ads business, just as it was focussing on leveraging its platform control against the firms that had beat it to reshape the field for the next try.

carlineng• 4 years ago

I remember Tim Cook said they are not in the Ads Business. Unfortunately I am too busy, Apple's PR has worked hard to delete those tracks of what Tim Cook said, or Google's search engine is longer showing what I am looking for.

The first sentence of the actual article links to when Tim Cook said that.

helsinkiandrew• 4 years ago

They're not in the search business because the potential is much more limited compared with selling hardware and services. People use YouTube and Facebook for many hours a day and the amount of revenue compared with what Apple can get from ads in app store, news, perhaps iPhone search and other Apple apps are orders of magnitude higher (hundreds of billions of dollars compared with single digit billions for Apple).

Privacy is very different for most of the ads Apple are currently showing too. Search ads work without the need for tracking because when people are searching for something you show them ads for things they are searching for now, not from some model of their interests created from their tracked internet history.

This is why Apple can have an ad business and also destroy Facebooks (and others) ad business based on tracking - they don't need to squeeze every dollar from targeted ads.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th• 4 years ago

I degoogled long before it became popular to do so. And I was on gmail early enough to have needed an invite.

But the writing was on the wall for anyone who knew what to look for. And it's the same with the likes of Paypal. I refuse to use these services because they're not banks and are not beholden to the same rules (they're getting more regulated, and my find themselves to be a bank equivalent eventually).

kbenson• 4 years ago

The self righteousness of Google, I thought nothing could be worse than Google's hypocrisy.

I wasn't very suspicious at the time, but learned to be. My take on this is different though. I don't think it was a case of self-righteousness as much as extreme naivete of some postdocs that were just entering the business world. naivete in thinking a statement such as that couldn't be twisted to the point it meant less that it already does ("evil" is not well defined), and naivete to think they wouldn't be the ones twisting it, whether on purpose or subconsciously, as business needs slowly changed and they had to justify keeping their business afloat and profitable, and people in jobs, and shareholders happy.

You either set up your business such that it's incentivized to align with your morals, or your business (the market) will incentivize you to change your morals to align with it.

If nothing else, we've learned that practices that seem mostly benign one decade at low scale can become very troubling the next decade when done at a much larger scale and/or when additional consequences of the practice become known. Choices made that align with your morals at one time may have consequences that mean you were wrong, even if you couldn't really have known it, but now your business relies on this prior decision.

Running a business is hard, making overreaching statements you can't live up to later is easy.

gigel822• 4 years ago

Not only that, in my experience, the support is fanatical in nature. I often get downvoted and flagged for daring to state the obvious, which is that Apple is positioning itself to become one of the largest companies in the Ad space. It's probably more than just great marketing / PR (at least - of the usual kind).

tootie• 4 years ago

I like to say that Apple is a marketing company that makes decent tech products. They absolutely played this market like a fiddle. They sat back and watched Google and FB absorb tons of bad press and I'm sure they were feeding it behind the scenes. It always felt to me like a ploy. As much as ads and the SEO game had their problems, they were there to support the open web. Apple kept tapping the breaks on improving their web browsers and driving users to apps because that was their walled garden. Owning an iPhone now is essentially a status symbol, owning an Android means you're poor. The privacy rules designed to kill ads was only ever designed to hurt Google, not to protect users.

As a counter example of marketing gone wrong, Amazon has very steadfastly never sold their customer data to anyone. No one ever thought for a second that they did this because they were interested in privacy.

lupire9• 4 years ago

Google also has never sold customer data. Amazon has been in level trouble several times for stealing customer (product seller) data.

Spooky237• 4 years ago

“Selling data” means nothing. Amazon trades in data services all of the time. Facebook is serving up retargeted Amazon ads in near real time.

Apple usually designs their experiences around things they control end to end.

ouid• 4 years ago

apple uploads and modifies all photos you take on your device with the explicit stated intent of referring you for prosecution. That doesn't sound very private to me.

yazzku5• 4 years ago

'Deeply suspicious' is an understatement. These corporations don't have your back, and if something benefits the user, it's only as a side effect. Sadly, many still buy into the messaging, which must be hard to avoid when Apple's marketing has always been around making you feel like the kool kid in the block. Anybody who has ever believed Apple's pro-privacy scam is living in a fairy tale.

lupire9• 4 years ago

No one has anyone's back, except if your mother loves you, so what's the point of that complaint?

Alliances of mutual benefit are still good.

lupire9• 4 years ago

It's called doing well by doing good, and earning a god reputation.

If you do good, people will talk about it, and you get to talk about it.

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

I propose a law, that states that advertising is only permitted in certain locations, in certain industries (phonebooks, highway ads, TV stations), and that anywhere else, it is completely illegal to advertise, full stop. Do not even think about advertising there if it's not on the short list. If you want to advertise on a product, no money must exchange hands, or Congress must pass an amendment.

EDIT: Forgot when writing this down (been thinking about this for a while), but this would only apply to Publicly traded companies.

elicash• 4 years ago

So you start a t-shirt business online, and you can only advertise in those places instead of Instagram? Seems bad for the business.

Would be very profitable for tv stations, though! And we'd see a ton more billboards covering everything.

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

Well, in that case, I would just say that my law only applies to Publicly traded companies.

That would cover all the Apples, Samsungs, Rokus, and so forth of the world which is what we care about most, I think.

seydor2• 4 years ago

good. let's run some ads to pass that law

colejohnson663• 4 years ago

That'll never stand up to a First Amendment lawsuit

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

I'm not so sure about that. In many states, if you sell a product, the government can compel you to put speech on your product (such as, for tobacco, giant warnings about addiction.) In my home state, Minnesota, advertising certain products (like adult-themed stores) is banned on highway billboards. If that is legal, you could maybe at least force a giant black-and-white text warning covering up half the side of TV saying, "Warning: Contains non-removable built-in advertising and user behavior tracking features." If you were really nasty, you could force a "sin tax" on the manufacturer for doing so - just charging 10% per product with built-in advertising would quickly end the practice. Treat advertising like tobacco - even that would be a start.

magic_hamster6• 4 years ago

This is a brilliant idea, however there are a few problems. The first is that for better or worse, you could bring down a lot of services, businesses, content creators (i.e. YouTube) and most likely a great many people will lose their job.

The second problem is, this is probably not going to fly against freedom of speech, because it's effectively censorship of a certain kind. And if it does pass, what could be the next flavor of communication to be outlawed? Maybe it's not something you're going to like.

I much prefer blocking ads (which I've come to be incredibly effective at), and still have the law allow people to advertise. And I hate ads with a passion! But the alternative could be worse.

mateo411• 4 years ago

I think we would have to change the 1st Amendment to make this type of law constitutional.

andsoitis2• 4 years ago

Wouldn’t it be better to enumerate what’s prohibited rather than what’s allowed?

ccouzens• 4 years ago

How do you tell if something is advertising? Is a sportsperson wearing a brand because they like it or because they're being paid to wear it?

kjkjadksj• 4 years ago

Highway ads are bad because they distract drivers. Some states like AK and VT have banned billboard already.

tzs• 4 years ago

So if a publicly traded company wants to advertise on TV they either have to find a TV station that will run their ad for free or they have to buy a TV station, because of the requirement that no money change hands for the ad?

cwkoss6• 4 years ago

Highway ads are a public safety risk and should be banned, IMO

amelius14• 4 years ago

Also just about any type of advertisement stimulates overconsumption.

Banning ads right now seems like a sensible thing to do if we want to reach climate goals.

amelius14• 4 years ago

Let's also ban professions in advertising.

I mean, we did it for prostitution, so it could work?

stephc_int13• 4 years ago

This is bad news for Apple.

I think that relying on adtech is poisonous in the long run.

whywhywhydude• 4 years ago

I know everone hates ads, but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment? Did Apple’s blocking of facebook’s targeted ads improve the consumer experience? Or did that just make advertising more inefficient which then led to just more irrelevant ads. A good example would be American tv. Everyone has to suffer to through those stupid viagra and antidepressants ads because there is no targeting.

buzzy_hacker• 4 years ago

No. Because targeting means you’ve built a profile on me by collecting data about my habits and interests without permission and will sell/leak that to god knows who. Websites can tailor their ads to the audience likely to visit them.

makestuff• 4 years ago

I would be fine with paying for youtube premium, etc. if they did not track and build profiles on paying customers. I get mining my data in exchange for using it for free, but I do not think it is fair to mine data on paying customers without giving them some discount/opt out.

andsoitis2• 4 years ago

You can turn off personalized ads on iOS https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-how-apple-del...

Turn personalized ads on or off Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising, then turn Personalized Ads on or off. Note: Turning off personalized ads limits Apple’s ability to deliver relevant ads to you. It may not reduce the number of ads you receive.

hurril• 4 years ago

Plus: they're often even worse than the wholesale because what they think they know about me is basically always pure nonsense. (Other than offering me an ad to buy the book I just fckn bought.)

malfist• 4 years ago

I would argue no, but that is my opinion.

