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Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals

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Re: Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals

#121

Post by arrosenberg »

tinus_hn wrote: post #73
Havoc wrote: post #30

Sounds like they're copying google with their desire to get rid of cookies / FLOC etc. Strong privacy stance on privacy for others (and in media)...but very quiet on 1st party inhouse ability to connect the dots. I have a hard time seeing how this doesn't end in anti-trust tears for both of them

You don’t need to invade privacy to show ads in a search result, based on that search. That’s how DuckDuckGo survives. We’ve all heard the anti trust whining about the App Store for over a decade now. It’s not happening. Nintendo gets to decide what you put on a Nintendo Switch, Apple gets to decide what you put on an iPhone. That’s not monopoly abuse, if you don’t like it buy different console or an Android phone. P…

Its not “obviously” monopoly abuse by virtue of the fact that the antitrust laws have not been updated to account for modern markets and technologies. Beyond that, its not hard to distinguish between Nintendo, a company that makes consoles and video games (and has several larger competitors); and Apple, a vertically integrated empire who controls a big chunk of the global communication and entertainment markets and does not have significant competition (just cartel-style competitors).

Re: Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals

#122

Post by justapassenger »

teekert wrote: post #96
justapassenger wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unobtrusive ads have nothing to do with serving them locally, and are main reason why people have problems with them. Give it some time. Ads become obtrusive because it works and it brings more revenue.

They had tracking ads, everybody blocked them, then they changed it.

Non tracking ads bring very little revenue as ads all about effectiveness. After initial experiments and cool off period you’ll either see more ads, tracking or scaling down of operations due to limited revenue.

Re: Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals

#123

Post by tinus_hn »

arrosenberg wrote: post #121
tinus_hn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to invade privacy to show ads in a search result, based on that search. That’s how DuckDuckGo survives. We’ve all heard the anti trust whining about the App Store for over a decade now. It’s not happening. Nintendo gets to decide what you put on a Nintendo Switch, Apple gets to decide what you put on an iPhone. That’s not monopoly abuse, if you don’t like it buy different console or an Android phone. P…

Its not “obviously” monopoly abuse by virtue of the fact that the antitrust laws have not been updated to account for modern markets and technologies. Beyond that, its not hard to distinguish between Nintendo, a company that makes consoles and video games (and has several larger competitors); and Apple, a vertically integrated empire who controls a big chunk of the global communication and entertainment markets and d…

Apple controls slightly less than 20% of the global smartphone market and has been bypassed by Samsung in market share. It’s just ridiculous to claim they do not have significant competition, they have less than 20% while that other over 80% is all Android.

Even in their biggest market, the US, they barely pass 50% and the rest is all one very successful competitor. Pretty significant competition.

Re: Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals

#125

Post by chillee »

tzs wrote: post #106

> Apple’s ad business began to boom following changes it made last year to its app tracking policies that made it easier for iPhone users to opt out of being tracked across other apps on their phones. What's the mechanism here? Is it something like this? Before the change: 1. I use say a free (with ads) guitar tuner app. 2. That app usage gets shared with Facebook's app. 3. Facebook now knows I'm probably a guitar pl…

> That app usage gets shared with Facebook's app.

That's not really the primary mechanism, as far as I know. My understanding of the flow is this:

Before:

1. You browse Facebook. 2. Companies who want to sell a guitar tuner app buy ads targeted to guitar tuner apps. 3. You click on the ad, and you download the app. Both the app and Facebook get an unique ID identifying you (this is called the "ID for Advertisers" or IDFA). 4. You use the app, maybe pay them money. The app is able to directly attribute you giving them money to the ad it ran on Facebook, and Facebook is able to know that you converted on the ad, which is very good signal. 5. The company is able to accurately track its conversions, and Facebook is able to accurately price ads.

After: 1. You browse Facebook (and opt out of cross-app tracking). 2. Companies buy the ad, you click on it, download the app. 3. You no longer get an ID, instead both Facebook and the company get a scrambled ID that they can no longer link. 4. As a result, Facebook can no longer attribute the results of its ads as effectively, leading to less accurate signal and less confidence from advertisers.

