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

241–250 of 403 posts

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#241

Post by rndgermandude »

jforman wrote: post #223
rndgermandude wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly want to see evidence for this claim. Sounds to me it makes running an ad network harder and therefore probably more expensive, but it is far from a certainty that this translates into advertisers' willingness to pay more (and pass it on to consumers). Personally, I use ads as a signal to avoid buying certain products. If the ads are too prominent and omnipresent, it's an indication for me that I would be p…

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…

There are alternatives to fight ad fraud than unqiuely tracking users everywhere.

The tracking part isn't necessary for fraud detection not even for conversation tracking. It's only necessary for "personalized ads" aka spying on users.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#242

Post by confiq »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #194
confiq wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actio…

I think you misunderstood Mozilla. Apple is still going ahead with this regardless. My understanding the rollout was delayed because of ongoing financial hardship on everyone in the world because of COVID (and to give more time to advertisers, developers and others to prepare). Mozilla is also asking everyone to publicly support Apple's decision because it's good for consumers, which in result would also force others…

ok, that is one way to look at this... I've just disabled IDFA on my phone now!

Thanks for having nice conversation! :)

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#243

Post by mhb »

jforman wrote: post #236
mhb wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's certainly possible new channels emerge to restore equilibrium, but I don't see Neeva (or whoever) replacing Google as a customer acquisition channel any time soon. 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 t…

I think there is a more charitable view of how people (I, at least) view what you are saying. There is a certainly a disadvantage to existing ad-revenue funded companies to not being able to identify their audience at the most specific possible level.

But there are also (potentially huge and beneficial) opportunity costs. We will never see alternative business models which are not viable in the existing ecosystem.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#244

Post by jefftk »

chongli wrote: post #239
jefftk wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This all presumes that the advertising business needs this level of granularity to succeed. It doesn't. Advertisers can purchase fixed display ads on reputable sites by contracting directly with the site owner. They can also sponsor content creators and provide them with an affiliate code which the viewers can use to receive a discount. These mechanisms do not expose the advertisers to fraud.

> Advertisers can purchase fixed display ads on reputable sites by contracting directly with the site owner.

But what is a fair price? That depends on the traffic, but we are positing that detection of "is this a real user" is not possible, right?

Traditionally, advertisers have gone by Nielsen style ratings for broadcast media (pay people to track what they consume, extrapolate) and circulation numbers for print media. In our hypothetical world the former would still be possible but the latter wouldn't. Unfortunately, in addition to being really inefficient, if you pay people to track what they consume you will essentially never compensate niche publications. This strongly promotes centralization.

Privacy Pass / Trust Tokens / etc seem much more promising to me?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#245

Post by thomasahle »

wil421 wrote: post #40
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.

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

If there's suddently a lot more fraud and scams on the services they use, they'll probably be annoyed. Though they probably won't blame Apple if that's your point. It's still a worse user experience.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#246

Post by jforman »

mhb wrote: post #243
jforman wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly possible new channels emerge to restore equilibrium, but I don't see Neeva (or whoever) replacing Google as a customer acquisition channel any time soon. 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 t…

I think there is a more charitable view of how people (I, at least) view what you are saying. There is a certainly a disadvantage to existing ad-revenue funded companies to not being able to identify their audience at the most specific possible level. But there are also (potentially huge and beneficial) opportunity costs. We will never see alternative business models which are not viable in the existing ecosystem.

Agreed. Entrepreneurs always see opportunity in disruption, because you can always rebuild something better. Just don't @ me too hard for pointing out that the disruption is real and will affect the ecosystem (including startups!) as it is today.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#247

Post by hanche »

sudhirj wrote: post #69
rattray wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And make stolen credit card numbers even more valuable? (I like where your head is at, fraud is just hard)

Stolen cards have long since been solved in many parts of the world with 3DS. Not sure why the US is still lagging behind on this.

For some value of “solved”, yes. I live in 3DS-land myself, but since 3DS is not universal, credit card info is still at risk. I had a fraudulent purchase against my card recently. The bank returned the money, but at the moment, I am fighting a bill for import duty on the Gucci scarf the crook purchased on my card. :-/ I had no idea, until now, that they may charge €350 for a scarf.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#249

Post by Dahoon »

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 is doing everything they can for privacy... as long as it pushes customers in the direction of Apples as service. That is the whole point. PR and abuse of market position to further their own service.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#250

Post by Nextgrid »

jefftk wrote: post #179
wil421 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

This seems like a problem with the current model of ads being paid for by impression/click, and switching to a model where ads are being paid for the time they're being displayed (pay X to have your ad appear here for Y time) the problem goes away.

Furthermore, the current advertiisng model also suffers from this problem even beyond malicious intent. Is it fraud if a real user "looks" at the ad but actually looks away from their screen? If they mute the sound? If they don't speak the language the ad is in? Etc.

Post reply on HN