iOS 14 and Facebook Pixel causing increase in PSL inclusion requests

> It is inappropriate for presence or absense in PSL to be used by Facebook as a means to include or reject entries due to the IOS14 change, as PSL is not any form of security screen whatsoever, and the volunteer team maintaining the PSL is receiving the burden of being a sieve for the changes on interaction between those systems, which is taxing our resources.

> The ONLY validation performed by PSL volunteers and Github process to add listing in the PSL is to check that a DNS entry is added by the domain administrator that can be tied to, and this can be completely illusory and lite in reality in contrast to perhaps the deisred level of security that had been intended between Facebook Pixel and Apple.

> We are freezing the approval of new submissions that cite the FB / IOS 14 interop issue in order to provide Facebook or Apple, with a much more robust set of resources, the opportunity to sort this out amongst/betwixt themselves.

https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/1245#issuecommen...

~~Seems like FB was abusing the work of volunteers here as a reaction to changes in iOS 14.~~ I don't see why they can't run their own PSL a la NTP servers.

edit: Seems like Apple was the one to declare PSL as canonical.

Can someone provide more context here? How does being added to the PSL affect tracking? Why are businesses adding themselves to the PSL en masse?

This is a result of Apple limiting the entropy of marketing data that can be received from a domain (defined as an eTLD+1) to 6 bits.

This causes problems for platforms like Shopify or marketplaces like Alibaba or eBay that may have multiple sellers trying to run ads on a domain and competing for the same small pool of entropy.

This solution? Leverage the "public suffix" list to define your domain as an eTLD and give every seller a separate subdomain so that everyone gets their own data entropy namespace.

Now every hosting provider or online marketplace is scrambling to re-architect their site into subdomains with public suffixes to maintain the status quo.

Pretty much all Shopify shops have their own domains, only a minority drive traffic to their .myshopify.com subdomain

This is fascinating to see Apple and Facebook engineers politely yet publicly arguing over potential technical implementations of Apple's privacy policies.