Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 204 posts

Re: TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround

#111

Post by crmd »

freeflight wrote: post #99
CountSessine wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - because manufacturing in the West is ultimately self-defeating. Success breeds complacency and labor unrest. This isn't just a China-thing (I have no idea what your Potemkin regulation is or why you would mix those metaphors). When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they think, "why aren't they paying their employees more??!" and start a union to parasitize earnings. When Asians (including the Japan…

> Yes - because manufacturing in the West is ultimately self-defeating. It's much more to do with the steadily increasing complexity of products due to humanity having become very much a global species with heavy interdependence. Look around the room you are sitting in: There will be items in it manufactured all over the world, from components also coming from all over the world. That's not only how we manage to make…

>> Yes - because manufacturing in the West is ultimately self-defeating.

> The idea that a single country could emulate that, in complete isolation, is bluntly said childish.

Who is this “single country” straw man you are referring to? The western world is comprised of 50+ nations with over $40 trillion in GDP.

Re: TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround

#112

Post by lotsofpulp »

Clubber wrote: post #104
lotsofpulp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is conceivable in a winner take all business, or a top 2 take all business, you either tap into the world’s largest market or you don’t survive. For example, Apple being able to lock up all the supply of higher end chips and smaller companies not being able to compete.

>It is conceivable in a winner take all business, or a top 2 take all business, you either tap into the world’s largest market or you don’t survive. The US is the world's largest market, by a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_marke...

Yes, I meant the world’s top markets. Especially one that’s up and coming.

Re: TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround

#113

Post by sudosysgen »

CountSessine wrote: post #102
tw04 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they think, "why aren't they paying their employees more??!" and start a union to parasitize earnings. Saying that employees expecting a livable wage is "parasitizing earnings" is a pretty outrageous claim. >It's an important difference for manufacturing physical things and it's why the West loses out to Asia in manufacturing outside cutting-edge tech. The West los…

Saying that employees expecting a livable wage is "parasitizing earnings" is a pretty outrageous claim. More defective programming in the wetware. Why is pay the only part of the equation? When Japan realized that their housing market was undermining living standards in the late 90’s, they cracked down on NIMBYism and took housing and land zoning authority away from cities. The housing market almost immediately corre…

We're not dropping prices in NA in good part because our governments are dysfunctional and don't want to intervene, and because large landowners see such interventions as contrary to their benefit.

And besides, relaxing zoning is far from enough - you need to build vast and performant public transit systems, and in the case of Tokyo you need to make housing a depreciating asset.

South Korea was not a democratic state during most of its crucial growth period either - it was only after a revolution in the 80s, and even then democracy is a very gracious word for a country that was literally ruled by a cult for half a decade.

Taiwan also was in quasi-dictatorial KMT rule for most of its rise, and Japan to this day on the national level is basically ruled by the LDP in perpetuity.

But crucially, Japan, SK and Taiwan aren't where the kind of production China does happens. They are just as economically beholden to China as we are, sometimes moreso.

Re: TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround

#114

Post by freeflight »

Jonanin wrote: post #57
anon9001 wrote: post #38

Technically, what's going on here? "CAID" isn't a public iOS technology, and the article doesn't say what it means. Some googling returns: https://mmachina.cn/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/MMA%E4%B8%AD%... Apparently it means "CAA Advertising Id", where "CAA" appears to be the "Creative Artists Agency", some sort of Chinese advertising group. (edit: wrong organization, it's actually "Chinese Anonymization ID", not a gro…

The story is that major Chinese companies and the state are working together to develop an alternative to Apple’s IDFA. While aggressively pushing back against companies in the U.S. tracking users, Apple seemingly doesn’t mind having a double standard for China.

Is that really the story? When the USG requires Apple to access something on the basis of legal intercept then Apple will comply, as they did with the FBI and that mass shooter guy: Apple granted the FBI access to the iCloud account, the FBI botched it and then wanted access to the data on the physical phone, which Apple couldn't provide due to not knowing the encryption key.

The only other "big stance on privacy" that Apple has is that, unlike their main competitor Google, they are not an advertisement business. So they have no real financial motivation to add tracking to their devices and software vs a Google were advertisement and user tracking are pretty big pillars of their financial income.

Infrastructure like that is trivial to hijack for surveillance once in place, which privacy wise makes Google devices and software by default the worse choice unless using specifically cleaned and hardened custom roms.

So while these two issues are related, legal intercept and privacy, they are not as easily conflated as you make it sound when you claim Apple is having "double standards" when they really are not "double standards" but simply abiding by local laws and regulations.