The reason for my no is that if there are ad agencies committed to building a profile of you, that's far to easy for that profile to get sold/stolen by bad actors. For example, if I was a trans man, and I was buying feminine hygiene products, I could be targeted for harassment by a leaked advertising profile.

If there's no money in building profiles it makes it less likely that one will be built, not that it can't. But that's a reasonable tradeoff to me.

vehemenz• 4 years ago

Sure, but it's not as if the data used to create the targeted ad disappears after the ad is served, or that the data in a single, secure location. It's shared with 100 other analytics companies and could end up in the hands of your health insurer, or God knows who else.

rebeccaskinner4• 4 years ago

I'm against all ads, but I'm particularly against targeted ads because building and tuning systems that are designed to track people and personalize messages to influence behavior have far too many uses that are far worse that convincing someone to buy some pants or whatever. It's highly tuned and personalized psychological warfare at scale, that can be deployed for any number of reasons.

okamiueru• 4 years ago

If you want a contrary opinion, I disagree. On the face of it, I agree with your premise. However, targeted ads unfortunately also means creating profiles which are sold to data brokers. Targeted ads are I suppose ok. However, collecting data, profiling and selling to whomever is paying has very significant ramifications.

If advertisers figure out a way to target ads without profiling, I'm all for it. In fact, it's not that uncommon for me to watch "sponsors" on YouTube. It's targeted because people who are watching a video on mechanical principles, might be interested in.. Say "brilliant".

That said. VPN services and ear pods can gf themselves.

tomp• 4 years ago

The more targeted an ad, the more it manipulates your mind.

dbtc• 4 years ago

Maybe not so much for the individual user's experience, but society as a whole.

We're seeing that targeted (political) ads are a powerful way to hack a democracy.

If everyone is seeing the same shitty advertisement, at least they have something to complain about together - even that much common ground is better in my opinion than everyone with their own version of reality.

stormbrew• 4 years ago

Or did that just make advertising more inefficient which then led to just more irrelevant ads.

Why should I care about the "efficiency" of the ads I'm being served? It's not my job to help them exploit me.

rixthefox• 4 years ago

I think that's the model everyone (eg: your average consumer) likes and is most familiar with.

Advertisements on TV are tolerated because it's not targeted and just a random broadcast to everyone who might be interested.

Anxiety that certain things may be used against you in the form of advertising is a very real problem people face. A teenager who is researching transgender topics would be potentially frightened if the TV station the family usually watches that never shows any ads about transgender health suddenly started pushing those kinds of ads and the parents disapproved.

The problem lies in the tracking technology. In order to make informed decisions about what people might potentially be looking to buy includes learning that individual's preferences and the rather unfortunate part of everything being online is that includes everything you could possibly imagine. Everything from the type of job you have right down to your porn preferences and other proclivities are potentially up for grabs and I'm sure the vast majority of people would feel greatly unnerved if Google, Facebook or whoever showed them just what kind of person the algorithms have determined them to be just by the data they've already collected.

tomComb• 4 years ago

Also, targeted ads can be very useful for small businesses trying to reach their target market.

Untargetted ads tend to be big companies promoting their brand.

magic_hamster6• 4 years ago

First of all, yes I rather get irrelevant ads than being targeted. If you worked in certain industries you know that some advertisers are extremely cynical, and I simply don't want to be in a constant state of mental warfare against these people. This has a real effect on stress and in my opinion is worse than seeing an irrelevant ad. At least I know this ad isn't tracking and profiling me.

There is also the concept of identity, and specifically, who owns your identity. If you are the owner of your own identity, including interests, wants and needs, then no company should be allowed to create a profile of your identity ("shadow profile") without your permission. However, the big ad corporations like Google and Facebook (and recently TikTok) all create shadow profiles for you, like it or not, with or without your consent. Why are they allowed to do this? Should I not be paid if my unique identity is being used and monetized?

whimsicalism14• 4 years ago

This "ownership of identity" complaint makes no sense to me. You are the owner of your identity, but I would still be free to think you are an asshole if I so wanted (I don't, to be clear, just an example :) )

Making inferences about you doesn't mean you "own" your identity less.

addicted2• 4 years ago

I strongly disagree. Targeted ads are significantly worse than generic ads.

The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings. Targeted advertising means you have even more data specific to an individual making it easier to manipulate the individual. More generic advertising (for example, TV ads) means all you have is the general area they live in, or the general interest of the individual (magazine ads). You cannot manipulate people based on their personal traits anymore.

The focus of the advertising shifts immediately from the consumer of the ad to the product and/or message of the ad, because you simply do not have enough information about the consumer.

whimsicalism14• 4 years ago

The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings

The entire point of your comment is manipulating human beings.

Advertising often just seeks to make a consumer aware of a certain product. If that is manipulation, so is pretty much any content that seeks to change what people know.

Mikeb852• 4 years ago

The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings.

That's quite cynical. No the point is to connect products to interested consumers. Case in point: we recently had a baby so I've been googling for baby stuff. Now I get some ads for more baby stuff. It's relevant to my life far more than Viagra ads or whatever other generic ads could be shown to me. It's not exactly manipulation because I do need lots of baby stuff.

buttersbrian2• 4 years ago

I disagree. Manipulate is not only loaded, but it is the wrong word.

Ads attempt to persuade. They can be implemented in manipulative ways, but ads aren't inherently that IMO.

adrr• 4 years ago

Targeted ads is why we see an explosions in new companies. With traditional marketing, new companies had no way to reach an audience effectively. You could start a company but couldn’t build a customer base. With targeted advertising, it gave us things like free trading with Robinhood that leveraged targeted ads to buy installs. It gave us a bunch of new banking options that offer zero fees. It gave us new clothing brands, razors, workout equipment, cosmetics and washable rugs.

Killing targeted ads will just mean the incumbents will dominate and without competition, consumer prices will rise. Gillette did their first price reduction because of dollar shave club is an example.

gerash3• 4 years ago

By that logic you prefer random recommendations over personalized ones which means listening to the radio and TV over Netflix and Spotify

AlexandrB• 4 years ago

Everyone has to suffer to through those stupid viagra and antidepressants ads because there is no targeting.

This is no worse than suffering through "Raid Shadow Legends" ads because I have a "gamer" bit flipped somewhere in Google's profile of me. 99% (or even 100%) of stuff advertised to me is hot garbage, even if I'm in the right demographic for the product.

The problem is that targeting is only part of the equation of what you see. The other part is the advertiser's budget. And companies that spend big on marketing are often either selling digital crack (e.g. gacha games, scams, gambling) or simply have the most capital investment (startup of the week, manscaped, Nord VPN, etc.). Neither scenario is a good signal of quality. As a result, the safest approach as a consumer is to ignore all ads.

enkrs• 4 years ago

I live multiple lives. I'm a father, a businessman, have multiple hobbies, do sports. Targeted ads mean this info can be combined. I can be profiled and abused. Algorithm has calculated what I might impulsively buy and shows me that personalized ad everywhere.

Non-targeted ads do not mean viagra ads. Non-targeted ads still have the context of the website/app I'm using.

Non-targeted ads mean that I can get ads about specific hardware when I browse my hobby forums; I can get ads about some interesting SaaS when I browse my work related news sites. I don't get anything that's targeting some calculated personality quirks of mine to the highest ad bidder.

wbsss4412• 4 years ago

I don’t see how targeted ads are any less insufferable than a viagra ad. I don’t watch ads for fun.

No matter how “relevant” an ad may be, you’re still breaking context to insert yourself, and distract me from, the thing I’m actually interested in.

MobiusHorizons• 4 years ago

If they were any good I might agree. But in my experience ad targeting just fixates on things you recently looked up, or actually already purchased. I don't recall ever finding a product through a targeted ad that I didn't already know about.

spaetzleesser• 4 years ago

when I am on a kiteboarding forum I prefer to see ads that are relevant to kiteboarding and not ads for hand mixers just because I looked at or bought one last week.

I also think targeted ads are really bad for society in general. They have incentivized the building of companies that have created massive surveillance and manipulation systems on a scale nobody would have dreamt of some decades ago. Think about Stalin or Hitler having the datasets Google or Facebook have built up and how they could have used them. I can't see anything good about targeted advertising unless you buy into the vision that people's only purpose in life is to buy things.

bee_rider3• 4 years ago

I will add yet another voice to the heap saying "nope, targeted is worse." The point of ads is to trick me into buying something I don't need, I'd rather they were less efficient.

Further, lots of smart people are working on the project of ads. Talented programmers and data scientists. Hopefully less efficient ads will result in a less lucrative ad sector, and more of these folks can be convinced to do something productive with their talents.

scarface7412• 4 years ago

Doesn’t it say more about you than the advertiser that you are allowing yourself to be tricked?

crazygringo• 4 years ago

Seriously. I literally have gone to the page for my Google advertising profile and updated my interests to be more accurate.

