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iOS 14 and Facebook Pixel causing increase in PSL inclusion requests

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Re: iOS 14 and Facebook Pixel causing increase in PSL inclusion requests

#71

Post by varispeed »

PeterisP wrote: post #50
varispeed wrote: post #31

To be honest Facebook should offer a tracking free version with paid subscription. It is not acceptable that the only way to use Facebook and contact your family is to sacrifice your own and theirs privacy. When are we going to have a regulator step in and tackle this? It doesn't seem that GDPR has helped much, so I think more radical steps are needed. Such tracking that is being done online would be illegal offline…

I don't think that such a paid subscription would be feasible. Facebook currently earns more than 150 $/year on ads for each of their US/Canada user on average ; and iPhone users who would be willing to pay for such services probably are worth more than the average, so the appropriate market-determined fee to replace invasive ad targeting would be quite large. I don't think people would be willing to pay for tracking…

I don't think profits of a private company should be a justification for such invasion of privacy. There is plenty of ways they could make it work, but we need a legislation to compel them to do so. That option should be mandated by law even if it turned out to be niche.

Re: iOS 14 and Facebook Pixel causing increase in PSL inclusion requests

#72

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

local_dev wrote: post #57
mangosquash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on digital advertising for a franchise where each individual store manages their own shopify site at location.franchise.com. Soon, these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases, unless franchise.com is added to this list. I understand the PSL managers' position that this is an unfair burden to place on them though.

>these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases Isn't that part of the purpose of the changes that Apple is making? As a user, this seems like a great change. Less tracking is a positive.

In principle, you can know that an ad click resulted in a purchase without knowing who clicked the ad and who made the purchase. Apple supports these kinds of measurements for its own Apple Search Ads product.

The “entropy limit” you see people talking about elsewhere in the thread is one means that attempts to allow ads to be measured like this without revealing information about the users. But if every store *.shopify.com is in the same entropy pool, there won’t even be enough information to tell which ad campaign led to a sale on which store.

Re: iOS 14 and Facebook Pixel causing increase in PSL inclusion requests

#73

Post by vHMtsdf »

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #5

This followup issue seems to have a more clear writeup, especially for someone like me who is a bit out of the loop when it comes to the PSL: https://github.com/privacycg/private-click-measurement/issue...

The linked discussion makes me wonder, how much of our existence on the internet is just an unintended consequence of some minor engineering decision? Whim of an unknown engineer creating or destroying million dollar industries down the line...

Re: iOS 14 and Facebook Pixel causing increase in PSL inclusion requests

#74

Post by Macha »

simlevesque wrote: post #60
bredren wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a bit surprised that a shopify biz that could not be bothered to use its own domain would be very concerned about monitoring ad performance. Seems someone would first effect to have a better branded site. As in, a decent TLD. And that if anything, this is a kick in the pants of an ecommerce site to get its own domain(s) to deal with this. Do I have that right?

Well, I could own google.myshopify.com and be happy with it but have no way to buy the .com

Just suck it up and buy google-calculatorstore.com or whatever - if you're happy with the myshopify domain you clearly don't care _that_ much.

Of course, that specific example, since Google is trademarked and well known might get you on the wrong end of Shopify's ToS or a UDRP request either way.

Re: iOS 14 and Facebook Pixel causing increase in PSL inclusion requests

#75

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

fotta wrote: post #2

> 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 Gi…

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

Dependency on the Public Suffix List is already baked into essentially 100% of the global browser market for purposes like control of setting cookies - I'm not sure Apple made it any more 'canonical' by depending on it here.

Re: iOS 14 and Facebook Pixel causing increase in PSL inclusion requests

#76

Post by gsnedders »

marketingtech wrote: post #6

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…

> 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 is essentially https://github.com/privacycg/private-click-measurement/issue....

Effectively it boils down to, "how can you distinguish the seller from the website owner?", if you want to give both seller and website owner entropy.

Re: iOS 14 and Facebook Pixel causing increase in PSL inclusion requests

#78

Post by zp33 »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #72
local_dev wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases Isn't that part of the purpose of the changes that Apple is making? As a user, this seems like a great change. Less tracking is a positive.

In principle, you can know that an ad click resulted in a purchase without knowing who clicked the ad and who made the purchase. Apple supports these kinds of measurements for its own Apple Search Ads product. The “entropy limit” you see people talking about elsewhere in the thread is one means that attempts to allow ads to be measured like this without revealing information about the users. But if every store *.shop…

How can you give every subdomain in *.shopify.com their own entropy pool without also giving domains the ability to serve a distinct subdomain for each user (eg, user-1.example.com & user-2.example.com) and therefore bypassing the restrictions Apple is seeking to implement?

Re: iOS 14 and Facebook Pixel causing increase in PSL inclusion requests

#80

Post by therealx »

jakear wrote: post #63
TechBro8615 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PSL has always been a giant hack and totally unmaintainable in the long term. It's only a matter of time before someone mistakenly relying on it for security purposes gets owned by a rogue PR. Also, as mentioned in some of these issues, browsers don't even update it on any sort of guaranteed schedule.

The fun thing is you can s/PSL/DNS/g and the statement still holds. Same for BGP

BGP and DNS survive due to relative obscurity, despite everyone using it in some way. Web devs do not give a shit about BGP (sadly.)
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