Re: TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround

#115

Post by topspin »

CountSessine wrote: post #81
topspin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The western world needs to desperately work on making their supply chains independent of the CCP The western world can't. The world is only so big and the remaining sites of refuge for cheap, exploitable labor and Potemkin regulatory regimes are few. Almost any alternative place you might cite is either already beholden to China (the viable parts of Africa) or too unstable (due to endemic corruption, external threa…

Yes - because manufacturing in the West is ultimately self-defeating. Success breeds complacency and labor unrest. This isn't just a China-thing (I have no idea what your Potemkin regulation is or why you would mix those metaphors). When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they think, "why aren't they paying their employees more??!" and start a union to parasitize earnings. When Asians (including the Japan…

> I have no idea what your Potemkin regulation is

Nations such as China erect fig leaf regulatory regimes that are both ineffective and corrupt and are designed to attract Western capital that are avoiding the regulatory burdens (environmental regulation, labor regulation, etc.) in Western nations. These are Potemkin structures in that they offer plausibly deniable cover to the Western establishment for the purposes of trade agreements and other international instruments.

Re: TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround

#116

Post by pydry »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #101
topspin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The western world needs to desperately work on making their supply chains independent of the CCP The western world can't. The world is only so big and the remaining sites of refuge for cheap, exploitable labor and Potemkin regulatory regimes are few. Almost any alternative place you might cite is either already beholden to China (the viable parts of Africa) or too unstable (due to endemic corruption, external threa…

> Insourcing is obviously out of the question; the wealthy Western establishment is violently intolerant of industrial expansion. As far as I can tell, it’s simply more expensive to insource, taking into account wages, labor regulations, and environmental regulations. If and when other countries catch up to the production costs in the US, then there won’t be a reason to ship things halfway around the world.

It's frequently not cheaper and occasionally more expensive. One reason it is popular is that it gives the managers who oversee it a lot more power and control:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/more-on-the-myth-of-...

Re: TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround

#118

Post by outside1234 »

Apple needs Biden to step in and threaten to shut down Tiktok again if they go ahead with this. Hell, maybe he should just shut it down preemptively in the US and the EU should sue them over GDPR to make sure China gets the point.

It is totally asymmetric for Apple to try to take on China in this and given their dependence on China for manufacturing (which I hope they are reconsidering now) they really can't afford to take them on.

Re: TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround

#119

Post by jquery »

CountSessine wrote: post #102
tw04 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they think, "why aren't they paying their employees more??!" and start a union to parasitize earnings. Saying that employees expecting a livable wage is "parasitizing earnings" is a pretty outrageous claim. >It's an important difference for manufacturing physical things and it's why the West loses out to Asia in manufacturing outside cutting-edge tech. The West los…

Saying that employees expecting a livable wage is "parasitizing earnings" is a pretty outrageous claim. More defective programming in the wetware. Why is pay the only part of the equation? When Japan realized that their housing market was undermining living standards in the late 90’s, they cracked down on NIMBYism and took housing and land zoning authority away from cities. The housing market almost immediately corre…

You’re making a lot of bold claims. It would be nice if you justified at least one of them before chaining them together to reach a pre-ordained conclusion.

Re: TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround

#120

Post by tw04 »

CountSessine wrote: post #102
tw04 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they think, "why aren't they paying their employees more??!" and start a union to parasitize earnings. Saying that employees expecting a livable wage is "parasitizing earnings" is a pretty outrageous claim. >It's an important difference for manufacturing physical things and it's why the West loses out to Asia in manufacturing outside cutting-edge tech. The West los…

Saying that employees expecting a livable wage is "parasitizing earnings" is a pretty outrageous claim. More defective programming in the wetware. Why is pay the only part of the equation? When Japan realized that their housing market was undermining living standards in the late 90’s, they cracked down on NIMBYism and took housing and land zoning authority away from cities. The housing market almost immediately corre…

>More defective programming in the wetware. Why is pay the only part of the equation? When Japan realized that their housing market was undermining living standards in the late 90’s, they cracked down on NIMBYism and took housing and land zoning authority away from cities. The housing market almost immediately corrected itself and housing prices in suburban Tokyo have been in free-fall ever since. You can get a 2000sqft family home for the equivalent of about 200k just 30 minutes outside downtown Tokyo today. We don’t do that because... why?

The world does exist outside of Silicon Valley. I can get exactly what you're describing in over half of this country, pick your state including the entirety of the midwest.

>Again, more defective wetware. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan - these are democratic states with a high standard of living that have been able to control costs in ways that the West hasn’t. More people are homeless in the US per capita than any of those countries and it has everything to do with defective programming and talk of “liveable wages”. Of course everyone needs to be able to afford to live. But your own mistaken assumptions are emblematic of the political and social dysfunction of the West. Until we address that, no - those supply chains won’t be returning.

The median income in South Korea is $3,000 less than the US. And they have universal healthcare.

Someone's wetware is defective, it isn't mine. You might want to do some research before showing up with that kind of condescending attitude.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

Post reply on HN