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Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

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Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#311

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

closeparen wrote: post #297
ogre_codes wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fraud prevention for example will get an order of magnitude harder, First Ad Fraud != Fraud. It is low grade hacking. Second. Trading the privacy of every iPhone user so that advertisers can prop up a sketchy/ poor industry is a terrible trade.

This completely changes the game on all kinds of fraud, not just ad fraud. Currently when you get caught, the service you’re abusing bans your device. To keep trying you need new hardware; attacks have a real monetary cost for the attacker. When your iPhone can present itself as infinitely many iPhones, this is neutered, and services will need different (probably more invasive) techniques to keep banned users away.

Can someone (only) use IMEI plus account instead of IDFA for uniqueness?

So if you want to exclude/ban a user, you can use the IMEI+account, but outside of excluding a user from using your service, you cannot access IMEI+account.

User privacy is preserved because there's no singular ID for advertisers, and services can still ban fraud because if it's present they can use the IMEI+account to ban a user.

Maybe even have that built into the OS? The app can ban someone based on an IMEI+account, but the IMEI+account info stays on the device. The device just certifies that the combination is unique without exposing that info to the app, and the app can still ban that hardware/account, so the user would need to buy new hardware to get around the ban.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#313

Post by jefftk »

egsmi wrote: post #302
jefftk wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time, privacy and fraud both benefit from the same changes. To prevent tracking online, you want your device to look just like everybody else's devices. To prevent fraud, you want devices to look different so you can tell when a device does not represent a real user. At the extreme, imagine if every person has a unique identifier that was automatically sent whenever they used any device: preventing ad fra…

> To prevent fraud Honest question, I am not trying to be obtuse, but in this context can you more specifically define fraud? Is it just "ad fraud" as defined here: https://www.clickcease.com/blog/what-is-ad-fraud/ I get why businesses should care about ad fraud, but why should I, as a consumer care about it? Frankly I don't even want to know about my traffic, let alone yours.

Yes, ad fraud. We're talking about endymi0n's claim in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25429278 that without IDFA preventing ad fraud is (a) harder and (b) disproportionately harder for smaller players.

As for why you should care about it, see my response to thesuitonym below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25431866

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#314

Post by ogre_codes »

closeparen wrote: post #297
ogre_codes wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fraud prevention for example will get an order of magnitude harder, First Ad Fraud != Fraud. It is low grade hacking. Second. Trading the privacy of every iPhone user so that advertisers can prop up a sketchy/ poor industry is a terrible trade.

This completely changes the game on all kinds of fraud, not just ad fraud. Currently when you get caught, the service you’re abusing bans your device. To keep trying you need new hardware; attacks have a real monetary cost for the attacker. When your iPhone can present itself as infinitely many iPhones, this is neutered, and services will need different (probably more invasive) techniques to keep banned users away.

> This completely changes the game on all kinds of fraud, not just ad fraud.

Getting around a ban is not Fraud.

Regardless, a cross app ad identifier is not needed to prevent this. There are ways within your app to save data per iOS user (this is not cross app data, it's specific to your app) which would allow you to prevent this. You could use sign in with Apple/ Google/ Facebook. You could require emails. etc etc.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#315

Post by ogre_codes »

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #311
closeparen wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This completely changes the game on all kinds of fraud, not just ad fraud. Currently when you get caught, the service you’re abusing bans your device. To keep trying you need new hardware; attacks have a real monetary cost for the attacker. When your iPhone can present itself as infinitely many iPhones, this is neutered, and services will need different (probably more invasive) techniques to keep banned users away.

Can someone (only) use IMEI plus account instead of IDFA for uniqueness? So if you want to exclude/ban a user, you can use the IMEI+account, but outside of excluding a user from using your service, you cannot access IMEI+account. User privacy is preserved because there's no singular ID for advertisers, and services can still ban fraud because if it's present they can use the IMEI+account to ban a user. Maybe even hav…

The IMEA is worse than the IDFA and neither is needed for this use case.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#316

Post by jefftk »

willstrafach wrote: post #291
jefftk wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time, privacy and fraud both benefit from the same changes. To prevent tracking online, you want your device to look just like everybody else's devices. To prevent fraud, you want devices to look different so you can tell when a device does not represent a real user. At the extreme, imagine if every person has a unique identifier that was automatically sent whenever they used any device: preventing ad fra…

1. You’re allowed to use IDFA. But users will now have to allow access, as a permission dialog will pop up first. 2. The IDFA is just a simple static UUID. It cannot do a very good job at preventing fraud. There is no way to validate anything about it or affirm that it ties to a genuine device.

1: I expect this will translate to the majority of traffic will not have IDFA available, either by apps not wanting to annoy users by asking, or users saying no.

2: On a single request, yes. But users typically make very large numbers of requests over time. The pattern of requests that you'd see from a real user looks pretty different than what you'd see from a bot.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#317

Post by damnyou »

airstrike wrote: post #305
damnyou wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I'm not a fan of advertising, but one of the most important things it does is level the playing field across income levels and countries. $5/month would be outrageously expensive for a very large number of people, most of whom are not on Hacker News , and any discussion of replacing advertising with a subscription model has to start from that basic fact.

There's no reason Facebook can't charge Brazilians 5 BRL instead of 5 USD.

Sure. We're not talking about Facebook here, they'll be fine. We're talking about random sites and apps. How many apps on the Play/App Store actually implement differential pricing by region?

This cannot be an afterthought—it must be the central question all advertising skeptics must start with.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#318

Post by jefftk »

Nextgrid wrote: post #286
rndgermandude wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the second part of your answer. Indeed, if you wanted something like a way to id bad actors, you could do some scheme where the OS (or browser or even secondary service) could do some form of attestation that isn't trackable and has even stronger guarantees than some unauthenticated unique id has. If Apple and Google can make their Corona Tracking APIs untrackable by third parties, then untrackable "valid devi…

The coronavirus exposure notifications are only "safe" because we assume no single actor can put Bluetooth receivers every square meter, thus rotating the IDs every so often is an effective defense against potential tracking. The same couldn't work with the internet because essentially every ID would be known to potential bad actors, as they'd be tracking every single one of them (among other data points) and can eas…

If you read the trust tokens proposal you can see how it does not have that vulnerability: https://web.dev/trust-tokens/

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#319

Post by jefftk »

raxxorrax wrote: post #273
fumar wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you pay for the services and content you consume?

Advertisers would put stupid banners on my page because they cannot do anything else but still want to advertise. Maybe they spend less because they get less return. I actually think it would increase quality of content.

Why would you expect this to increase the quality of content?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#320

Post by damnyou »

inetknght wrote: post #301
damnyou wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I'm not a fan of advertising, but one of the most important things it does is level the playing field across income levels and countries. $5/month would be outrageously expensive for a very large number of people, most of whom are not on Hacker News , and any discussion of replacing advertising with a subscription model has to start from that basic fact.

You're justifying the abuse of people's privacy because they can't afford to buy out of it. That might be legal for the moment but it is in no way moral.

I'm not justifying anything, I'm merely stating what I think is an unequivocally positive side effect of advertising-based models: they have automatic price discrimination built in. Subscription models do not have it built in—developers have to do extra work to introduce price discrimination. I think this is a demerit of subscription models, though not one that outweighs the demerits of advertising models.
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