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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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhones have longevity. The iPhone 5s from September 2013 has been receiving regular security updates, the latest being iOS 12.4.8 on Wednesday. It was the first 64-bit phone, and first iPhone (first phone?) with a Secure Enclave. They can be had for <$100 in good condition.

BTW, every one says this - but nobody uses it like a daily driver. Yes, it will work as a spare - with just one app - like whatsapp - but for many poor - they need 1. Uber or Ola 2. Facebook or WhatsApp 3. linkedin to whatever local app 4. youtube Why dont you try to use it for a week with all your existing apps? If it works as good - why would anyone buy newer?

My iPhone 6 is my daily driver.

You should try using it before telling people it doesn’t work.

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

#92
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that the ad industry has taken it too far, I also disagree with your statement. Because users pay for free apps with their data, Apple isn't asking them "do you want to pay $ 0.99 or accept ad tracking?" Apple asks "Do you want to use this app without ad tracking" of course the user will choose to disable ad tracking because there is no downside to them. But if all users do that it will be the end of a…

The downside is not having personalized ads. They will still see ads. I'm vehemently against invasive tracking for personalized ads, but more than happy to see clearly marked, clean context-based ads.

Most people don’t really care for the stupid ‘I bought a bike so next month I will be bombarded with bike ads’ context based ads because that is both annoyingly useless and a constant reminder an invisible spy is watching over their shoulder.

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

#93
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, Android itself doesn't have to be horrible, but most distributions are full of adware. Wouldn't want to minimize the work going into the core of the OS, I meant the critique to be directed against Android + gapps. I love Lineage, but you are dependent on other maintainers for your device or you have serious work ahead of you. It is quite simple to install for experienced users, but way too complicated for most…

How about the elephant in the room? Radio firmwares. It is meaningless if you install firewalls, if you compile android on your own, only to have to turn around and use proprietary, closed source libs to access proprotary, closed source radio firmwares. Radio firmwares which often have full RAM access, parallel CPU control, GPS and full hardware access, and make intel's management engine, and closed source bioses loo…

When I last deep dived to the cellular hardware, Radio always had its sealed off processor with a postbox firmware upload port. After initializing it, you left it alone and just used the comm-ports to talk with it.

As far as I understand, in the name of efficiency and compactness, they are on the same silicon now.

Are they still a different CPU core or just run on the main processor block?

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

#94
post #20

If an entire industry dies because users were given an explicit upfront choice, because of one popup like the article says, then it wasn’t a productive industry. We’ll see what really happens.

What will really happen is ads get more sinister and hidden. Product placements in movies will seem childish in comparison. Astro-turfing is already huge on Reddit, it will spread to all parts of media now, blurring the lines between genuine opinions and forced narrative. Ads, marketing and branding are integral part of capitalism, it's never going to go away from consumption focused societies.

That would only mean context based ads are the way to go and spying on people to create ever more intricate profiles is not necessary.

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

#95

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?

Yeah, I think you are right. Apps don't need access to GPS, internet or bluetooth to know your location. They can just log what cell tower you are connected to, and use that information to "estimate" your location every time you switch cell towers. I think that method even works in flight mode, as your phone is still listening for cell towers, but just not responding. But I think this info is limited to the OS, and c…

Apps can’t ‘just log what cell tower you’re connected to’ because they have no access to that information.

There’s no valid reason an app would need that kind of information so it’s just completely unavailable on iPhones and requires special privileges on Android.

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

#96
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the elephant in the room? Radio firmwares. It is meaningless if you install firewalls, if you compile android on your own, only to have to turn around and use proprietary, closed source libs to access proprotary, closed source radio firmwares. Radio firmwares which often have full RAM access, parallel CPU control, GPS and full hardware access, and make intel's management engine, and closed source bioses loo…

When I last deep dived to the cellular hardware, Radio always had its sealed off processor with a postbox firmware upload port. After initializing it, you left it alone and just used the comm-ports to talk with it. As far as I understand, in the name of efficiency and compactness, they are on the same silicon now. Are they still a different CPU core or just run on the main processor block?

The baseband is essentially ring -1, it has its own processor but it has access to the main memory, and often also the cache lines.

Wether or not all of the main memory is and even can be mapped I don’t know, I have no idea what CPU each baseband is running however in some designs it has direct access to the SoC MMU which means it could dump the entire memory over the wire to anyone.

The interfaces with the BB are also “virtual” this is done for various reasons including ease of integration with various operating systems so even if you on the OS level talk to it via the legacy serial COM interface using AT commands the hardware itself doesn’t actually have an isolated COM interface (that could be turned off) the SoC just emulates it.

Of SoC basebands have USB/Serial interfaces directly which could potentially be isolated and turned off when the BB isn’t in use, however the cost of that is usually very poor performance and limited capabilities at which point you might as well carry a portable cellular hotspot which you can physically turn off when you don’t need data or voice.

Also keep in mind that taking out the SIM card doesn’t prevent the baseband from talking to towers, it can still technically make calls the towers just usually don’t allow anyone to register without a subscriber ID which is stored on the SIM, and with eSIM you basically even lose the ability to control that.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhones have longevity. The iPhone 5s from September 2013 has been receiving regular security updates, the latest being iOS 12.4.8 on Wednesday. It was the first 64-bit phone, and first iPhone (first phone?) with a Secure Enclave. They can be had for <$100 in good condition.

BTW, every one says this - but nobody uses it like a daily driver. Yes, it will work as a spare - with just one app - like whatsapp - but for many poor - they need 1. Uber or Ola 2. Facebook or WhatsApp 3. linkedin to whatever local app 4. youtube Why dont you try to use it for a week with all your existing apps? If it works as good - why would anyone buy newer?

None of these apps are essential even in the developed world where anyone who uses Uber regularly can probably afford a newer iPhone, these apps also run just fine on a 5s/6 which can be found for under $150 without much issues.

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will really happen is ads get more sinister and hidden. Product placements in movies will seem childish in comparison. Astro-turfing is already huge on Reddit, it will spread to all parts of media now, blurring the lines between genuine opinions and forced narrative. Ads, marketing and branding are integral part of capitalism, it's never going to go away from consumption focused societies.

That would only mean context based ads are the way to go and spying on people to create ever more intricate profiles is not necessary.

I personally prefer personalized and explicit ads over vague and hidden inside content ads, the latter seems very manipulative to me.

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

#99
post #78

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…

Microsoft already tried, very hard even. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogled Problem is nobody likes Microsoft, its not sexy. Just look at all the dislikes under those videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI1ominSL_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63u-RG-31B0

Hardly anybody outside of the tech bubble saw those videos. What happened there is a brigade of haters came along and down voted them. Probably a lot of Mozilla/Google supporters.

There are plenty of Microsoft videos with mostly upvotes. Try a video about the Xbox.

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

#100
post #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.

Try BlockBear for Safari on iOS.
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