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Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

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Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#171

Post by gnu8 »

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.

> puzzle the scraps back together

They’re not supposed to do that. Their dogmatic refusal to see the writing on the wall is ridiculous.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#172

Post by confiq »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #146
confiq wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Sorry, did you read Mozilla's blog post or aware of what IDFA is and it's history? Apple released IDFA to improve consumer privacy, to avoid advertisers being able to fingerprint iOS devices using Unique Device ID (UDID). Access to UDID was deprecated in iOS 5 (that's 2011). It has also given control to consumers since then to opt-out of providing IDFA by default. In 2019, Mozilla asked Apple to take rotate the IDFA…

actually... I did wrong quote so joke on me! The quote that I wanted is this one

> That’s where you come in: We need a massive outpouring of support for Apple’s decision to help strengthen its resolve to protect consumer privacy.

Why mozilla needs people like me and you in order for apple to fulfil their promises for consumer privacy?

As apple says “Privacy. That’s iPhone”, why it needs user attention for apple actions?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#173

Post by [deleted] »

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".

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#174

Post by chokeartist »

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'm calling your bluff right now: online advertising, which is underpinned on knowing as much as possible about you, is fucked.

The half measures you described will not even be 10% as useful as the current model (direct ID from the device). What are you going to correlate a CG-NAT IP with, when said IP is shared by potentially hundreds of thousands of users? It becomes an exercise of diminishing returns, very quickly. And that is not a defect, that's a feature.

Privacy isn't about just maximizing your shekels. It is about protecting and respecting user data. Advertisers are clinically incapable of understanding that second part.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#175

Post by Laarlf »

pradn wrote: post #157
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.

If I’m looking at HomeKit for example, this is not true.

Also people would want google anyway. After all it’s still the most useful search engine for almost everyone. Apple is primarily still a device maker for people who want stuff to justwerk and people who have no interest in tech.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#176

Post by Bockit »

suprfsat wrote: post #139
sradman wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it has literally no purpose beyond mining peoples' data Its main purpose is targeted ads while repurposing or reselling peoples’ data is a nefarious secondary use. Multi-sided markets are important revenue models that are tailored to user preferences and behavior. We are trying to strike a balance; we don’t need to demonize all advertising centric business models to win the argument for better privacy options. I th…

How do you propose to target ads without mining peoples' data?

Essentially, you don’t.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#177

Post by HatchedLake721 »

shawnz wrote: post #141
qdhqdhqdg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed, we should be careful not to champion them as the saviours of consumer privacy just because they have lately been marketing themselves as an improvement over Google and Microsoft.

They haven't just "lately been marketing themselves as an improvement over Google and Microsoft".

Anyone aware of Apple's history knows that Apple has always pushed consumer privacy forward, forcing others in the industry to follow.

I don't know any other consumer electronics company other than Apple that has been championing consumer privacy so much over the last 12-15 years.

If you learned about Apple's stance on privacy only in their recent marketing, that doesn't mean they haven't been doing it before.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#178

Post by tmakks »

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…

> cross-device tracking is on very thin ice legally under the GDPR

Exactly and tracking companies such as Adjust or AppsFlyer carry on IFDA-ing/fingerprinting users. GDPR seems to be just a nice-to-have.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#179

Post by jefftk »

wil421 wrote: post #120
bartread wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the GP is saying. They're saying that only Facebook and the like have the resources to catch fraud, and smaller players won't. Yes, it's harder, but that hardness is almost an irrelevance to Facebook and other FAANG-alikes, whereas it could be much more of a problem for smaller businesses who will struggle to bear the costs both of fraud, and to develop anti-fraud solutions (or pay for anti-fraud serv…

Can you explain how Apple’s anti tracking measures are going to hurt small business and make fraud easier?

Most of the time, privacy and fraud both benefit from the same changes. To prevent tracking online, you want your device to look just like everybody else's devices. To prevent fraud, you want devices to look different so you can tell when a device does not represent a real user.

At the extreme, imagine if every person has a unique identifier that was automatically sent whenever they used any device: preventing ad fraud would be really easy, and you would have essentially zero privacy. At the other extreme, imagine if every device looked exactly the same, with no user agent, no IP, no cookies, no way to tell my traffic from yours. In that situation, people would have pretty strong privacy, but if you had headless browsers loading the ads on your site no one would be able to tell that those views were not from real users.

As the GGP says, removing IDFA shifts the balance toward both privacy and fraud. See https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass... and https://web.dev/trust-tokens/ for attempts to separate these.

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

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#180

Post by [deleted] »

TruthSHIFT wrote: post #132
tchalla wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think are the possible issues for full encryption of iCloud backups?

One important implication of not using full encryption is that it protects users from themselves. If a user forgets their password, Apple can still unlock their data. From a security perspective, this obviously isn't ideal. But, from the perspective of the average user who has lost all of their data, this is great.

[deleted]
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