Targeted ads usually aren't trying to trick me, they're telling me about products and services I genuinely don't know about. Maybe this will shock people, but I have actually bought things linked straight from ads a handful of times. (Only a handful, but that's more than zero.)

I infinitely prefer targeted advertising rather than the horrible lowest-common-denominator generic non-targeted "grow your dick" and "one weird trick" and "millionth website visitor" garbage. (I just wish there were a button for "don't show me ads for humidifiers anymore because I already bought one after researching, I'm not gonna buy another". So that the targeting worked even better.)

cush• 4 years ago

but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment?

Better by what measure? Not at the expense of privacy. Where is the data going? Who is it being sold to?

Sure, American TV ads are annoying, but they're predictable and sometimes entertaining. American TV ads are so inefficient that they need to work for your attention.

One issue with targeting is receiving antidepressant ads, knowing the algorithm knows that you're depressed. Or receiving baby ads when the algorithm knows you were expecting, but doesn't know you had a miscarriage. There are countless examples of targeting being a danger to the public as well, being used for very effective misinformation campaigns.

avianlyric• 4 years ago

Apple blocked targeted ads based on track individuals, and collecting personal data. There are plenty of ways of serving targeted ads without the tracking.

The most obvious approach is content based targeting. If someone is reading an article about baby names, put ads for baby clothes next to it. If there’re reading an article about cloud infrastructure, put an AWS ad next to it.

People managed to make and sell perfectly good adverts long before Facebook and Google came along. Have you never noticed that every advert in a trade magazine targets people in that trade?

ec1096854• 4 years ago

They didn't block targeted ads based on collecting data. Facebook can collect all the personal data they want and use it for advertising.

What they can't do w/o consent is collect data from third party apps and use that to target users in other apps.

robbyking• 4 years ago

I understand your point, but there's a difference between ads targeting specific audiences and ads targeting specific individuals.

unionpivo• 4 years ago

No targeted ads are worse in several ways.

1.) It's one of the main reason why surveillance capitalism is so widespread. Some of the worst things that came out of tech in past 20 years are directly or indirectly connected to "targeting ads".

2. ) Better name for targeted adds would be Machine driven adds. And with it comes the counter part of machine driven re-posters re-blogers, ai generated spam content etc. If you didn't have all those "targeted" machine driven networks there would be a lot less reason to build such sites. Since most advertisers would not want to advertise on such sites if they had a choice in it.

3.) With all the crap they bring, they still suck at targeting. They either focus on one search you did a while ago to the exclusion of everything else, they to sell you same expensive stuff for months after you already bought it, or completely irrelevant most of the time.

4.) They make pages load slower, sometimes a lot slower.

JimDabell12• 4 years ago

I know everone hates ads, but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment?

There’s a lot of people disagreeing with you, but it’s missing the point, I think.

Everybody can get the experience they want; both you and they can. You can get targeted ads by accepting when an advertiser asks to track you. They can get non-targeted ads by rejecting when an advertiser asks to track them.

The key thing here is that everybody is given the choice. And that’s Apple’s only requirement – they haven’t banned tracking, they have banned tracking without asking the user for their consent first.

chillfox5• 4 years ago

You are forgetting the alternative that is no ads.

bfrog• 4 years ago

I mean the main differentiator of Apple was the lack of Ads and tracking compared to google for me. If Apple starts hammering ads and providing tracking data and selling spots like google does with admob/android then is it really worth the premium anymore?

smoldesu7• 4 years ago

If the main difference between Apple and Google is selling your data, are they really all that different in the first place? Apple already collects plenty of telemetry from your devices whether you opt-in or not. OCSP sends data back to Apple's servers every time you tap an app, that's non-negotiable. They go out of their way to limit your traffic filtering capabilities solely so they can phone-home. The rabbit hole is pretty deep, and doesn't favor any of these FAANG faces.

Tijdreiziger4• 4 years ago

The volume of data transmitted by iOS is one order of magnitude less than Android, though (at least when logged out and idle).

Reference: Leith, D. J. (2021). Mobile Handset Privacy: Measuring The Data iOS and Android Send to Apple And Google. URL: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf

shostack2• 4 years ago

Ad companies don't sell your data. It's one of their most valuable assets. They sell access to impressions that are targeted based on modeling of that data.

It is a nuanced, yet extremely important distinction.

chillfox5• 4 years ago

Nope,

Lack of ads IS the killer feature for me. What I use an iPhone for could just as easily be done by Android.

If Apple is enthusiastically running towards the ads hellscape then it might be time to get one of those Linux phones and start developing some apps for it. I need less than 10 apps for it to be a viable replacement, or if it get's really bad then I could make do with even less.

barbariangrunge• 4 years ago

The ads aren’t the big thing for me. The tracking is

_23sd• 4 years ago

After reading the article, I still don't understand the exception Apple purportedly gets from its tracking rules. As I understand it, Amazon is allowed to use activity in the Kindle app to show personalized ads in the Amazon Shopping app without using the ATT prompt. Isn't that the same thing as Apple using News app activity to personalize ads in the App Store?

The part that is unfair is that no one but Apple gets to have an App Store or process IAPs, which has always been the problem with iOS. Trying to make it about ATT just seems like a red herring.

jchonphoenix• 4 years ago

Apple has access to all data it blocks from other ad networks by virtue of you owning an iPhone. It uses this data in its DSP. One effect of Apple locking down privacy was to create a unique monopoly on data for itself and its an advantage it intends to capitalize on.

jshier• 4 years ago

It could have access, but so far all of these articles calling Apple out haven't cited a single shred of evidence that Apple has replaced the previous invasive fingerprinting by third parties with their own. If nothing else, the quality of the ads you see from Apple would indicate they gather less, not more, than most advertisers. I mean, I see ads for Apple products I already own, or services I already subscribe to.

mr_toad• 4 years ago

What people care about is whether they track which websites you visit and the contents of your email. And then selling it to anyone and their dog.

Spooky237• 4 years ago

It’s Apple, so any critique draws attention.

Long game, a successful Apple ad business creates bad incentives and is likely bad for customers. As evidenced by the AppStore really being a front door for the worst kind of skinner-box gaming, Apple will choose cash over any overriding principle.

tehlike7• 4 years ago

Apple is blocking conversion tracking for third parties.

Think of this: 1.Fb shows an ad for angry birds 2. user installs the app 3. user opens the app and makes a ping to fb to tell user with idfa xyz opened the app.

The problem is not that only apple gets (2), but it is that because it gets (2), it thinks it should be able to dictate how (3) happens. Since apple is the only one doing (2), it puts everyone else at a disadvantage.

And since apple doesn't have web ads business, it sees no problem killing that altogether through att as well.

gardenhedge• 4 years ago

Couldn't 3 just be done on the backend? User opens app, ping to app's own service which pings FB. Then apple can't block it

ec1096854• 4 years ago

Apple has SKAdNetwork to track app conversions in a privacy centric way. E.g. Google Ad network is integrated with it: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/skadnetw...

jahabrewer• 4 years ago

... I still don't understand the exception Apple purportedly gets from its tracking rules.

As Ben Thompson has been shouting, it's because Apple has a very convenient definition of "tracking".

SpectralTheory• 4 years ago

Where are these ads being delivered? Just the App Store, or are they expanding into somewhere else?

hankchinaski• 4 years ago

App Store, News app, Stocks app, Maps app, Books app, Podcast app it mentions in the article

Nextgrid3• 4 years ago

The only app of value here is maybe Maps. The rest is garbage already so won't be a major difference.

rebeccaskinner4• 4 years ago

I've seen this coming for a while, and I'm honestly not sure what the next move to make is for those of us who have done as much as we can to escape the hoards of advertisers. I have no particular love for iOS, but I switched to an iPhone years ago to escape the google ecosystem. There isn't really a plausible third option at this point. Even if Linux phones had usable hardware, more of the world is moving toward relying on apps that only run on DRMed systems with signed software from the data collecting duopoly. I can't deposit a check or order a taxi with a rooted phone, and the trend is getting worse over time- not better.

I suppose the one up-side to the situation is that there's not much point in even trying to spend the time figuring out how to root a device, or dealing with egregiously under-performing open smart phone hardware, and it might be possible to save some money going back to a dumb phone.

pkulak2• 4 years ago

You can't deposit a check or order a cab with a dumb phone either. Might as well put Calyx on something and at least have Firefox and OpenStreetMap.

rebeccaskinner4• 4 years ago

I've thought about going down that path, and I still might, but at the moment I'm very frustrated by the state of hardware and general support for a lot of the user and privacy respecting options to the point where it's hard to believe it'll actually be worth my time to try to get something like that set up.

Tijdreiziger4• 4 years ago

I want to be able to (among other things) order cabs and deposit checks using my smartphone, though. (Well, maybe not that last one, seeing as checks don’t exist here in the Netherlands anymore.)

Going back a decade in terms of functionality is hardly an answer.

Grustaf2• 4 years ago

Why can't you call a cab with a dumb phone?

saiya-jin2• 4 years ago

I recommended recently to my wife to buy Apple mini 13 as her next phone, after both of us being forever on Android.

