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Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

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Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

#171

Post by ceh123 »

gregoriol wrote: post #144
bogwog wrote: post #133

I'm curious about the 4% of users who enabled it. Did they get tricked into doing so? Was it an accident? Or do some people out there really genuinely want to be tracked?

Probably people working in the ads industry or facebook or amazon... makes quite a lot of people! Joke aside, I believe most people don't understand what this iOS popup wants from them: for most average users, it's another annoying popup that their device shows them and they don't really know what it means or what option they should choose (like the location ones, networking ones, bluetooth, ...). It happens a lot wi…

I mean, if you accidentally choose the wrong option you can just go fix it in settings. I do this all the time when downloading new apps, my default is declining everything and then something usually breaks (like location on Waze) and then I go fix it.

Incredibly mild inconvenience for the benefit of having the default option be not tracking me unless I specifically allow it.

Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

#172

Post by HeyImAlex »

woeirua wrote: post #147

I think this speaks to the power of defaults. 96% of users have not turned this on because they didn't even know that its disabled, and when an app asks you if they can track you, the response is going to be a strong no. The reality is that FB's entire business model has been predicated on the default being that tracking is allowed. If this holds, this will be cataclysmic for FB. You can't have a huge portion of your…

Is there anything to stop gating features/whole apps behind having tracking enabled?

Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

#173

Post by vbezhenar »

SCHiM wrote: post #151
gregoriol wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably people working in the ads industry or facebook or amazon... makes quite a lot of people! Joke aside, I believe most people don't understand what this iOS popup wants from them: for most average users, it's another annoying popup that their device shows them and they don't really know what it means or what option they should choose (like the location ones, networking ones, bluetooth, ...). It happens a lot wi…

The user most definitively has to know these things. Your argument is a race to the bottom I think. We will end up with devices where the user has to know nothing, cannot do anything and is lazy and easily led. Just as moving yourself around on a bike is healthier than planting your ass in your car, so is thinking for yourself and _once_ in your life taking the time to figure out what that whole location sharing thin…

> We will end up with devices where the user has to know nothing, cannot do anything and is lazy and easily led.

Sounds like a good summary for iPhone.

Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

#174

Post by SCHiM »

gregoriol wrote: post #163
SCHiM wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The user most definitively has to know these things. Your argument is a race to the bottom I think. We will end up with devices where the user has to know nothing, cannot do anything and is lazy and easily led. Just as moving yourself around on a bike is healthier than planting your ass in your car, so is thinking for yourself and _once_ in your life taking the time to figure out what that whole location sharing thin…

I get your point as a tech person, but really, have you ever had this issue with your parents and iOS devices these days? I mean even most 30-something people don't know what those choices are about, that Whatsapp is worse than Signal... Maybe there should be something like a "root" or "developer" setting that can be enabled for advanced users, but for the average person the default for all this must be the best poss…

I mean sure IOS is hassle free and all that, but on IOS you're also a computational serf, computing at the whims of your apple overlords.

I've thought one member of my family to setup their own wireless access point. And they can reliably solve most 'the internet does not work' problems on their own now. This member used to confuse the explorer.exe window with a picture of an explorer.exe window in internet explorer, with predictable results (at the time)...

I'd rather live in the latter world than the former, time will tell if more people agree with me.

Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

#175

Post by nothis »

woeirua wrote: post #147

I think this speaks to the power of defaults. 96% of users have not turned this on because they didn't even know that its disabled, and when an app asks you if they can track you, the response is going to be a strong no. The reality is that FB's entire business model has been predicated on the default being that tracking is allowed. If this holds, this will be cataclysmic for FB. You can't have a huge portion of your…

I don't really get how trends like this one (and IMO that's just the tip of the ice berg – this is companies preparing for the inevitable legislation that will make most forms of tracking illegal within the next 10 years) don't affect facebook or google stock.

This IMO makes two scenarios likely:

1) The market is currently just dragging along, hoping this will all go away and we're really in a major ad-bubble that's about to pop.

