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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

#141
I have a serious question. Obviously if one were to choose between an ad-free experience and an ad-full experience, one would choose ad-free. But, if ads were needed for monetization, wouldn't you choose personalized vs non-personalized? Personally, I would go with personalized because a non-personalized experienced usually has no relevancy and frankly it is inefficient use of money in this world. From there, it really comes down to companies invading your privacy, usually they make the wrong assumptions from it. Why can't there be a way for me to tell the ad-world what I'm in the market for and have them stop trying to snoop around and guess what I want? Most may say that making a Google search is enough to tell ads what I want but I think there are a ton of assumptions made there.

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

#142

This won't be the end of it. It's just one of the many battles. And iOS isn't for everyone. Yes it's great for protecting privacy but it's also extremely restrictive for the users. The fact that they don't even allow real third-party browsers is baffling in this day and age. I also can't use my Yubikey in OpenPGP mode which I really need for my password manager and SSH access. I know it supports U2F now but that's no…

Much like Flash, not allowing third-party browsers could be explained as a cynical control mechanism on Apple’s part... or as their not wanting to see tech support volume shoot up as Chrome and Firefox users complain their battery life is terrible. Or some combination of the two.

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

#143
This is the number one feature on iOS 14 that I cannot wait for. I am getting very tired of finding out that unrelated services know that I have used a specific app (like Facebook knows way too much).

Somewhat related (even though this is focused on Apps). I have noticed an uptick in websites that don't support safari, likely due to how they handle cookies. I hope this does not become super common (but I can't imagine many sites wanting to loose out on the iOS market)

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

#144
post #141

I have a serious question. Obviously if one were to choose between an ad-free experience and an ad-full experience, one would choose ad-free. But, if ads were needed for monetization, wouldn't you choose personalized vs non-personalized? Personally, I would go with personalized because a non-personalized experienced usually has no relevancy and frankly it is inefficient use of money in this world. From there, it real…

How would you imagine "tell them what you're in the market for" would work? I don't think it would work at scale; almost no user would take time to make a manually personalized ad profile instead of ... not doing that.

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

#145
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telephony can be handled by dumb phones

Telephony is dead. These days in many places cannot get a job or function without access to email or chat. In a lot of non-rich markets the smartphone is the cheapest option to gain access to these communication systems. We're not in 1998 anymore where people phone you.

> In a lot of non-rich markets the smartphone is the cheapest option to gain access to these communication systems.

I'd say that's nowadays true for richer parts of the world as well.

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

#146
post #141

I have a serious question. Obviously if one were to choose between an ad-free experience and an ad-full experience, one would choose ad-free. But, if ads were needed for monetization, wouldn't you choose personalized vs non-personalized? Personally, I would go with personalized because a non-personalized experienced usually has no relevancy and frankly it is inefficient use of money in this world. From there, it real…

I would choose personalized ads if ad companies would personally allow me the choice to select some predetermined categories of ads.

Personalized ads created by siphoning data off everything I do not so much.

Put it this way, to use an example, what kind of relationship would you prefer, someone who knows all the things about you because they asked or someone that comes up to you and is like 'yeah, I know you like this that and the other because i've been following you everywhere you go, listening to your phone calls and installed a RAT on your computer?

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

#148
post #141

I have a serious question. Obviously if one were to choose between an ad-free experience and an ad-full experience, one would choose ad-free. But, if ads were needed for monetization, wouldn't you choose personalized vs non-personalized? Personally, I would go with personalized because a non-personalized experienced usually has no relevancy and frankly it is inefficient use of money in this world. From there, it real…

Non-personalized all the way, and for many, many reasons. Two off the top of my head: 1) You already bought the product, and now you see ads for it for the next x weeks; 2) You may not want other people (like maybe a spouse) to know you were browsing for something (like a gift, or perhaps even something untoward).

On the second point, my spouse and I, each of us on our own devices, one of us can search for something, browse a website, and then the other one will start to see the ads for such in their Instagram feed (and for the record, it is usually me seeing the things my spouse is looking for). It is completely insidious and it needs to stop!

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic, but Google's monopoly was already well in abuse when Windows Phone was around, and being used to block Google's competitors. Gmail required you enable "less secure apps" to let a Windows Phone connect to it and they continually blocked Windows Phone from having any access to YouTube as well. Even when Microsoft invested their own development resources in building support for Google's already monopoly-sca…

> Gmail required you enable "less secure apps" to let a Windows Phone connect to it Wait, what was that about? Microsoft was incapable of building a Windows Phone email client that used OAUTH?

I believe Gmail switched at that time to pushing you to use effectively a Gmail-proprietary method to authorize access to a Gmail account. Nobody else was doing it at the time, I think official OAuth scopes actually came later.

And bear in mind, OAuth to authorize mail access is weird. Generally speaking, mail clients use IMAP or POP3 and SMTP. One of the more popular open source Android mail clients, K-9 mail, still doesn't support it: https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/655

But the biggest issue is that, like the "unknown sources" checkbox in Android, Google uses scare tactics to discourage non-Google-proprietary apps and protocols. Use Google apps on Google devices only, otherwise you'll have to authorize "less secure" things.

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

#150

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…

> 2. Most Apple users use google maps.

The stats I've seen don't back this up. Maybe in some countries? Certainly not "Most" overall, and Google doesn't even have a third of iOS users in the US.

> Apple need to release a good search/maps product before complaining.

Duck Duck Go does just fine 99% of the time. Apple Maps likewise in most regions at this point. Google Search has gotten worse over the years as they've chased revenue while its competitors (DDG primarily) have gotten better. Likewise, Apple Maps have improved at a much faster pace over the past few years and closed the gap. Where Apple Maps used to lag quite a bit, they are now extremely close in functionality. A lot of people prefer the Apple Maps interface.

> If they are honest then they can remove the default search engine from Google to DDG or whatever.

While this is a ding against Apple's privacy policy, it isn't a great argument when you consider the worst "Privacy issue" Apple has is the fact that in one place they touch Google by default. If Google is bad for privacy as you suggest here, then by default, having a platform which only touches Google in one easily swappable place is vastly better than a platform that is neck deep in Google's anti-privacy Shit. You can't have it both ways here.

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