What a disappointment, she likes actually 1 feature - photos, and the rest is subpar experience compared to her old galaxy S10 (almost 4 year old phone). But then she likes my android photos similarly, since I have 10x zoom which is great for kids always running around or for hiking. Its not even first weeks of her use of Apple, she has it few months. I can browse on my samsung S22 ultra random internet without being swarmed with ads and tracking (firefox and ublock origin, something Apple phones will clearly never have).

And all the rest. It has fingerprint sensor for unlocking, instead of ridiculously shitty faceid which doesn't work with masks (she is a doctor so does wear them often). It often doesn't work even without masks, ie non-ideal light conditions like right now (evening and dimmer lights). Comparable S22 is much nicer phone to look at, to hold, to carry, to charge, and to work with.

I regret recommending it to her at this point, I too was convinced by Apple's effective PR. But quality is just not there, the devices are worse, bigger in size with smaller screen, uglier, heavier, software is meh, raw CPU power is useless on its own when device is so limited. I don't believe a zilch of Apple's PR about privacy, as I didn't for the ads and various other PR talk, actions are the only thing that matter.

And after reading this topic, its clear I will continue shopping in Android's non-chinese realm for a very long time. I don't consider my device secure from state actors, and neither is Apple, so we act accordingly. Thus, no added value in Apple devices, just plenty of marketing, similar to say Hermes or Louis Vuitton purses. Nobody believes those are worth 500$ or 5,000$ to manufacture, yet rich people buy them.

hk__2• 4 years ago

I can browse on my samsung S22 ultra random internet without being swarmed with ads and tracking (firefox and ublock origin, something Apple phones will clearly never have).

If you are ok with using Safari instead of Firefox, that’s something that has been possible since 2015 on iOS [1].

instead of ridiculously shitty faceid which doesn't work with masks

It does since iOS 15.4 (March 2022 [2]); I use it every day.

It often doesn't work even without masks, ie non-ideal light conditions like right now (evening and dimmer lights)

Light has nothing to do with this because FaceID works with infrared: I’m able to unlock my iPhone in the dark with no issue at all. You’re probably holding it wrong [3].

But quality is just not there, the devices are worse, bigger in size with smaller screen, […] heavier

I fail to find an iPhone 13 that’s bigger than your Samsung S22 Ultra. The Pro Max is 0.2mm wider but 2.1mm less tall and 1.2mm thiner (163.3 x 77.9 x 8.9 mm [4] vs. 160.8 x 78.1 x 7.7 mm [5]). It does have a smaller screen-to-size ratio (87.4% vs. 90.2%) and is slightly heavier (240g vs. 228g -- not sure how noticeable this is).

the devices are worse, […], uglier, […], software is meh

That part is highly subjective. I personally find the S22 Ultra very ugly but that’s an opinion, not a fact.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34173732

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/face-id-with-mas...

[3] https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/13/how-iphone-x-face-id-wo...

[4] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s22_ultra_5g-11251.p...

[5] https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_13_pro_max-11089.php

fsflover• 4 years ago

Even if Linux phones had usable hardware, more of the world is moving toward relying on apps that only run on DRMed systems with signed software from the data collecting duopoly.

This is not a technical but a political problem. People owning (GNU-)Linux-phones (or just caring about the future of mobile computing) should demand from the companies that they do not force everyone into monopolies.

amelius14• 4 years ago

you mean demand from governments.

cwkoss6• 4 years ago

We need to start a social movement to punish advertisers. Ads are pernicious and pervasive thought manipulation which systemically decrease the life satisfaction of nearly every person in society. It is a cancer.

We should strive to make anyone who gets manipulated into changing their behavior based on an ad they saw feel ashamed and stupid for falling for their tricks, and angry at the advertisers for manipulating them.

kibwen• 4 years ago

Say it louder: ads are socially-acceptable, corporate-sponsored brainwashing.

thr0wawayf006• 4 years ago

We should strive to make anyone who gets manipulated into changing their behavior based on an ad they saw feel ashamed and stupid for falling for their tricks,

This sounds great, but:

A) how do you know/can you prove that you've been manipulated?

B) How do we know that we haven't all been manipulated? (After all, millions of people bought into this ecosystem to get away from ads, I think every person who's angry has a case that they've been manipulated)

and C) where is this social movement gonna take place? Social media, the bastion of internet advertising?

The answer is make tech less important in our lives. There's been a pattern going back decades that technology grows in scale and utility and eventually becomes corporatized to that point that it generates more income to work against its users. The answer is to live a lower tech life. Less time on phones and apps and more time in the real world.

kajaktum• 4 years ago

We need to start a social movement to punish advertisers. Ads are pernicious and pervasive thought manipulation which systemically decrease the life satisfaction of nearly every person in society. It is a cancer.

Will never happen until we can dispel the notion that human are free agents. People will never give up this believe about themselves. Meanwhile, it's proven to be effective by virtue of it being a trillion dollar industry or something. Same thing with gambling.

massysett3• 4 years ago

Advertising is incredibly useful to me and I routinely seek it out.

- I own a home that routinely needs services. Ads help me find willing businesses.

- I own a car that needs tires. Just yesterday I looked at ads for those selling them.

- I like to buy art for my house. Ads in apps like Etsy pop up things that might interest me.

- Sometimes I look for a new job. Enough said on that one.

Believe it or not ads exist because they perform a useful social function.

kornhole2• 4 years ago

Linux laptops are lovely at this point. Linux phones are for the more adventurous and tolerant hackers, and I love them for working out the issues. Android without any Google is the best handset option for most people. Degoogling can be accomplished in many ways such as using the universal android debloater found on github, or installing an Android fork such as Graphene, Calyx, or Lineage. Nextcloud is the most comprehensive replacement to many of the services and synchronization such as contacts, calendar, photos, files, bookmarks, passwords, phone location, news/RSS, podcasts, music, tasks, and notes. It can also host E2E chats and video calls.

puyoxyz• 4 years ago

I can't deposit a check or order a taxi with a rooted phone

On GrapheneOS[0] (privacy focused AOSP-based mobile OS) you can do that stuff easily while still owning your device/having root, etc (at least according to this video[1] I saw)

[0] https://grapheneos.org/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZmUINSvQ4

aembleton3• 4 years ago

You need a pixel phone for GrapheneOS which is why I haven't tried it yet.

innagadadavida• 4 years ago

We saw what happened to Apple’s Siri search initiative that was started around 2014. If that is any indicator, don’t have much hopes for this one either.

Apple is being very hypocritical here. Privacy matters until they tell you it’s ok, don’t worry about it. With Budd Trible moving on, I guess this is the state of affairs. Sad.

jscipione• 4 years ago

Better Apple make money off data than it being collected by Facebook and sent to the FBI.

https://nypost.com/2022/09/14/facebook-spied-on-private-mess...

At least Apple has a record of keeping their users safe from government.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/apple-refuses-barr-request-t...

moolcool3• 4 years ago

Having the data exist on somebody's servers in an unencrypted state at all is enough to make me uneasy.

r00fus• 4 years ago

What makes you think Apple isn't doing the same? They were involved in PRISM as well. Honestly, I really doubt Apple could continue to do business without being at least somewhat porous to law enforcement and government snooping (maybe better than others but definitely not stiff-arming them).

olliej• 4 years ago

Sigh, I don’t believe Apple’s ad network tracks people to the same extent as Google, Facebook, etc.

But the mere existence of it undercuts the privacy claims and creates a giant moral hazard (if AppStore search is lousy then people have to buy ads/sponsored keywords, and the clear desire for ad businesses to start invading privacy).

I really wish it didn’t exist :-/

secondcoming• 4 years ago

I, for one, did not see this coming at all. I genuinely believed that Apple's privacy strictness was for the greater good.

gumby2• 4 years ago

Is there any way to block Apple's own ads today?

I wonder if Apple will also try to prevent that or will just figure it's a small enough number that allowing it will help them with the nerds. Informally, when I see something on someone else's device, ad blocking doesn't appear to be popular. I can't imagine using the web without it.

alex_young2• 4 years ago

Apple has astutely observed that they don't need a bunch of tracking cookies to track you across sites and services if they already have your account on your phone and access to everything directly.

Google has something like this moat within their search engine dominance, likewise Facebook does for social, but both of them are rather limited slices in comparison with the OS itself.

So, we arrive at this junction - Apple lobbies, for the consumer of course, to prevent tracking across the web, and conveniently limits their number of competitors to one, that being Microsoft which seems rather inept at this advertising thing anyway.

It's hard to root for Google or Facebook here, but it's also pretty obvious that our friends in Cupertino don't have our best interests in mind.

joshgachnang• 4 years ago

I'd say Google should be in a pretty good spot with Android + search engine.

alex_young2• 4 years ago

That’s a good observation, but Google really doesn’t control things the same way Apple does since they aren’t directly distributing Android for the most part. It would be hard to pull off that kind of synchronization with the handset ecosystem.

verisimi• 4 years ago

Apple = a big sandbox Google, Meta = also big sandbox Government surveillance = Apple + google + meta = the biggest sandbox

Which sandbox do you like to play in? Does it even matter?

