231–240 of 403 posts
They would lose me as a customer if they change, but I don’t expect them to do that.
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Well, less than a month ago all Mac apps worldwide refused to open because the listening service at Apple failed to respond, so you don't even have to look at the network to know that Apple is spying… Apple has access to all apps you open, your position, the content of your iCloud, etc. etc.
Short answer: apps are signed with a developer's certificate they get from Apple; the OCSP check for certificate validation went down. To put this in context, whenever you connect to a secure website, OCSP is used to make sure the certificate is still valid (unless OCSP stapling is used, but that's another issue). BTW, OCSP checks are unencrypted, but Apple says it will change to an encrypted protocol. And it wasn't…
> Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history; product interaction; crash data, performance and other diagnostic data; and other usage data
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
Or maybe Apple Lawyers don't understand either?
> BTW, OCSP checks are unencrypted, but Apple says it will change to an encrypted protocol.
“When caught, simply apologize and promise to do better next time, it will be fine”. It wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last.
As a sidenote: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-13416598
Apple's apptrack restrictions in reality have nothing to do with users privacy, it is a simple measure to get a slice (or the whole thing) of an advertising pie from Facebook and other giants.
IDFA on iPhones is simply being replaced with SKAD network profiles, effectively managed by Apple and that's it. So now the whole ios traffic/ads business will be controlled not by facebook/others but by Apple.
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I would be thrilled if online advertising became unviable as a business model. Most of what makes the web suck today (megabytes of javascript on every page; clickbait articles; outrage-driven social media; warehouses of PII waiting to be bought/sold/stolen) is because of advertising. Yes, I do want to pay for the services I use.
How would you pay for the services and content you consume?
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I would be thrilled if online advertising became unviable as a business model. Most of what makes the web suck today (megabytes of javascript on every page; clickbait articles; outrage-driven social media; warehouses of PII waiting to be bought/sold/stolen) is because of advertising. Yes, I do want to pay for the services I use.
How would you pay for the services and content you consume?
A lot of content, especially newspaper/magazine articles, at least here in Germany, already are paid-only, either through subscriptions or both subscriptions and alternatively microtransactions (mostly more in-depth reporting). The UK Guardian and the German taz employ voluntary payments/subscriptions with some success last I heard. US media seems to be pushing a lot more for subscriptions now ("you got free 3 articles this month")
Creators on patreon and on OnlyFans (NSFW) seem to be making good money off of subscriptions, on a smaller scale (and if they sell a product that has some demand, of course).
Relatedly the greater independence of creators from advertising would in turn mean fewer ads, which in turn means potentially more competition for the available ad space again and thus potentially higher prices.
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Let's say you're a startup trying to advertise on Google, and somebody has paid a bot network to fraudulently click on your ads. Now Google can't detect that those clicks are fraudulent, so you're billed for them. Your channel efficiency unavoidably goes down, which increases your cost of customer acquisition because your other channels cannot pick up all of the slack. Increasing the cost of customer acquisition is g…
This is a pretty status quo biased view. Maybe stronger privacy protection enables a startup search engine (or whatever) with a more privacy oriented funding method which wasn't thought viable before.
I think people are misconstruing me here. I'm not saying Google advertising is somehow fundamentally necessary to the economy. I'm just saying that it is straight up incorrect to think that there aren't legitimate downsides to removing their ability to police fraud.
If Apple really cared, they'd make IDFA opt-in only. Why are we now applauding the option to disable a feature that the EU deemed illegal from the start? [1]
If Apple really cared, they'd remove Google as the default search engine and forgo the $8-12 billion they make from Google. Then, allow a fair bid for privacy focused search engines (or make their own). [2]
If Apple really cared, they'd stop tracking you in Apple Services like Apple TV+ and stop sharing your data with third parties. [3]
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/what-is-apples-...
[2] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/25/google-apple-search-def...
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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 fra…
To me, if your system relies on being able to tell most internet users apart, that sounds extremely close to processing personally identifiable information.
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Ad fraud... How exactly is this my problem as a consumer? This sounds pretty much like a "you" (ad networks and advertisers) problem... So why should you be allowed to spy on me - who never defrauded any advertisers - to fix your problem?
> How exactly is this my problem as a consumer? When you use a service that is funded by advertising, the service only gets that funding because the advertisers trust that they are getting their ads in front of real users. Some advertisers are able to precisely measure the quality of their traffic, for example by seeing whether the traffic they get buys things, but most are in businesses where that's not possible (no…
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.
I also think this is why Apple and Microsoft have bright futures but companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook will only see more legal hurdles from here on out.