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New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads

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Re: New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads

#31
post #18
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These conversations are always so one-sided on HN. Not only is 're-targeting' immensely useful, it absolutely increases conversions. Targeting in general helps quite a lot. Ad targeting is the opposite of evil, it actually increases relevance by a significant degree, and increases market efficiency, wherein surpluses go to both sides. There's a huge market for products and services out there and it's getting harder t…

Unless, you know, by buying ads on snowboarding gear focused sites, as the industry has done for decades in the print industry.

This is the thing that “ad tech” people never want to acknowledge (because it makes their “secret sauce” a lot less valuable).

Not only would there be zero tracking required to show content-relevant ads, there’s zero creep factor. No one questions seeing an ad for a new blender or an online grocer when looking at a recipe site, there’s no question why you’re seeing those ads.

Seeing ads about something very specific that you looked for a few days ago, on completely unrelated sites is the epitome of creepy.

Re: New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads

#32
post #2

At long last! And now I'll know why I pay more for an iPhone.

You can always opt out ad tracking in iPhone, even today, by using Limit Ad Tracking option in Settings.

Yes you can do that in iOS 13 but very few people are tech savvy to know that. With iOS 14, the dialog would be in front of you as you the app. High chance everyone would opt out

Re: New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads

#33

To anyone that took GDPR seriously and not as a reason to shove another popup in everybody's face this doesn't come as a surprise It will be even better when advertisers (that is, the ones that pay for ads, not the ad networks) realize that "over tracking" and retargeting are just ways of parting them with their money but doesn't increase conversions. You have basic info about your user, you don't need to track them…

realize that over tracking and retargeting are just ways of parting them with their money but doesn't increase conversions.

This is naive. There are plenty of real world examples of generic advertising "stock," without targeting... it's sold at a huge discount. It is targeting that gives FB ads value.

Without targetting or a working CPA system, FB ads would be as useless as the many available content advertising networks.

Thinking of online advertisers as dumb is a dangerous error. There are enough sophisticated advertisers in the market to make the online ad market very rational. Thinking of it as dumb advertisers that will eventually come around is a fallacy... a dangerous one.

This problem is real. Very large parts of the online economy are reliant on targeting. That's the real problem we're facing.

Re: New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads

#34
post #8

To anyone that took GDPR seriously and not as a reason to shove another popup in everybody's face this doesn't come as a surprise It will be even better when advertisers (that is, the ones that pay for ads, not the ad networks) realize that "over tracking" and retargeting are just ways of parting them with their money but doesn't increase conversions. You have basic info about your user, you don't need to track them…

These conversations are always so one-sided on HN. Not only is 're-targeting' immensely useful, it absolutely increases conversions. Targeting in general helps quite a lot. Ad targeting is the opposite of evil, it actually increases relevance by a significant degree, and increases market efficiency, wherein surpluses go to both sides. There's a huge market for products and services out there and it's getting harder t…

The pro-targeting argument always seems to forget the middle-ground of context-based ads.

This new snowboard company can advertise on snowboard-related websites, on snowboard-related google search

The magic "IA assisted silver bullet retargeting" that this snowboard company will be sold by yet another VC-founded adtech company almost always amount to "Oh this guy just bought a new snowboard, he probably needs another one right now, let's pay a mountain of cash to push him to buy another one on every website he visit for a week"

Re: New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads

#35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still run a system wide ad and tracking blocker on android.

Can you elaborate on your practice how you do it?

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/ https://blokada.org/

Re: New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads

#36

Maybe the open source promise of Android was indeed a lie. To me this industry has no value to society at all. Not a fan of Apple, but they seem to be serious about privacy showing other companies how it is done. Microsoft could have really established itself as an alternative to Google on the same front, but they utterly failed by mirroring the worst aspects of the disastrous landscape we see on mobile devices. I ho…

At the end of the day, 1. Apple users are the ones that cannot browse without adblocker. Safari is not as good as ublock-origin 2. Most Apple users use google maps. > Not a fan of Apple, but they seem to be serious about privacy If they are honest then they can remove the default search engine from Google to DDG or whatever. They get billions from Google for default search engine. https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/1/21…

I have been using adblockers[1,2] on mobile as well as desktop safari for quite some time now.

1. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1030595027 2. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quiet-content-blocker/id144152...

Re: New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads

#39
post #7

I've been using the full desktop version of the ublock origin plugin on firefox mobile for quite some time, and it's dramatically improved my mobile experience.

This plugin works only in android, right? Tried to install it on my iPhone but it said it’s not compatible with my browser although i have Firefox installed.

Re: New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads

#40

But doesn't this privacy setting get nullified anyway by companies tracking your device at the cellular network level? I'm not too familiar with it, but regardless of whether you accept cookies, etc., they are able to ID you through your carrier anyway?

> tracking your device at the cellular network level I'm not aware of this happening at a large scale outside of the networks themselves, do you have any references for this?

I believe Verizon was caught inserting super-cookies with an ad tracking identifier. But that method was much easier back when the majority of the web was just http.
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