WoodenChair2• 4 years ago

One of the reasons I pay a premium to use Apple's products is to not be part of an advertising ecosystem. I am disappointed that this seems to be changing. Ads in the App Store are one thing—ads in Maps, Books, and Podcasts as the article suggests may be coming in the future—will drive me to use premium (even if they're paid) alternatives. At a minimum, people who pay for an Apple monthly iCloud subscription should be able to opt-out (not just of tracking, which already exists, but seeing ads all together).

htrp2• 4 years ago

At a minimum, people who pay for an Apple monthly iCloud subscription should be able to opt-out (not just of tracking, which already exists, but seeing ads all together).

The premium is just an opt-out of the ads (on the specific app) .... the tracking is where the value will be in the future

bredren2• 4 years ago

I feel the same way. I thought the price premiums we pay on hardware and services is supposed to support profit margins that allow Apple to not show advertisements to me.

If the prior profits were not enough, how much higher do the prices need to be to not do this?

In general I trust the company to make choices about computing experiences, much more so than any other products company. So, I am going to try and hold judgement and see how this pans out.

That said, I'd like the company to get out ahead of these decisions and explain reasoning for these changes.

leaflets23• 4 years ago

Regardless of how much the hardware and services already cost, the company can always make more by showing ads too? Meaning, no profits or prices are high enough.

(Unless they show far too many so people start leaving ... That threshold might be high though; Linux is too cumbersome for almost everyone?)

etherealG• 4 years ago

I think being the richest company in the world makes it pretty cleat that there’s no need to increase prices to support no ads. It’s pure greed and you can’t reason with it.

twsted• 4 years ago

I am really worried about this.

I would have hoped Apple stayed away from this business.

This is greed, imho.

oneplane• 4 years ago

While a bit weird, I can understand that you can do ads without tracking (perhaps without profiling as well) and this doesn't always mean that Apple becoming one with the capitalistic singularity of advertising business requires them to also be tracking people.

The same goes for plenty of forms of telemetry; it doesn't equal individual tracking or tracking at all (before someone comes in with a cohort theory).

Some things like predictive text entry (Microsoft did/does that? And grammarly and Gboard) have an easy implementation where you ignore privacy and simply dump all user entry onto a server and do the heavy lifting there. Apple's version of that might be Siri recordings when recognition fails to improve that, but I haven't seen it with ads or text entry (yet?).

At some point no company should be doing any of this without homomorphic encryption or a good level of sanitisation. All of Apple's telemetry that you can inspect (either locally or simply by adding a proxy) is well-anonymised. It doesn't hide what specific binaries are causing errors as that would defeat the point of measuring reliability, and when you connect to someone, they will know what IP connected to them, but other than that, it's not as bad as people tend to make it out to be.

apienx• 4 years ago

"Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain language, and repeatedly." - Steve "Newspeak" Jobs

Apple doesn't care about what cyberlibertarians think about their business practices. Baking in ads won't affect sales (might even prop it up if used to subsidize devices).

gerash3• 4 years ago

In terms of data protection I have friends who work at Google and at Apple. The one working at Apple was able to check their spouse's spending trend on App store (granted they were working in a relevant department) while at Google reading your own data is not even granted without justification let alone an external user.

cromka• 4 years ago

Sounds like something worth whistleblowing to relevant authorities. Depending on where are they located, they could even be rewarded for it.

justapassenger• 4 years ago

Talking from experience - having a real privacy program at a big company is really hard. Like thousands for people and billions of dollars hard.

And speculating - wouldn't surprise me too much that Apple is actually weak there. Apple's approach to privacy seems to be mainly "we just don't get your data on our servers", which could be resulting them in ignoring how to build an actual robust privacy program on their side for other things.

null_object• 4 years ago

The one working at Apple was able to check their spouse's spending trend on App store

You obviously could back this hearsay up with actual evidence I assume?

Quarrel• 4 years ago

"Sure, here's the screenshots I took of my wife violating her NDA, while handing them to me to post to HN."

Like, sure it is hearsay, but what do you want from the guy? Most of us are sharing anecdotes that we hope we be helpful to other HNers, most of the time. If anything, I think a lot of people look to the experience of other users here as the advantage.

summerlight2• 4 years ago

How could they? They obviously don't want to face C-suite level retaliation who can make their life miserable over the next 10 years.

gerash3• 4 years ago

This was a few years ago and I actually don’t want to get anyone in trouble

_joel• 4 years ago

Sounds like they also breached laws, way to go.

pyentropy• 4 years ago

Sounds believable to me. Google is really good at data warehouse & database tech (BigQuery, BigTable, Spanner) and access management systems, as well as sturdy custom-built tools for internal use by employees.

Even though it might not be intentional, Apple is lagging at such tooling.

MisterPea• 4 years ago

Yep. As another user pointed out, privacy tooling is a very hard problem across a large company. When you have a cloud platform, you're especially incentivized to build a robust solution for this.

I would imagine AWS and Microsoft also have a thorough tooling solution.

summerlight2• 4 years ago

Can't say for Apple, but can confirm that it's quite challenging to access arbitrary user data in Google without giving good justification and all the log accesses are subject to audit. This is not just a mere possibility; also heard that a few cases were actually escalated and resulted in termination because of inappropriate access.

frankfrank132• 4 years ago

Idk if thats super relevant is it? Will Apple employees be handcrafting ads for the users they can see?

friedman23• 4 years ago

It means that Apple's care of user data is surface level. Google is under much more scrutiny than Apple and thus takes better care of your data.

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

To be honest I’m not that worried about individual employee access. I’m much more concerned about systematic organisational access.

Apple might have a handful of employees misuse data. Google will do it on purpose, at scale.

throwaway__122• 4 years ago

it's not really personal data but i've seen a few times in recent years how easy it is to get all the details you want about your competitors' adsense campaigns & strategies if you know someone who work in the right departement at Google.

gloryjulio• 4 years ago

Apple pretends iOS is not Android, and turns it into Android eventually. The irony

progbits• 4 years ago

Except without 3rd party browsers and system-wide adblockers.

kristofferR• 4 years ago

As the article mentioned system-wide adblockers are banned from Android from the 1st November.

franczesko• 4 years ago

What is worrying is that there is no true alternative. Full-privacy might be a very lucrative business opportunity.

DrBenCarson3• 4 years ago

To play devil's advocate...if you believe Apple really stands by their privacy values, why wouldn't they start an ads business? If they feel they can deliver ads and protect customer data, they should start an ad business. They owe it to shareholders and to their customers.

If they don't do it, someone else will, and they ultimately don't trust third parties with their customers' data (also being a massive corporation, they don't like other companies generating revenue off the backs of their customers).

If you believe Apple is genuine about their commitment to privacy, this should be encouraging news. If you don't believe that, then this does appear to be questionable at best (boxing out third parties so they can profit off the data themselves)

xvector2• 4 years ago

Anticompetitive to deny others the ability to run ads on your platform. Apple's gonna be hit big time with antitrust.

CharlesW4• 4 years ago

Anticompetitive to deny others the ability to run ads on your platform.

Yeah, if that were true it'd be pretty bad. (It's not true.)

DrBenCarson3• 4 years ago

Yeah, that's not true.

Apple doesn't stop anyone from running ads. They stop companies from collecting and aggregating data across multiple apps without explicit user consent.

fullshark• 4 years ago

I actually don't care that much about the privacy stuff, you are insane if you don't think Apple tracks user metrics and device data for at the very least business intelligence. I care about the UX being worsened.

DrBenCarson3• 4 years ago

Oh 100% they collect and track user metrics, but I do think they abide by the answer you give when any Apple device asks you if you want to send metrics to the mothership at setup.

It's also a matter of how well the data is anonymized. Given they've gone through the trouble of adding private email proxy features, secure web proxy features, and lockdown mode, I don't think it's lip service, but that's just my opinion.

pbronez• 4 years ago

They use some pretty sophisticated tech to do this in a way that respects user privacy:

https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...

pronlover723• 4 years ago

I hate ads but I live with a few now. I have privacy to some extent. I don't want to give up privacy for ads. As an example, there's no reason Apple couldn't hash the screen constantly to see what videos you're watching, what images you're looking at, who you're talking to (face recognition, text recognition). They own the OS, they can do all of that in the name of serving you ads. Some TVs apparently already do this. And if you don't think they can hash what's on your screen well they already shipped that tech.

So I would most certainly not choose a phone that spies on me over one that has ads. I already have a phone that has ads. Sure I want less ads but not at the expense of less privacy.

In fact arguably, the less privacy you have the more ads you'll get since they'll have more data to target you.

amelius14• 4 years ago

If they feel they can deliver ads and protect customer data, they should start an ad business. They owe it to shareholders and to their customers.

Collecting data about people is already an infringement of privacy in itself.