2) Tracking... isn't that profitable after all. All the personalized tracking shit can be replaced with a simple "users who clicked on canon printer also clicked on cheap ink refill kits" type of model that gets the same results or better. Which also puts into question a lot of what FB and Google are actually doing.

Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

#176

Post by zffr »

Firebrand wrote: post #167

Based on Apple’s job postings I’m beginning to suspect their stance on ads and tracking was nothing more than a clever ruse to weaken competitors while they build their own a personalized ad business for iOS: https://i.imgur.com/y1s9F4J They also just hired Facebook’s first ads targeting product manager to work for their ad platform. I don’t think Apple ads won’t be limited to the App Store within a couple years.

Has apple ever said they were anti ads? I thought their position was that they were anti tracking without consent.

Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

#177

Post by vbezhenar »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #93
justapassenger wrote: post #68

What a surprise. If I tell people going to the store that they choose to pay for the products, or not, a lot of people will choose not to. Who would guess that people like free stuff? Apple is disrupting whole economy for apps. It’s a very broken economy, with lots of questionable practices, that’s for sure. But we’ll see if it’ll be net benefit for customers. For sure for Apple, as more apps will have to move to be…

A lot of people would be happy to pay upfront and keep their data.

And a lot of people don't have money to pay and their attention is the only resource they can pay for apps. With ad economy broken, they'll lose access to the apps they're using now and that's a bad thing in my opinion.

Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

#178

Post by hparadiz »

woeirua wrote: post #147

I think this speaks to the power of defaults. 96% of users have not turned this on because they didn't even know that its disabled, and when an app asks you if they can track you, the response is going to be a strong no. The reality is that FB's entire business model has been predicated on the default being that tracking is allowed. If this holds, this will be cataclysmic for FB. You can't have a huge portion of your…

> BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out.

If Google or Apple remotely installed a hastily built tracker controlled by a government agency on my device I'd be pretty miffed about it.

Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

#179

Post by gregoriol »

ceh123 wrote: post #171
gregoriol wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably people working in the ads industry or facebook or amazon... makes quite a lot of people! Joke aside, I believe most people don't understand what this iOS popup wants from them: for most average users, it's another annoying popup that their device shows them and they don't really know what it means or what option they should choose (like the location ones, networking ones, bluetooth, ...). It happens a lot wi…

I mean, if you accidentally choose the wrong option you can just go fix it in settings. I do this all the time when downloading new apps, my default is declining everything and then something usually breaks (like location on Waze) and then I go fix it. Incredibly mild inconvenience for the benefit of having the default option be not tracking me unless I specifically allow it.

You and I can find probably the option, but I have had enough experience with people who have something broken and don't have a clue why or what to do. We are used to go through menus, system Settings, commandline options, ... but that's really only us, tech people on hn.

Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5

#180

Post by mumblemumble »

curryst wrote: post #107
mumblemumble wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The (body image scanning) technology is ... without the ability to ... transmit ... the images," > the images are examined by a security officer in a remote location oh dear. More seriously, at least TSA can at least make a proportionality type of argument, along the lines of, this invasion of privacy is justified on the grounds that it might save lives. Adtech is just going to use it to try and figure out how to c…

Of the data that I've seen, adtech has about as much legitimacy in claiming they "might" save lives as the TSA does.[1] The last year the TSA released the stats on their Red Team tests, they failed to detect 95% of threats. Some of the threats that made it through were fully assembled handguns, fully assembled bombs, and partially disassembled versions of both. As many have pointed out, the TSA is largely security th…

FWIW, I'm not necessarily saying that TSA's argument works out in practice. I'm just saying that they can at least try to make it.

Versus, even if we give adtech a similar benefit of the doubt, and accept for the sake of argument that they really could more effectively convince me to buy the world's greatest fidget cube, there's still just no way that such an outcome is a great enough social good to justify the means they used to achieve it.

(Except perhaps from the perspective of the adtech and fidget cube people. And, even then, only if we assume that they have a slightly deranged opinion of the social utility of their fidget toy relative to all other fidget toys. Or that they're solipsists.)

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