Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

foundation.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 403 posts

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#21

Post by tobr »

zpeti wrote: post #5

I genuine question I don’t know the answer to, what’s better, seeing completely random ads that are questionably relevant, and wasting my attention and time (and meaning specialized small businesses can’t compete, ads are for things like detergent that everyone needs), or seeing ads that I might actually be interested at some point (some cool gadget that actually could be relevant to my life, sold by a specialist sma…

> We all know though that 90% will opt out or more. Without knowing they are making this very choice.

This doesn’t make sense. We’re going from a situation where users are completely blind to what’s going on, to one where they are informed and given a choice - and your framing is that somehow, this makes them less informed?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#22

Post by ThePhysicist »

In Europe, cross-app, cross-browser & cross-device tracking is on very thin ice legally under the GDPR, so I'm not surprised Apple finally curbs the use of "sticky" identifiers on their devices. Honestly, it's a bit shameful that a device that is marketed as the gold standard in privacy would even support such an identifier in the first place, it has literally no purpose beyond mining peoples' data.

Now that the third-party tracking ecosystem is slowly drying out I'm curious what advertisers will come up with to circumvent these new measures. Anyone here that works in the industry and wants to share some plans?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#23

Post by jb1991 »

hu3 wrote: post #20
Havoc wrote: post #6

To what extent are iPhones fingerprinted though? As we’ve seen with websites even no unique id is not necessarily game over

You can test your device browser fingerprint here: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org

One thing I've never understood about fingerprinting is that Firefox is supposed to prevent it by mangling the fingerprint data if you have those settings turned on. However whenever I visit sites like this, they all those the same thing that never changes, which means my fingerprint is quite stable and shared easily.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#24

Post by tonyedgecombe »

zpeti wrote: post #12

I wonder if close to the deadline somehow Apple and Facebook agree on some sort of revenue sharing like with google search on safari. In return for using idfa. Apples been so focused on revenue recently this could easily be just a shakedown of fb.

I doubt it, that would be the opposite of their public message on privacy. For all the recent complaints about Apple it does appear they really do believe what they are saying in public.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#26

Post by mehrdada »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #22

In Europe, cross-app, cross-browser & cross-device tracking is on very thin ice legally under the GDPR, so I'm not surprised Apple finally curbs the use of "sticky" identifiers on their devices. Honestly, it's a bit shameful that a device that is marketed as the gold standard in privacy would even support such an identifier in the first place, it has literally no purpose beyond mining peoples' data. Now that the thir…

I think it started as a compromise measure to hamper down on collection of other more persistent device identifiers (through AppStore regulation) so in a way it was a step in the right direction when introduced.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#28

Post by stinos »

robin_reala wrote: post #11
zpeti wrote: post #5

I genuine question I don’t know the answer to, what’s better, seeing completely random ads that are questionably relevant, and wasting my attention and time (and meaning specialized small businesses can’t compete, ads are for things like detergent that everyone needs), or seeing ads that I might actually be interested at some point (some cool gadget that actually could be relevant to my life, sold by a specialist sma…

You missed out the third option, which is ads relevent to the content they’re embedded in. This metaphor worked from 300 years ago through to 15 years ago with no problems.

Or the fourth one, no ads? I might be the minority but ads are wasted on me anyway (apart from the annoyance of seeing them).

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#29

Post by endymi0n »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #22

In Europe, cross-app, cross-browser & cross-device tracking is on very thin ice legally under the GDPR, so I'm not surprised Apple finally curbs the use of "sticky" identifiers on their devices. Honestly, it's a bit shameful that a device that is marketed as the gold standard in privacy would even support such an identifier in the first place, it has literally no purpose beyond mining peoples' data. Now that the thir…

Having been on both sides of the table, I would slightly disagree here. Fraud prevention for example will get an order of magnitude harder, plus this move will further skew the playing field towards FAANG who have the resources to puzzle the scraps back together for decent conversion tracking with the help of logins, IPs, SDKs with First Party IDs and a massive dose of machine learning.
Post reply on HN