It doesn't matter here if you keep that data out of the hands of yet other people.

magic_hamster6• 4 years ago

Profiling the user based on their seemingly private usage of the device is a breach of privacy. This is the big issue. It's not okay to be all for privacy when it's other corporations' tracking methods, but employ the same methods for yourself.

What Apple basically did was say "tracking users for ads is great, and we realized we don't have to share this data with other ad companies, so good for us."

Apple can collect device data for technical purposes, which is borderline, but more acceptable.

chillfox5• 4 years ago

I care more about an ad free experience than the privacy angle. Not that I don't value privacy, I do value it highly, just not as highly as avoiding ads.

mywacaday• 4 years ago

I recently signed up for the duckduckgo anti tracking protection beta. I guess I always suspected on some level the amount of tracking but seeing the the blocking in real time of apps I haven't used in weeks really brings it home.

tomcam2• 4 years ago

I for one am shocked. Simply shocked.

gigel822• 4 years ago

/s?

tomcam2• 4 years ago

Yes definitely /s

mabbo2• 4 years ago

Apple will just wind up like Amazon: cannibalizing the customer trust now that they have market power.

Consider: Amazon has the majority of e-commerce sales today in the west. This is largely in part of decisions makes 20 years ago to allow honest reviews by real customers, both good and bad, earning strong customer trust. Now they're making money by selling the top spot on their search results and calling it "advertising". It's not. It's the sale of all that customer trust they spent 20 years building up. And the money they make on selling that trust is massive.

Consider: Apple is loved by its customers. They trust them. Apple means quality, security, and all the other good things they want. They're also at 30% of global mobile phone sales- massive market power.

Now it's time to start selling off that customer trust for profit.

Being Apple, the first move is to attack the entire online ad industry via privacy improvements- I'm not saying it's a bad thing that they did it, but I am suggesting they didn't do it for anything other than profit motive. Next, join the industry with a competitor in the space that takes advantage of all the things Apple knows about their customers. Trade the trust they've built up for a payout in cash.

It was either that or try to invent a new product. Since Steve Jobs died that hasn't gone very well.

hatuthecat• 4 years ago

Apple Watch was probably the largest launch since Jobs died, and now it’s the dominant smart watch. Apple Silicon breathed new life into the mac lineup. AirPods have become the standard bluetooth earbuds. I think apple has been doing great with new products recently (after struggling in the late 2010s, as shown by their extreme emphasis on services instead of products then) and I hope they keep that momentum instead of compromising on ads.

moolcool3• 4 years ago

Speaking of Apple, Apple Watch, and data collection, how long do you think it will be until an insurance company subpoenas Apple for it's health data? "You said you didn't have a preexisting condition on your application, but you knew you had an arithmia, because your watch told you so. Therefore, we have no choice but to deny your claim"

mabbo2• 4 years ago

and now it’s the dominant smart watch.

Apple won't release sales figures for it. It's such a small market, compared to everything else that Apple does. Being the biggest fish in a very small pond doesn't add up to much.

Apple Silicon breathed new life into the mac lineup

No disagreement- I'm using one right now. Fantastic chip, the M1. But it's an iteration on an existing product, not a revolution. It's not something new. It doesn't enable anything that you couldn't do before.

timmytokyo• 4 years ago

Tim Cook was asked about advertising and privacy a couple weeks ago. Here's his answer. Take from it what you will.

"Digital advertising is not a bad thing. We've never said digital advertising is a bad thing. What is not good is vacuuming up people's data when they're not doing so on an informed basis. That's what is bad. And so we try to put the user in the driver seat there to own the data."

https://youtu.be/sdvzYtgmIjs?t=3717

amelius14• 4 years ago

Driver seat as in: we'll show you an annoying popup asking for consent every time you are least prepared for it.

novok5• 4 years ago

IMO I don't really trust amazon reviews. I use amazon because they have a very effective shipping and return network and system, with a very broad set of items that pretty much nobody else reproduces. It's their fulfillment network essentially. Order from random retailers (even with shopify) and you're reminded why amazon is in the lead, with gotchas in return polices that get pretty irritating. Order from target / walmart and you notice how much is missing.

Amazon wins because it's more like visa or a physical goods internet than a specific store.

frazbin• 4 years ago

err nope, now that they've got an Si lead and control teh whole vertical, they can abuse us all the want; we literally have nowhere to go.

anizan• 4 years ago

Brings back memories of a monty python sketch "You have got nice ... here. It would be a shame if something happened" https://montycasinos.com/montypython/scripts/armyprot.php.ht...

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

If Apple starts running invasive ads or other bad practices, it will further the development of the PinePhone / LibrePhone. It will also cause a lot (possibly even the majority) of developers to switch from iOS / macOS to open-source OSs. In this sense, invasive advertising would be a bad idea economically.

A lot of developers who value "open-source" still use iOS and macOS. A big reason is because, despite being proprietary, this software is good. The minor flaws (macOS harder to modify, iOS being locked-down, both platforms being not open-source and less compatible with open-source than Linux/BSD) don't outweigh the work of creating a new OS which has the benefits (seamless user experience, fast, good design, efficient for productivity). A big reason PinePhone and LibrePhone are far behind iOS is simply because there isn't enough motivation - the hardware is there, it's the software (e.g. smooth gestures) which are lacking.

Apple would not lose much of their userbase, as a minority of "non-developer" people don't care about invasive ads. But a lot of developers do, and having developers move away is still really bad because it affects Apple's ecosystem. Devs don't just use iOS and macOS, they make software for these platforms and even directly contribute to open-source Apple code. If everyone is making software and fixing bugs for Linux and LineageOS instead, they will get better and cause more developers and eventually ordinary users to migrate away.

zaptrem• 4 years ago

It would be easier for devs to modify MacOS to rip out the hypothetical ads and complain loudly until Apple fixes it than to switch OSes completely.

travisgriggs• 4 years ago

I've been a big Apple fan over the years. They continue to grow more tarnished for me.

But my big problem is... where do I go? It's not like Android phones are better--I write native apps on both, I have 9 Android phones sitting to the left of me right now, and 6 iDevices to my right--they're worse to use. They're a night mare to code for compared to iOS.

I write Linux, Windows, and Mac code from post Ives 16"MBP. The OS is as good as any Linux I use (it's worse in some ways, but better than others). The hardware is impressive. I have tried the Linux on Windows stuff, Windows is the worst.

It's not like it was 20 years ago, when MacOSX was in its infancy, and Linux was awesome, and you could reinstall Sawfish WM on Linux running on the Windows laptop the company gave you. Apple hardware/software has its warts, but overall it's pretty good stuff all things averaged. So I'd love to escape their growingly evil ecosystem of services, but it's not clear what the development rig better and more free/enabling than this would be.

lupire9• 4 years ago

Your 20 year old Linux still works. All you have to do is not be greedy about wanting all the inventions that evil corporations made in the past 20 years.

smoldesu7• 4 years ago

The goal shouldn't be to 'escape', but rather encourage our businesses to do the right thing so people aren't hostages in the first place. If Apple simply played fair, I don't think anyone would feel the need to leave (or fear that they need to). Perhaps this will be the ultimate test of Apple putting their customers before profits...

In any case, I think Linux replaces MacOS without much protest. I hated working around Mac-specific idiosyncrasies anyways, and while a number of devs might protest, Apple hardware makes for fine Linux machines these days. You're right to identify that iOS is harder to replace, but it's hard to imagine a long-term solution that doesn't involve Apple allowing sideloading. I really hope they do the right thing here, but that's all we can do.

andai• 4 years ago

I'm often reminded of Stallman's message that Free Software would be the right thing to use, for reasons of ethics and preserving freedom for ourselves and others, even if it were a worse experience. (He argues that it isn't worse, but that's a different conversation.)

rtpg• 4 years ago

It's so frustrating that Android isn't better. I ... think that it's mostly due to app design not being so great.

But the super glib part of me is unable to escape from the idea that there is an original sin with Android, with its complications around activities and the like, and the JVM, that make the weird jittery lagginess inevitable. I know that in theory you should be able to have a high perf layer for graphics and animations, but where is it?

It's just embarassing that somehow we've ended up in a situation where there is so much money poured into an "open" (yes I know it's not open but) system and yet it still feels so bad compared to iOS on a... 4 year old device

laumars• 4 years ago

It’s been a few years since I’ve ran Android but I remember it was possible to have silky smooth animations via custom ROMs. The problem was a lot of OEMs slapped crap loads of bloat on an underpowered handset.

This might not be the case any more, it’s been years since I’ve ran Android, but there once was a time when running cyanagenmod (I think it was called) on a HTC handset gave you a better experience than iOS on an iPhone.

sylens• 4 years ago

I see more and more people getting into this mindset. They want a little more openness than what Apple provides, but they want a little more structure and direction than Android.

