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

101–110 of 403 posts

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#101

Post by tenacious_tuna »

stefan_ wrote: post #79
endymi0n wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fraud prevention? What exactly are you paying the Apple cut for?

I think they mean app-side: determining if a user is a bot or not gets harder when you can't tie that user to the datamine'd indicators of their humanity.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#102

Post by ratherbefuddled »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #39
endymi0n wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if it would be profitable for Visa/Mastercard/Discover/AmEx to sell a verification service where people can authenticate with a $0.01 authorization or approval amount. Obviously, it wouldn't work with gift cards or other accounts not tied to a real person.

The answer to card fraud is called Strong Customer Authentication and it's a requirement under PSD2. It requires payment service providers to obtain a second factor for authentication. This might be an online banking login and approval, device data capture or an SMS one time code. How is up to the card provider.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#103

Post by simonh »

littlestymaar wrote: post #82
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…

> shameful that a device that is marketed as the gold standard in privacy It's being marketed this way, that's it. It doesn't mean Apple care about privacy, and they prove every once in a while that they don't respect anyone's privacy at all. They spy on their users as much as anyone else (and overall, they have access to much more information than everybody else except Google). All they want to do is prevent third-p…

They only share data with partners at the direction of users and only to provide specific services, and use for marketing is banned. That privacy policy?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#106

Post by intricatedetail »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #24
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.

The why is it opt-out?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#107

Post by cafebabbe »

eivarv wrote: post #94
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…

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. Probably fingerprinting – not to mention the fact that ad-people are lobbying both legislators (including the EU) and standards bodies (like W3C)... and in the latter case they're also directly contributing to the standards.

Most adtech players are legit and don't rely on such practices, illegal in many countries.

Of course some smaller one will still try to do it, don't get me wrong.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#108

Post by tleb_ »

robin_reala wrote: post #96
notRobot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They absolutely do, and it sucks that there's no way to view it or request deletion.

Sure there is. If they’re holding personal data on you, they legally have to provide it (and optionally delete it) when issued with a Subject Access Request under GDPR.

I have tried requesting personal data from one company. They quickly said they didn't have anything associated with me; I believe it's just identified by an id that I don't know and that isn't linked directly to myself.

I wouldn't be surprised if they did not link email addresses (and other user-accessible identifiers such as a phone number) anymore just to avoid having to give you your data if you request it.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#109

Post by stinos »

CubsFan1060 wrote: post #68
stinos wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I think this is an interesting option. However, people who write newspaper articles, etc.. still need to get paid. I think we all say "I'd like to be able to pay just for the articles I want to read", but just like a la carte TV, I think we'd find out that is much more expensive than we know. My theory is that, collectively, our privacy and attention is worth far more to other people that to us. Making up numbers, a…

people who write newspaper articles, etc.. still need to get paid

They sure do. But seeing the majority out there does want to see ads or doesn't care about seing them, it's not like they won't get paid at all. And indeed that majority won't pay for content but there are others who do, and it's not impossible to make a living out of it: there are proper independent online-only news channels out there with no ads and paid by their subscribers (plus a bunch of government subsidies usually).

just like a la carte TV, I think we'd find out that is much more expensive than we know.

Assuming you mean Netflix and the likes: that is actually way cheaper now than what 'a la carte' used to be for me. 20 years ago when I wanted to choose what I looked at on a screen, I'd be looking at DVD rental because there wasn't much of an alternative here. Or maybe even not an alternative at all, don't remember exactly, but there was just cable TV and apart from standard channels you could get some extra (a porn channel, a sports channel), but that's still not 'a la carte'. Anyway: I easily paid twice what Netflix costs me now per month, every week.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#110

Post by confiq »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #95
littlestymaar wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shameful that a device that is marketed as the gold standard in privacy It's being marketed this way, that's it. It doesn't mean Apple care about privacy, and they prove every once in a while that they don't respect anyone's privacy at all. They spy on their users as much as anyone else (and overall, they have access to much more information than everybody else except Google). All they want to do is prevent third-p…

> "they don't respect anyone's privacy at all". This is so dishonest. Please familiarise yourself with Apple's history in consumer privacy and what they've done so far, including inadvertently forcing others to follow (looking at you Google). https://youtu.be/08IC1AZTxls?t=2941

> https://youtu.be/08IC1AZTxls?t=2941

Yes, apple talking about apple... Lets see the facts, here mozilla is asking apple to commit what apple is advocating for all these years.

> "In 2019, Mozilla called on Apple to increase user privacy by automatically resetting the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) on iPhones."

It's 2021 very soon

Post reply on HN