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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

#131

Post by hyperbovine »

chrisseaton wrote: post #42
_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…

> Apple isn't doing this out of altruism Of course not - who said they were?

Agree -- total red herring. And I'm much happier that Apple has a financial incentive to keep this up. "Corporate altruism" has a tendency to go poof! the instant it conflicts with the bottom line.

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

#132

Post by ceejayoz »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #103
ridiculous_fish wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Imagine the Macbook keyboard or the Touchbar being released under Steve.

Imagine the G4 cube, or the puck mouse, or the Motorola ROKR.

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

#133

Post by macintux »

ceejayoz wrote: post #132
thanhhaimai wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Imagine the Macbook keyboard or the Touchbar being released under Steve. Imagine the G4 cube, or the puck mouse, or the Motorola ROKR.

Watching video of Steve introducing the ROKR makes it very clear he was...underenthused.

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

#134

Post by surround »

jedberg wrote: post #13
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5

How has this been so effective, when Panopticlick still says my Safari browser has "a nearly-unique fingerprint"? (And based on what I've read from other users's experience, this is normal.)

When you load Panopticlick, you'll notice it takes a minute or so to fingerprint you. That's a pretty long time and a lot of CPU. Re/Targeted ads require the decision to be made in milliseconds, including network transit time. They just don't have the time to fingerprint you on every request. They could do it once, but then they are back to the problem of having to set a cookie to keep track of you after that.

>When you load Panopticlick, you'll notice it takes a minute or so to fingerprint you.

No, it takes a minute because it’s trying to load trackers in order to test your adblocker. Fingerprinting itself takes only a moment. Try TorZillaPrint: the results are instantaneous.

https://ghacksuserjs.github.io/TorZillaPrint/TorZillaPrint.h...

In practice, good content blockers (i.e. uBlock Origin) block most fingerprinting scripts. I don’t know whether Safari’s includes this.

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

#135

Post by macintux »

buboard wrote: post #109
criddell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They keep trying with Apple News & similar products, but frankly people aren't (for the most part) willing to pay for content they're used to getting for free. See the mobile app marketplace, e.g.

I really hoped Apple would get into micropayments for online content a long time ago, but I haven't even glanced at what Apple News+ entails, so perhaps I'm a hypocrite.

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

#136

Post by Zak »

manigandham wrote: post #31
signal11 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get targeted ads. They’re quite dumb. If I look at product X, ads for product X follow me around the web, which isn’t that useful because I’ve already done my research and am not quite ready to hit “buy” no matter how many ads you show. Ads for similar products I might be interested in, but I’ve not seen too many of those served up by these ad networks. Untargeted ads at least might show me something new and…

That's not how they work. What you're seeing is the issue with not having data shared between networks and the resulting poor targeting. Retargeting has better results than any other type of targeting but unfortunately there's a gap between the ecommerce systems knowing you bought something and the ad networks used to market those ads. It's easy to drop a pixel and say you looked at a product, but it's much harder to…

Amazon has been repeatedly showing me office chair casters as a suggestion after I bought a set on Amazon.

Despite having much better information on things I actually spend money on than the average ad network (all my devices have adblockers), Amazon isn't clever enough to figure out that I'm probably done with that product category for years.

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

#138

Post by kccqzy »

> For instance, a publisher can track what people do on their own site—just not on other sites. So they can sell targeted ads based on the information they have.

This is what I believe is fair. Unfortunately we are seeing the difference between first-party cookies and third-party cookies gradually vanish. Publishers are already encouraged by ad tech companies to set up CNAME records so that a subdomain on a publisher site points to an ad-tech company domain.

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

#139

Post by jayd16 »

_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…

>That said, being 50% motivated by making their users happy is more than can be said about Google or Facebook.

They all have products to sell to users so in that sense they all have to strive to make those users happy. Some business strategies use lock in to keep consumers but unless you want to wage that accusation against one of these three companies it seems like they should all be equally motivated by consumer happiness.

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

#140

Post by surround »

RandallBrown wrote: post #45
Someone wrote: post #8

Does this cover iOS apps, too? If so, that could mean fewer iOS apps will get written. If not, is that only on technical grounds (it may be easier to hide what data apps send out) or (also) because it is good for Apple if one has to write an iOS apps to better track users?

iOS apps have an advertising identifier that can be reset by the user. There are of course other ways to fingerprint the devices, but they will get your app removed from the App Store if you're using them for advertising. (If you're caught of course.)

Apple is “cracking down” on ad targeting, while simultaneously helping iOS apps track and target users through a unique advertising ID.
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