G.D.P.R.
It's fun to be ruled by
G.D.P. ah R.
You can have services No intrusive tracking You can have all the joooooooy
G.D.P.R.
Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
241–250 of 371 posts
Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
#242With all the anti-trust stuff going on against Apple I wonder if this strong stance against cross app/site tracking gets overturned after some sort of legislation.
I mean, as long as they don't get into the ads business themselves, I'd say they'll be fine.
They might be trying to re-enter ad business since they are hiring: https://m.imgur.com/y1s9F4J
Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has apple ever said they were anti ads? I thought their position was that they were anti tracking without consent.
I would even go further and say that Apple doesn't care about anything other than making money by making good products. As more and more people begin to be concerned about privacy, Apple takes steps to try to reassure them that the phone is still a safe platform in which they can store private information such as photos, personal messages, address books, banking information, etc. Neither does Apple want a lot of anno…
The caring about money part is exemplified by this story. IMO this is one of the biggest stories in tech recently, but sadly never got traction on HN:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/21/22385859/apple-app-store-...
Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
#244You know... It just occurred to me that disallowing tracking from these apps would force them to seek a business model that is far less destructive to the fabric of society
Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
#245What exactly is the benefit to the average user of not having apps track them? Most people seem to welcome more relevant advertisments, and a significant number of people in my social circle - even in Ukraine - like to purchase products directly from Instagram advertisments. If you can't make money from advertising, and paid apps have an enormous 15-30% commission, how exactly does anyone except Apple make money from…
I think you're framing it the wrong way. You should be asking: What's the benefit to the user (and advertisers too!) of all this tracking and data collection? Adtech often touts "relevant ads." But I think that's a red herring. I'm a fan of The Simpsons. That doesn't mean I want ads for Simpsons stuff following me from site to site. I'd probably get annoyed if I get Simpsons ads on a serious financial website. What's…
Obviously the benefit of better ads, is that making an app is not free, and highly profitable ad models allows companies to not charge for apps.
If these ads business models become significantly less profitable, then it becomes more difficult to provide free apps to everyone.
Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Except it wasn’t hastily built, and the tracking isn’t controlled by a gov agency in the nefarious way that you’re implying.
The Canadian version of the app recently added “secure anonymous usage statistics”, which aren’t particularly anonymous (since all we have is their word that they don’t log your IP), and that aren’t particu secure (messages are encrypted with HTTPS but it’s not too difficult to infer the contents of the message based on their length). And, you can’t opt out of them.
I still have it on my phone (although at least within my house I’m blocking their metrics via pinhole) but I 100% understand why someone would not want it on their phone.
Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the end of the day, nothing is free. It's just a different payment scheme and Apple is killing that scheme. We don't even pay through our privacy or attention span. These are simply wasted in the process of offloading the payment to a different payment processor. The game is not free, it just collects the payments through the candy shop. The offsetting of the payment includes you stop playing and looking at candy…
> also Google's cut and Facebook's cut in advertisement(which is not transparent and I hear that it's about %50). In general, neither Google nor FB take a "cut" in the traditional sense from their advertising. What (normally) happens is that advertiser bids their "true value" (i.e expected LTV), and a second price auction is run. In this kind of auction, the winner pays the price that the runner-up was willing to spe…
Thanks for the clarifications. How they charge the money and What does FB and Google call it? How much is it?
Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
#248I 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 understand being strongly against one type of default tracking but strongly for another. Tracking is tracking as far as I’m concerned and I’m against all of it.
Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rivaled only by the indignity of those proudly and unironically proclaiming, “I own the result of my HTTP request and consider blocking ads and still taking advantage of not paying for content my god-given right.”
Honest question: are you, or have you ever been (or are you planning to be), someone with a direct financial stake in the ad industry? Employee, shareholder, board member, whatever. The answer to that question will greatly influence what we think of your witticism in the previous comment :-)
Yes, my livelihood depends on customers discovering products and services and then paying money for those things.
Re: Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So, this is a weird one. I mean, all of this stuff is pretty much automated, there isn't a team of people at adtech companies going hmmm user 621163091 is looking for PC's serve him an ad for Lenovo. Its a series of complicated ML models with large amounts of inputs and outputs that no human understands at a level where they could predict which ad a human gets. In the above scenario, I'm not sure that I see a violati…
Data has a way of being used in ways other than the one for which it was ostensibly originally collected. Especially once you let data scientists get in there and start having fun with it. (Source: I should know, I am one.) Or maybe you've got a unscrupulous employee who uses their access to the data to dox people. (Source: I used to work at a company where that happened.) And since, in a country like the USA, they are not subject to any particularly effective data protection laws, they're also really easy to sell to just whoever, or maybe liquidate at a bankruptcy auction, or whatever. The buyer may or may not intend to use it for better or worse purposes than the original collector. There's no real way of knowing.
There's also the security question. Data breaches are real and happen all the time. I think that the crackers' perspective on this subject may be, if I may misappropriate the famous IRA statement, "remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."
In short, the mere existence of these pools of data is a threat, not only to people's privacy, but to their personal security. Even when you can't demonstrate that a specific harm has occurred yet. It's like hazardous waste: given enough time, it will leak out and cause damage.