From my understanding, one of the ironic things now is that ATT has forced companies like Facebook to collect even more data (see https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/15272970860601139...). Because Apple no longer provides this unique ID for Facebook/advertisers to uniquely track conversions, apps/Facebook are forced to rely on much more data collection in order to probabilistically predict conversions.

Much of my knowledge of this area comes from Stratechery - I think this article, particularly the section entitled "And" explains what "cross app tracking" is: https://stratechery.com/2022/data-and-definitions/

Re: Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals

#126

Post by FredPret »

ftyhbhyjnjk wrote: post #3

Apple is a hypocrite. Have been saying this for years now. A deeply corrupted, arrogant and empathyless organization.

Corruption would be if they used company money for something that doesn’t create value for the owners, or bribed government officials. Certainly there is more than zero corruption, but it doesn’t seem like a characteristic feature.

Arrogance would be if they rested on their laurels and stopped innovating.

Empathy is a human quality, and not something organizations can have.

Hypocrisy may or may not apply, but at least they aren’t selling my data to the highest bidder. I trust them with my data and they keep it to themselves. I’m OK with that.

Re: Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals

#127

Post by tomjen3 »

koolba wrote: post #76
s1k3s wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no competitor to their super expensive product.

Putting aside the walled garden of iMessage, what’s so special about iPhones that you can’t do with any other expensive smartphone? The average person is just checking email, taking pictures of their food, reading garbage news sites, and watching mindless fad videos.

Your first sentence used "you". The second said "the average person".

That is two different statements. HN users are not Joe Average. Apart from working with the Apple Ecosystem, I cannot get enough privacy on Android. The new changes does not mean that Android is acceptable, it just means that the Iphone is also not acceptable, leaving me with zero acceptable smart phones.

Re: Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals

#128

Post by fezfight »

jefftk wrote: post #44
Havoc wrote: post #30

Sounds like they're copying google with their desire to get rid of cookies / FLOC etc. Strong privacy stance on privacy for others (and in media)...but very quiet on 1st party inhouse ability to connect the dots. I have a hard time seeing how this doesn't end in anti-trust tears for both of them

In getting rid of third party cookies it's Google copying Apple. This is something that Apple brought mainstream with ITP in 2017.

You could always disable them in Firefox both desktop and mobile. So I guess they're both copying Mozilla in this regard.

Re: Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals

#129

Post by diffeomorphism »

koolba wrote: post #76
s1k3s wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no competitor to their super expensive product.

Putting aside the walled garden of iMessage, what’s so special about iPhones that you can’t do with any other expensive smartphone? The average person is just checking email, taking pictures of their food, reading garbage news sites, and watching mindless fad videos.

> that you can’t do with any other expensive smartphone

There are two, again two platforms that matter for phones. That's it. "Well, it is not 1, so we can just twiddle our thumbs and ignore the problem" is not at all convincing. And then people get sidetracked with "but the term monopoly taken literally means...". Yes, nobody cares. Antitrust is explicitly not just about that.

Re: Apple is building an ad empire as its iPhone privacy crackdown weakens rivals

#130

Post by Terretta »

asdfkuhefukhwef wrote: post #67
consumer451 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am able to use Firefox Focus to block ads in Safari on iOS. I’ve not had an Android for a while. What additional ad blocking features would I have on Android these days?

> I am able to use Firefox Focus to block ads in Safari on iOS You think you are able to, but you just got lucky so far. Focus code is very buggy and work for only a few sites. It's very hard to contribute fixes, so I expect it to stagnate even more. And since the sites we, the tech elite, read are similar to the ones the few maintainers do, those will be well served while all the rest of the internet will not see an…

1Blocker and AdGuard Pro for iOS are both quite good.

1Blocker in particular has a great UI for homebrew element targeting, while AdGuard Pro supports arbitrary lists and relatively rich blocklist filter rules.

Both are very actively maintained. The innovation from AdGuard is surprisingly rapid, they are not just resting on feature sets from long ago.

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