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Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

foundation.mozilla.org

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Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#151

Post by tleb_ »

hcurtiss wrote: post #121
niea_11 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see a list of apps that share you activity with facebook here (even if you didn't install any facebook app on your phone or didn't use facebook login feature) : https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/activity_list (click "Manage Your Off-Facebook Activity" on the right if you're on desktop)

Wow. I had no idea this existed. In my case, over 600 apps and services that I had no idea were connecting to Facebook. Is there no way to turn this off?

There is a "Clear history" button, but it does not delete the data. Here is the message you see once clicked:

Clear your off-Facebook activity from your account?

Here are some things to know:

- Your activity history will be disconnected from your account. This does not currently include Oculus activity. We'll continue to receive your activity from the businesses and organisations that you visit in the future.

- Clearing your history may log you out of XXX and YYY other apps and websites. If this happens, you can still use Facebook to log back in.

- You'll still see the same number of ads. Your ad preferences and actions that you take on Facebook will be used to show you relevant ads.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#152

Post by perryizgr8 »

Contax wrote: post #135
Contax wrote: post #80

The irony. The article's page loads content from various third-parties, including, you know, Google. Walk the talk and all that Mozilla.

I don't get the downvotes. Did I insult or offend any Mozilla fans (which I am one BTW, even after some questionable decisions of late)? Am I wrong saying it's ironic to connect to Google -possibly the largest tracking company by far seeing they are present in almost every website out there- in an article praising anti-tracking measures? Is it bad to tell Mozilla to be more consistent with their message and actions?…

You're right. Firefox is basically an undercover agent for Google at this point. They are obsessively targeting FB for practices that Google is probably doing at a much greater scale.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#153

Post by eznzt »

endymi0n wrote: post #29
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.

I don't know why you use a big word such as "fraud" when you mean "we want to be able to know which accounts are owned by the same person".

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#154

Post by rahoulb »

Cipater wrote: post #59
wil421 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think iPhone users care if it’s harder for Facebook and the like to catch fraud?

I'll flip this one back to you in the same spirit. Do you think iPhone users care that Apple is implementing anti-tracking?

The number of times I've had non-tech people complain about how their phone is listening to them and then showing them adverts about stuff they've been talking about has gone through the roof in the last 18 months (generally as soon as I mention that I work with computers).

It's becoming a real concern for normal people - they don't understand what it is or how it works but they really don't like it.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#155

Post by exhilaration »

qz2 wrote: post #70
romanovcode wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is happy as long as google.com is the default search for Safari.

I reckon Apple are working on a solution there...

And give up $8-$12 billion of pure profit? https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-search-deal-doj...

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#156

Post by caddywompus »

LC_ALL wrote: post #50

Say what you want about Apple but they are by far the most privacy focused big company. Their income is from selling physical devices. Typical megacorps in 2020 are leveraging economies of scale to sell their users' attention. Apple has a unique value add in that when their users benefit they benefit. Sent from my Thinkpad.

It's odd though, they have these contradictory actions. For the iPhone, they are pushing for privacy, but on MacOS, we are now dealing with things like excessive telemetry to the point of phoning a authorization server for running local binaries. Not to mention the new firewall issues, where Apple utilities are able to bypass local firewall rules.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#157

Post by pradn »

LC_ALL wrote: post #50

Say what you want about Apple but they are by far the most privacy focused big company. Their income is from selling physical devices. Typical megacorps in 2020 are leveraging economies of scale to sell their users' attention. Apple has a unique value add in that when their users benefit they benefit. Sent from my Thinkpad.

Apple gets on the order of $12 billion a year from Google to make Google Search the default search engine in iOS. All that money comes from ads. They care about privacy until it hits their pocketbook.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#158

Post by amrangaye »

qdhqdhqdg wrote: post #123
LC_ALL wrote: post #50

Say what you want about Apple but they are by far the most privacy focused big company. Their income is from selling physical devices. Typical megacorps in 2020 are leveraging economies of scale to sell their users' attention. Apple has a unique value add in that when their users benefit they benefit. Sent from my Thinkpad.

Not hard to be the most privacy focused big company when the competition Google , Facebook or Amazon... I don't understand why we should always have good guys and bad guys and we can't accept that none of those company respect us. Nothing will change if we relay Apple's propaganda about privacy. People will think that the solution is already there and it's Apple. And it's not. Apple has catastrophic Privacy, just a b…

“Catastrophic privacy” is quite a huge claim - do you have any actual examples? My perspective is that iphone privacy protections have actually gotten better and more sophisticated over time, and I’m much more comfortable having older non-techie relatives on iOS for that reason. When it comes to providing them tech support ios has always been less finicky than android.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#159

Post by oauea »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #101
stefan_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again, what are you paying the apple cut for? Are you saying bots are buying your fancy messaging app?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#160

Post by jefftk »

eznzt wrote: post #153
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 don't know why you use a big word such as "fraud" when you mean "we want to be able to know which accounts are owned by the same person".

That isn't what "fraud" means in this context. Ad fraud is when you have something other than a real user loading or clicking on ads. For example, I could stand up a headless browser to click on the ads on my site. This would get me more of a payout from my advertisers, but would also be fraud.

A stable identifier makes identifying this sort of behavior much easier.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

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