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Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

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Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#281

Post by chungus_khan »

eganist wrote: post #149
superkuh wrote: post #145

Apple can make an anti-tracking computer but nothing they do can make an anti-tracking phone. It is a "cell" phone. The very nature of cell phones means the basestations have to decide where you are and which cell takes your connections. With precise clocks and multi-lateration the position of your handset is known to about 50m. All US telco keep this location data (which is constantly updated) for 2 to 5 years. And…

Although for what its worth, I wonder if it's possible for a cell to throw telcos off by broadcasting at higher power and connecting randomly between more and less distant antennas. This is probably one of the dumber ideas I've come up with given that I have no idea how the different protocols for handshakes between cells and towers work. Looking to be educated on it here in the comments.

Sounds like a great way to get your IMEI blacklisted by the carrier (and drop/miss calls a lot), and would not really stop them from triangulating your position (because you still have to be physically in range of all the towers, and would still be a determinable distance from them, being that distance is calculated using timing).

Cellular modem firmwares are also generally pretty closely guarded and not flashable.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#282

Post by forrestthewoods »

alwillis wrote: post #228
fbelzile wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their income is from selling physical devices. Not entirely true anymore: 1) About $8-12 billion paid by Google to have their search engine default. [1] 2) About $20 billion from their 15-30% cut of third party app developers. Where the App Store is protected from competition. [2] 3) Apple services (like Apple TV+), which collects usage data for itself and third parties. [3] [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/25…

The vast majority of Apple's revenue is from selling hardware. Yes, there's revenue from services, which is growing fast. The trailing 12 month revenue for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch (+ HomePod, AirPods, etc.) was over $220 billion . And while $20 billion is not nothing, it's actually not that big a deal for Apple, especially when you consider its $2 trillion market cap.

You’re mixing a lot of numbers there.

Apple makes about 60 billion a year in the profit. The 10 billion they get from Google constitutes 16% of their annual profit. That’s significant!

Apple trades at a 37x P/E ratio. An additional $20B profit could be worth about an additional $760 billion in market cap. You can’t dismiss 10 billion in pure profit because their market cap. Those numbers are directly related and far closer in meaning than you give credit.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#283

Post by briandear »

rndgermandude wrote: post #235
fumar wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you pay for the services and content you consume?

It could be microtransactions/in-app purchases-as-a-microtransaction, it could be subscription based models, it could be "media flat rates" (cross publication subscriptions), or something else entirely. 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 r…

But there there are people that intentionally bypass paywalls. Almost every article posted on HN behind a paywall has a user “neonate” who posts a paywall circumventing link. Then we collectively complain about advertising and paywalls. There is a large number of people that seem to think that all content should be free and that the people creating it are somehow a charity. I am ok with paywalls, but I don’t like to subsidize free riders. Apple News+ as a concept is a pretty good one, hopefully we can see more innovation in that sort of model.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#284

Post by justapassenger »

swiley wrote: post #128
javajosh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't move money around or even have private messaging. If the stakes are high enough, users need the service provider to be skeptical of all client processes, because the risk of being impersonated is born, right or wrong, by the user.

If you move money around then the legal system already exists to deal with fraud. As someone who doesn't use an iphone it's really frustrating that online services are starting to expect one for this reason when it hasn't been necessary in the past.

There’s legal system that exist to deal with people stealing stuff from my house. But I still have doors, locks, cameras and alarm.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#286

Post by Nextgrid »

rndgermandude wrote: post #222
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…

I like the second part of your answer. Indeed, if you wanted something like a way to id bad actors, you could do some scheme where the OS (or browser or even secondary service) could do some form of attestation that isn't trackable and has even stronger guarantees than some unauthenticated unique id has. If Apple and Google can make their Corona Tracking APIs untrackable by third parties, then untrackable "valid devi…

The coronavirus exposure notifications are only "safe" because we assume no single actor can put Bluetooth receivers every square meter, thus rotating the IDs every so often is an effective defense against potential tracking.

The same couldn't work with the internet because essentially every ID would be known to potential bad actors, as they'd be tracking every single one of them (among other data points) and can easily defeat the rotation of those IDs based on other data points which don't change.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#287

Post by briandear »

gord288 wrote: post #203
jforman wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it makes advertising more expensive, which in turn makes the products and services you use more expensive.

Products/services are typically priced according to what the market can bear. If advertising costs become cheaper for a given company, for whatever reason, who's to say this decreased expense is going to be passed down to consumers in the form of lower prices? Living in an advertising-saturated and/or privacy-deprived world is also a "cost" borne by members of society.

> who's to say this decreased expense is going to be passed down to consumers in the form of lower prices?

Because economics. I know this intimately. I have a product we manufacture and sell on Amazon along with other channels. And if I am saving $1 on a customer acquisition, I am lowering my price one dollar because that would mean I can sell more at the same profit. Because if I try to keep that extra dollar, my competition will lower their price. Basically the cost of keeping that saved dollar is more than the gain from lowering the price a dollar. That’s how competition is supposed to work.

I know my cost of goods sold and my cost of sales down to the penny and have a pretty good idea of the elasticity curve for my product: if I lower my price by $1, I would sell x more bottles. However if I lower my price by $1 right now, I would decrease in profitability unless my costs also decreased by $1. There is a point on the curve that represents the optimal price.

It would seem that fundamental microeconomics is something not taught in many schools and that’s tragic because you get statements like “who’s to say this decreased expense is going to be passed down to consumers.” Because competition is what makes this statement silly in principle.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#288

Post by pradn »

alwillis wrote: post #230
pradn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. It's a lot of money, but it's pocket change for Apple in the scheme of things—$220 billion in hardware revenue and a $2 trillion market cap. Google needs to pay it far more than Apple needs the money. Google knows Apple customers are far more lucrative than Android customers…

Google needs it more since Google makes > $12 billion on that traffic, but I can't imagine any company being willing to part with $12+ billion a year.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#289

Post by ogre_codes »

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.

> Fraud prevention for example will get an order of magnitude harder,

First Ad Fraud != Fraud. It is low grade hacking.

Second. Trading the privacy of every iPhone user so that advertisers can prop up a sketchy/ poor industry is a terrible trade.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#290

Post by ogre_codes »

olliej wrote: post #46
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…

The purpose of IDFA was to provide an identifier that wasn't hardwired to the device - apps were going to absurd lengths to get the UDID, and IDFA gave them something ostensibly sufficient that users could in theory reset at will. I give good odds ad frameworks will again start trying to circumvent the platform security to get a UDID or equivalent.

Then apps get kicked out of the App Store for violating App Store Policy and word gets around that it's a shitty ad network.
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