I really do wonder what would happen if Microsoft made a fork of Android with a replacement for Google Play Services (maybe something that emulated many of the APIs, putting Google in an ironic situation to say that its APIs are protected under copyright law)

bornfreddy• 4 years ago

Google’s Manifest V3 — Chrome’s new extension-building platform — severely limits the functionality of ad blockers. Though, ad blockers won't capitulate without a fight — that is as much as we can promise you. In a world’s first, AdGuard has recently published an ad-blocking extension built on Manifest 3.

That's... awful? Building an ad blocker on top of Mv3 is exactly what Google is hoping for. If nobody built an ad blocker for it, how much market share do you think Chrome would keep?

yladiz• 4 years ago

Not as many people care about, or even really know of, ad blockers as you might think.

smoldesu7• 4 years ago

That's funny, I remember people saying the same thing when Safari limited support for browser extensions: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158

jdmdmdmdmd• 4 years ago

how much market share do you think Chrome would keep?

The entire share of users who don't use AdBlock. The other users don't give them revenue anyway.

frankfrank132• 4 years ago

I get why people are so suspicious of this, but I personally still feel like Apple is going to handle this much better than Google or Meta. Meta and Google are 1-trick ponies, and those ponies feed off of transforming user data into ads. Apple doesn't need ads, and therefore can do them on their own terms.

rchaud3• 4 years ago

The lure of that sweet, sweet ad money finally takes down the FAANG member that many said would be immune to its charms.

Apple didn't cut Facebook out of the picture for pro-privacy, 'user-centric' reasons. This is the same playbook they used in 2010 when they kneecapped Flash. It wasn't about battery life or viruses then, it was to clear a path for the App Store to be the focal point for app and game development.

simonh3• 4 years ago

To be clear, this is entirely about advertising within Apple's App Store (that's what Apple Search Ads is). It has nothing to do with ads on the internet or in Safari, or even within third party apps.

pavlov• 4 years ago

And Google ads used to be only unobtrusive text inlined with search results until it wasn’t.

If there’s growth in a segment of business that’s moving the needle at a multi-trillion market cap corporation like Apple, there are executives and product managers all over the place hoping to get on board.

simonh3• 4 years ago

Maybe, I suppose we'll see, but people have been saying this ever since the Google/Apple bust up over user data in Google Maps back in 2009. If we condemned everyone for things they might do one day we'd all be in jail for life.

kuratkull• 4 years ago

Google search ads used to be in a separate box to the right of the search results.

CobrastanJorji• 4 years ago

I agree, I think you mean that they were NOT inline. They were out of the line, in an entirely separate column. With a different background color. With the words "sponsored links" added to their box.

jdgoesmarching2• 4 years ago

I feel like the real outrage here should be for developers who already pay a fee for the privilege of being Apple developers, give up 30% of their revenue for the privilege of being inconsistently judged by app review, and now need to fork over extra money just to have their exact app name appear when searched.

It’s insulting to the dev community who drove the success of the app store and arguably iOS in general. No amount of “we love our devs” PR can reconcile this.

thr0wawayf006• 4 years ago

It’s insulting to the dev community who drove the success of the app store and arguably iOS in general. No amount of “we love our devs” PR can reconcile this.

Apple built this market to control it completely, you could see it coming from miles away. It seems like the big move nowadays is build your market (i.e. "platform") and you get to be judge, jury and executioner. How did you see something like this playing out? I just don't understand how people still aren't cynical enough to see this kind of thing coming.

purpleblue• 4 years ago

As a user, I love the fact that the App Store has an extra pair of eyes to at least try to keep some consistency. It may suck for iOS developers but as an end user it feels safer than Android.

yazaddaruvala• 4 years ago

My guess, knowing nothing: Apple will drop the AppStore payments commission to 3% (for the first $X MM of payments).

I don't love Ads based rev stream, but Apple needs some revenue source for the AppStore. Currently the 30% of virtual goods payments is getting a lot of scrutiny. They have already started to reduce it to 15% in many cases. It just makes sense that this will get reduced to 3% over time.

Apple is pivoting to Ads so that they can reduce the % without much of an impact to their top and bottom line.

shostack2• 4 years ago

Not much different from Amazon, Google, or even grocery stores and retail.

drawingthesun4• 4 years ago

Incorrect I just checked that the stocks app on Mac OS does indeed have unrelated adverts.

simonh3• 4 years ago

Thanks, I missed the brief mention of those, but it's still not an ATT issue and they do apply the same standards to their own apps.

rchaud3• 4 years ago

Apple has ads everywhere, including Apple News and Stocks, and I imagine iMovie, Pages and Keynote soon enough.

musictubes• 4 years ago

News and Stocks are essentially the same system. Stocks is just financial news tied to the things in your watchlist.

zmmmmm4• 4 years ago

did you miss the whole section of the article about ads in the stocks and other apps on MacOS?

faller_slive• 4 years ago

Apple has hinted that more of its own apps can soon get ads. It was reported that the company eyes bring ads to Maps, Books and Podcasts apps.

skc• 4 years ago

They're gonna print even more money. You literally don't get a much more captive audience than macOS/iOS users.

ec1096854• 4 years ago

This part of the article is wrong:

"While Apple effectively tracks users on its own platform, the pre-installed apps are exempted from displaying a message asking permission to track users.

This is because Apple’s Anti-Tracking Transparency only applies to the apps that use third-party data to track users. Since Apple’s tracking stays within its own ecosystem, the company’s native apps are not subject to the policy. An exception Apple made for itself drew backlash, with some comparing the “nefarious”-sounding prompt third-party developers have to show to a far less ominous “personalized ads” pop-up Apple has to show itself."

Apps like Facebook can track the user any which way they please. They can't track users in other apps without consent.

idk12• 4 years ago

This is what the Stocks app on MacOS looks like if you scroll down for the smallest time - https://i.imgur.com/1j7ykDw.png

So Stocks app in MacOS, no stocks when you open it, but the news and ads is what you see.

I do hope we don't see ads in the Weather app at some point, that would be a shame.

Edit - I was curious, if you select APPL on the side and scroll a little, you get ads too, so they're on all side tabs - https://i.imgur.com/2X3Et0l.png

raz32dust• 4 years ago

Wow, that's eye-opening as an Android user and helps to put the anti-tracking initiative into strategic perspective. Apple is leveraging user trust to claim that it's ok for them to track users, not not ok for anyone else.

warning26• 4 years ago

What I find particularly egregious is that when Apple requests to track users, they use the text "Allow Apple to personalize your experience?", while for 3rd parties they use the much scarier "allow this app to track you?" prompt

magic_hamster6• 4 years ago

Imagine paying top dollar for a premium Apple product, only to get a soup of ugly ads in the native applications of your device.

As far as I know, this is the case for low end models from vendors like Xiaomi. And even there you can turn it off. I never dreamed of Apple doing something so detrimental to its famed User Experience that feels so cheap and disrespectful.

cma4• 4 years ago

And even there you can turn it off.

Does Apple's System Integrity Protection protect apps like Stocks?

wafriedemann• 4 years ago

Is this exclusive to the US? Mine does not look like that.

idk12• 4 years ago

This is the Stocks app in the UK.

rglover• 4 years ago

If that's legitimately Apple, Steve Jobs is rolling over in his grave. Good lord.

denkmoon• 4 years ago

Hoooooly shit that is so bad.

Regret. Panic. Uncertainty. What the fuck am I going to do now?

aaaaaaaaaaab• 4 years ago

LOL, wut? I'm in the UK but I don't see any of these... (although my AppleID is non-UK, maybe that's why?)

These are literally the trashiest, scammiest, lowest-tier clickbait ads. You would expect these on the bottom of tabloid articles from The Sun, not a stocks app (!) from Apple (!!).

Holy shit, I am appalled!

throwaway7425• 4 years ago

Are they being loaded from a separate domain?

drawingthesun4• 4 years ago

As a Mac and iPhone user I am annoyed as this means I'll have to start migrating away from Apple over the next few years, paying for premium product only for the os and native apps to start getting adverts is atrocious and cannot be rewarded with my continued support.

Edit: I just checked the stocks app on my MacBook M1 Max and there are unrelated adverts alongside finance news items.

I am appalled and regretting my my m1 max (64gb ram, 4tb ssd) purchase for the first time. Up till now its has been one my of best tech purchases in my life. Not anymore.

This is a sign of pure greed. The most profitable company wants even more profits and will damage its brand to do so.

bloggie• 4 years ago

Yes this is exactly why I switched from Samsung to Apple after they added ads to the Wallet app.

freeAgent3• 4 years ago

The problem is that there's now nowhere to go, unless you can deal with using Linux as your daily driver desktop OS. I have tried many times and have never succeeded, but if it gets bad enough I may have to find a way eventually.

drawingthesun4• 4 years ago

I would rather go back to cheaper computers and phones and deal with ads than pay for extremely premium products and get ads.

I feel like an idiot buying a $7,000 aud computer to have the native apps contain ads.

It's disgusting.

danielheath2• 4 years ago

It's definitely difficult at first - the loss of polish, and the extra up-front setup to make it nice.

If you do try again, my advice is: Play to the strengths of the new OS.

MacOS makes decisions for you (usually good ones), but you're SOL if you don't like them. This culture affects native apps, too.

