Live data from Hacker News

New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads

medium.com

171–180 of 385 posts

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

#171
post #37

I wish Apple would kill Medium

Before that, AMP

They're doing something. Safari has automatically converted AMP links back to their original pages since iOS 11. It could stand to be a system-wide behavior for my own usage, but it'd be a little intrusive if you actually did want to share an AMP link for a specific reason if it automatically altered your clipboard or text messages.

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

#173
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 -- I want to give up as little personal data as possible. Even if they claim that it's anonymous, with enough browsing data and other signals (IP, browser fingerprinting, etc), it eventually becomes possible to identify you.

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

#174
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

... don't they put ads in their operating system? But Google are the bad guys, ok

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

#175
post #162
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…

If personalized ads meant ads that were actually good recommendations for products I could be interested in and would be grateful to be informed about the existence of - maybe. The reality of it is that personalized ads are mostly just ads from those with the money and demographics info to stalk me around the internet - e.g. webshops running after me, believing that I abandoned my shopping cart simply because I got d…

You nailed it. I've had personalized ads disabled for years, and a few years back I switched it back on to see if it's any better.

At the time I was shopping for a Pebble smartwatch and kept checking the site if it's on sale, because Pebble had a tendency to do short-time discounts without actually announcing them. After a few times, almost every Google ad was for "Pebble Smartwatch". It not only wasn't useful, it was annoying.

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

#176
Apple is a bit naive. How will they block adtech companies fingerprinting TF out of users?

There's too much money on the plate. Companies such as Adjust have fingerprinting tech and announced this as one option against Apple's move. All GDPR compliant because they don't need to get user's approval but their customers need to. And do their customers ask for approval before fingerprinting? Isn't the approval not often mandatory for using the app? Or somewhere buried deep in the Privacy Statement and given afterwards? And if customers just fingerprinted without approval how would Apple ever find out that Appsflyer or Adjust just were used to fingerprint and to track you until you get your next iPhone?

If Apple was serious about privacy they would have detected and banned anyone using fingerprint SDKs. As sad this sounds for most users: Adtech won't die, Apple will rather make fingerprinting tech even stronger.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like most of the personalized ad systems haven't figured out that if I just bought an item the last thing I need ads for is more of that item (or different brand/models of the same thing). If it kept track that you'd bought a bike and a headlight & rack but hadn't bought saddlebags, and then showed ads for saddlebags until you bought a set they'd be somewhat useful. Instead you just get ads for more bikes and headlights & racks like you're some sort of deranged bike collector.

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

#178
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…

Apart from the privacy aspect already mentioned, I'd choose non-personalized to minimize their effectiveness.

Inherently ads are made to manipulate your behavior. I'd choose being manipulated the least possible.

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

#179
post #73

In a previous life I worked in ad-tech, and I don't think it's as black and white as the OP makes it out to be. I think that's actually a Bad Thing™️ as this industry needs to profoundly change or die. This isn't a new, unexpected thing for sell or demand side ad-tech platforms, they've seen the death of IDFA coming for a few years. The reality is that this will likely stop more 'above board' players (a good thing) b…

Tracking based advertising hasn't delivered on its promises. As a user, we're seeing more advertising than ever, and it turns out that seeing advertising for a thing which you shopped for and bought last week just isn't any better than seeing advertising that relates to the article I'm reading at the time. I'm also very skeptical that tracking based advertising actually works better for publishes either. Since the number of companies with good tracking data is so limited, the tracking companies (primarily Facebook & Google) have a near monopoly on user data and use that to extract more money out of advertisers, but the publishers see a decreasing fraction of that amount.

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

#180
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 prefer "non-personalised" - simply because "personalised" means that people and companies I know nothing about know lots about me.
Post reply on HN