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Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

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Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#101

Post by saagarjha »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #84
gruez wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canvas fingerprints are probably the same between other iphones of the same model and ios version. So unless you use a rare model and/or rare ios version, there's probably at least a few dozen people with the same fingerprint/ip range combination as you.

My understanding—only because another HN commenter told me as much, many months back—was that even the exact same model hardware would return different canvas fingerprints due to silicon differences. Not true?

That sounds unlikely. I'm sure there is some variation due to differences in OSes and GPUs, but there are surely enough iPhones with each to make it nothing more than supplementary entropy.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#102

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #96
_bxg1 wrote: post #37

Let us not forget that Apple isn't doing this out of altruism, but 50% because it hurts their competitors and 50% because it makes their users happy. That said, being 50% motivated by making their users happy is more than can be said about Google or Facebook. Edit: To be clear, I am an Apple customer and it's mainly on privacy grounds. I just like to keep realistic expectations about their present and future behavior…

At an Apple all-hands around 2005, an employee asked Steve why they made the iPod, and he said "because we love music." And the answer was so simple and so earnest, that you just knew it was true. Apple, for better or for worse, makes products based on what its executives personally want to use. That's not the only consideration, but it's unusually salient compared to other companies. My guess is that Apple works to…

> My guess is that Apple works to limit ad tracking because its executives personally do not want to be tracked

I'm going to guess that their CEO, growing up gay in 1960s Alabama, has a strong connection with the human need for privacy.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#103

Post by thanhhaimai »

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #96
_bxg1 wrote: post #37

Let us not forget that Apple isn't doing this out of altruism, but 50% because it hurts their competitors and 50% because it makes their users happy. That said, being 50% motivated by making their users happy is more than can be said about Google or Facebook. Edit: To be clear, I am an Apple customer and it's mainly on privacy grounds. I just like to keep realistic expectations about their present and future behavior…

At an Apple all-hands around 2005, an employee asked Steve why they made the iPod, and he said "because we love music." And the answer was so simple and so earnest, that you just knew it was true. Apple, for better or for worse, makes products based on what its executives personally want to use. That's not the only consideration, but it's unusually salient compared to other companies. My guess is that Apple works to…

Apple under Steve Jobs 2005 and Apple under Tim Cook now are different beasts. Steve would go crazy at the executives releasing all the buggy/unpolished products Apple released recently. Imagine the Macbook keyboard or the Touchbar being released under Steve.

iPod was a great product. But time has changed, and I would be cautious in extrapolating that experience to Apple today. I can't imagine Apple executives saying "We change the keyboard because we love typing".

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#104

Post by jefftk »

manigandham wrote: post #27
grumblez wrote: post #3

Breaking News: Advertisers concerned feature is working as advertised.

Advertisers don't care and have never worried about this. It's the adtech supply chain, and the publishers who get paid that worry about the revenue and targeting.

Depends on the advertiser! Big brand who mostly wants to reach everyone in a geographic area? Targeting doesn't matter. Retailer that wants to bring someone back in to complete a purchase? Without targeting they won't buy ads at all.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google)

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#105

Post by saagarjha »

alwillis wrote: post #78
Zanni wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like targeted ads, but I want them targeted to the content I'm consuming, not me personally. If I'm reading a blog or article on rock climbing, then, yeah, show me ads for all the gear. I'm interested. But don't show me an ad for an Instant Pot because I googled it last week. That's creepy.

That’s how Brave works—using zero-knowledge proofs, it uses your browsing history to inform its opt-in ad network on what ads should be shown to you. That info doesn’t leave your device. And if you opt-in, you get paid using their cryptocurrency Basic Attention Token: https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/13/20962085/brave-beta-1-0-...

Why does it need my entire browsing history? The example given above didn't ask for that.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#106

Post by gruez »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #84
gruez wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canvas fingerprints are probably the same between other iphones of the same model and ios version. So unless you use a rare model and/or rare ios version, there's probably at least a few dozen people with the same fingerprint/ip range combination as you.

My understanding—only because another HN commenter told me as much, many months back—was that even the exact same model hardware would return different canvas fingerprints due to silicon differences. Not true?

That seems implausible unless there's analog logic involved. With digital logic a bit is either a 1 or a 0, and any "variations" (eg. a 0 where it was supposed to be a 1) would be considered flaws as they can dramatically skew the end result (eg. the MSB of an integer being flipped, or one of the bits in the exponent of a float). As far as I know, there aren't any analog logic involved in a rasterization pipeline.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#107

Post by jefftk »

dmitrygr wrote: post #86
manigandham wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demand for highly-targeted users is what drives up prices. Since Safari users all look the same now and can't be highly targeted, they have lost that high-end demand and prices have fallen to generic display rates.

I would disagree. "People who can afford Apple gadgets" is a desirable high-income audience. I wouldn't be surprised if it was broken out as a special category for purchase by FB and GOOG soon.

Real-time bid requests generally already contain the UA, often partially redacted. So bidders can do this already.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google)

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#108

Post by princekolt »

summerlight wrote: post #79
saagarjha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engineers at Apple are well aware of the games that adtech plays.

Do you work for/with Apple regard to this issue? I followed discussions with WebKit devs and had an impression that they don't really care about the ecosystem but only Apple users. It seems they had never reached out to publishers/advertisers in the design phase of ITP. Later, they prepared a crappy conversion tracking mechanism to compensate the loss, but this design also had never involved the ecosystem.

> I followed discussions with WebKit devs and had an impression that they don't really care about the ecosystem but only Apple users.

Then all is good.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#109

Post by buboard »

criddell wrote: post #91
buboard wrote: post #76

Is apple offering an alternative for blogs to make money or should they have cake instead? Brave browser does it better than apple. I can already see webmasters sending users to download brave instead of safari Apple doesn't care about the web (why should they?). Their iAds thing went nowhere. (please enlighten me if apple is offering an alternative. i d love to use it)

There's another way to think about this. Privacy is a human right. If your business model is built on violating human rights at scale then I'm not going to have a lot of sympathy for you if technology kills your business. The lesson from Apple is build something great, something that people love, and they will pay you for it.

Agreed about privacy. So how is apple helping websites get paid?

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#110

Post by repsilat »

munchbunny wrote: post #59
turdnagel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused by this. If Safari users are harder to target, and demand for targeting Safari users hasn’t changed, shouldn’t the price go up?

In theory a "user" is more valuable the more you know about them because the extra info lets you better target them for higher response rates. Better privacy means you know less about the user, meaning you are less likely to bid high for that user's eyeballs, meaning the user is worth less ad spend. The actual story is a little more nuanced: when you target an ad, you are usually bidding for users in an auction. You'…

There's also a countervailing force, depending on the market. First an example that supports what everyone is talking about:

* User X loves cola

Pepsi and Coke both bid more to serve their cola subscription services or whatever. Ad price goes up. Now add more data:

* User is a Coca Cola fanatic.

Even though this is the same user, the ad price goes down, because Pepsi doesn't want to bid.

Now add another Pepsi fanatic for symmetry, and you can see how "more data about users for better targetting" can in some cases reduce auction prices (while of course still increasing advertiser value.)

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