For me, getting good results out of Linux has been a question of putting in more up-front work to figure out what I actually want the computer to do. The result is... very comfy.

thaumaturgy2• 4 years ago

I have been daily-driving Plasma (KDE) for ... eesh, at least 5 years now, maybe 7. I can't remember the last time I booted a Windows or Mac OS (for my own use). Plasma just keeps getting better too.

I use it as a generalist dev (so, interacting with lots of different environments) as well as hobby & entertainment (incl. photography).

The biggest pain point IMO is lack of a good email application. They're all aggravating in different ways.

The initial getting-started process requires a bit of reading to figure out hardware support and get a few things dialed in. That's a little painful, but shouldn't be a deal-breaker for dev types.

If you want to jump ship from the Windows/Mac dichotomy, check out Plasma. Runs great on Debian. Debian's less "sexy" than other distros, but it's a great solution for the "I just wanna get my work done" crowd.

Minor49er2• 4 years ago

What is missing from the Linux experience that is keeping you from switching? I have found Linux Mint to be quite capable for the last decade personally

throwaway7425• 4 years ago

I haven't noticed any ads in Windows 10 LTSC on my gaming computer. I do have multiple layers of ad blocking though so it's possible they are being blocked by something and I just don't notice. Laptop is Debian.

b1ue64• 4 years ago

unless you can deal with using Linux as your daily driver desktop OS

That's not as hard as you make it sound

jml78• 4 years ago

I switched to linux on the desktop. I use Elementary OS. Is it perfect? No, is it good enough? Yes. I dual boot with windows for gaming.

I developed on a Mac for 15+ years.

chillfox5• 4 years ago

ElementaryOS and stick to flatpak for apps where possible works really well.

heavyset_go6• 4 years ago

It's my opinion that if ChromeOS can suit a user's needs, then so can desktop Linux with a browser.

Plasma is actually well polished and reliable, much to my surprise as someone who never really cared for KDE.

tracker19• 4 years ago

PopOS and Ubuntu-Budgie are pretty nice for general use... I think my only problem really is that Bluetooth headphones don't always auto negotiate to mono+mic to/from stereo... but I'd rather deal with that than ads in the Start menu search.

zmmmmm4• 4 years ago

Yeah, its sad but its still very hard to operate in most full professional senior roles using only Linux. MS Office and high quality video conferencing are the two that are show stoppers for me. Pure technical positions its probably more viable but I could not get away with the quality my staff using Linux only suffice with (misformatted documents, unable to open things, Zoom crashing regularly, etc).

buffet_overflow• 4 years ago

Ubuntu/Canonical aren't great in this space either.

12.10 had Amazon Search baked in: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...

17.04 and later have ads in the terminal greeting messages: https://news.softpedia.com/news/canonical-under-fire-for-put...

When even my healthcare websites contain Google tracking tags, it's getting harder to find _anything_ untainted by advertising companies, even after paying what I would consider a reasonable price for the service itself.

grecy• 4 years ago

How do we go about blocking these ads?

Sounds like we’ll need OS level uBO.

PS if you’re serious, I’m interested in your m1

drawingthesun4• 4 years ago

What I mean by the next few years is instead of upgrading eventually to the M3 Max version of my laptop I'll buy something not Apple. If Apple continue down this path and don't do a reversal on this move.

tracker19• 4 years ago

PiHole goes a long way.. for mobile, I've setup wireguard at home, which lets my phone use my PiHole for DNS... Was the most convenient self-host option for it... bonus, is it blocks ads for other devices too.

thr0wawayf006• 4 years ago

This is a sign of pure greed. The most profitable company wants even more profits and will damage its brand to do so.

This a feature of the system, not a bug. Companies have to keep growing because analysts and the money people decide that's how the system works.

lotsofpulp• 4 years ago

I thought 401k/IRA owners and beneficiaries of pension funds (including taxpayers who ultimately are responsible for the deferred compensation liabilities) also want market caps to keep growing.

Especially with an upside down population pyramid.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

this means I'll have to start migrating away from Apple over the next few years

I'm glad that you will, because unless a lot of people do this, it'll just prove to Apple that their customers will keep buying their products no matter what. Nine times out of ten, what Apple does is make decision that loyal users hate, but then those same people keep buying their products anyway, so they just stop listening to them at a certain point.

hsn915• 4 years ago

There's no alternative. All the alternatives are actually worse in terms of "greed" or whatever. Apple is the only one putting out quality hardware and software.

Actually even the software is somewhat suspect but it's still leagues ahead of the "competition".

zmmmmm4• 4 years ago

If its any consolation, my take on this is that by purchasing a Mac (and not an iPhone) and avoiding all apps from the App Store or anything that displays ads you actually signal to Apple that you value their open hardware and software ecosystem. I would dispense with the iPhone but not the Mac ... until the day they actually mandate the App Store on Macs.

northerdome• 4 years ago

I remember Steve Jobs explicitly forgoing ads for iCloud during his last keynote in 2011. So sad to see where Apple is today. https://youtu.be/KTrO2wUxh0Q?t=412

We build products that we want for ourselves, too, and we just don't want ads.

thr0wawayf006• 4 years ago

I have very mixed feelings about all of this. Obviously, it's disappointing news to see. But at the same time, it's hard to be surprised.

Let's be honest here, the internet runs on ads, full stop. I have no concrete data but if you were take an aggregate of tech workers whose salary is made either fully or partially on ad revenue either directly by their employer OR customers, it would have to be a significant percentage, right? I'm not gonna guess but it's gotta be significant. Hell, FAANG alone is tremendously ad-driven, and those are largely considered the most prestigious jobs in the industry.

If you've spent 10 years working in tech, what are the chances that you've never taken a dollar that was earned through an online ad? Maybe I'm overly cynical here and I'm no Apple cheerleader here, but we see this same pattern emerge over and over and over again. Companies have to grow or else. That's always been the game, how did we honestly think it would go any other way than this?

CydeWeys• 4 years ago

"Everyone does it" isn't a good excuse, particularly because it's not true. I've never worked on an ad-funded product in my entire career. Every product I've ever worked on is funded through customers paying for said product. So, to the extent that doing so makes you feel guilty, rather than excusing it based on others' complacency, simply stop.

thr0wawayf006• 4 years ago

Perhaps you haven't, but what are your customers doing? Even if you're not directly building ad products, you're likely not far removed from the businesses that are.

I'm not trying to make an excuses here, I'm simply pointing out that the entire foundation of the internet economy is built on the premise that what you do on the network can and should be tracked for profit, and to complain about one of the wealthiest companies on the planet finally in the game demonstrates naivety. Business does not care about morals, business cares about making money. That is how businesses are incentivized to behave. There's no legitimate counteracting force (sorry but individuals angrily venting frustration on an internet forum is not a threat to their business) to motivate Apple to behave any differently. They know that they just need to keep providing a better service than the alternatives and as long as the ads are slightly less crappy than Android, people aren't going to leave Apple.

Argue right or wrong all you want, but this is the reality.

Sporktacular2• 4 years ago

I'm ready to criticise Apple for this, but with all the relevant permissions turned off, is Apple actively tracking users? Is it just a bad as FB/Google?

Tijdreiziger4• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33075319

Sporktacular2• 4 years ago

It's an interesting link, but it refers to data sent when initialising and interacting with the phone. It's not the same thing as tracking (as in over time) individual users' purchasing habits for advertising.

happyopossum• 4 years ago

For years, Apple has been running ads for hundreds of third-party apps across social media and other platforms so that users would download apps from its store and not from developers’ websites

Errr, what? AFAIK Apple has never run ads for 3rd party apps outside of its own App Store , and what’s this no sets out downloading apps from a developer’s website? They all come from the App Store (note, the article is specifically talking about mobile app advertising at this point).

zmmmmm4• 4 years ago

So we start to see a glimmer of the real strategy - was it truly about protecting user's privacy or actually about monopolizing that privacy - establishing a moat around it so that only Apple could extract the value? The problem is these strategies are indistinguishable until Apple decides to start the value extraction phase. But now we can start to see it beginning we can guess which one is the real underlying story in play and it doesn't look good.

stereoradonc• 4 years ago

I remember Apple never communicating about its intentions clearly around its advertisement business. It was clear at the outset that its App Store business is lucrative (with all the details of its users). Will it kill the golden goose (aka consumers)? Most users have no real alternatives.

xuki• 4 years ago

Apple saw Facebook making bank from app installation ads and decided they want a piece of that. Nothing has changed for the consumers.

Paraesthetic• 4 years ago

I'm just waiting for the antitrust to start.

kmlben65• 4 years ago

so what? as long as there's no legaslation that "give data or leave" is explicitly prohibited it would happen with any social network service. everyone does that.

adguard is not epic games, nothing gonna happen.

and even more than that - cdns/antiddos gather more data that usually not directly available to social networks because clicks doesnt originate from tracked pages.

Apple’s ad business set to boom on the back of its own anti-tracking crackdown

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