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Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

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Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#321

Post by urza »

coldpie wrote: post #196
jforman wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it makes advertising more expensive, which in turn makes the products and services you use more expensive.

I would be thrilled if online advertising became unviable as a business model. Most of what makes the web suck today (megabytes of javascript on every page; clickbait articles; outrage-driven social media; warehouses of PII waiting to be bought/sold/stolen) is because of advertising. Yes, I do want to pay for the services I use.

This. So much this. But there is hope. It seems that people are starting to realize the "price" of free content and are more and more willing to pay for it.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#322

Post by ABCLAW »

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.

As someone alt-tabbing in from real fraud investigation work, no, it doesn't. Banning burner phones and reducing banking privacy regulations would move the needle there, but those aren't even on the radar.

"Someone's script opened a page" isn't fraud. Someone built a script specifically to spam click a competitor's ads, by contrast, is.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#323

Post by bluesign »

dialtone wrote: post #299
bluesign wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true, any ad network benefits from IDFA, bigger the better. Removing of IDFA should close the gap between big players like Google, Facebook etc vs others.

I don't do mobile advertising but this is just incorrect... Most of Google's revenue comes from Search and that has nothing to do with IDFA. Then how would third parties with no access to first party data compete when there's no more third party data would be something I'm curious for you to explain.

Ok first of all I am not saying that third parties without access to first party data will compete with google's search ad business.

I think after removal of IDFA, smaller ad networks will steal some of big players mobile market share. And mobile advertising will not move to search based advertisement as much as you think. Maybe some revenue will shift there, but I think lose on mobile side will be bigger.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#324

Post by thewebcount »

pradn wrote: post #157
LC_ALL wrote: post #50

Say what you want about Apple but they are by far the most privacy focused big company. Their income is from selling physical devices. Typical megacorps in 2020 are leveraging economies of scale to sell their users' attention. Apple has a unique value add in that when their users benefit they benefit. Sent from my Thinkpad.

Apple gets on the order of $12 billion a year from Google to make Google Search the default search engine in iOS. All that money comes from ads. They care about privacy until it hits their pocketbook.

That's a rich sentiment considering the article is written by Mozilla who gets the some money for the same purpose!

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#325

Post by caddywompus »

zepto wrote: post #310
caddywompus wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's odd though, they have these contradictory actions. For the iPhone, they are pushing for privacy, but on MacOS, we are now dealing with things like excessive telemetry to the point of phoning a authorization server for running local binaries. Not to mention the new firewall issues, where Apple utilities are able to bypass local firewall rules.

Surely you know this ‘telemetry’ statement isn’t really true. They use badly designed open protocol to do certificate revocation. It’s not like they designed this as a way to collect user data.

Perhaps they don't intend to use the data as telemetry, but regardless, intentionally or not, they are receiving information about what you are running, even if it were just a hash of the binary. So you're right, it would be a trivially small information leak, but I'd like to think a company focused on privacy wouldn't resort to such an aggressive protocol.

I haven't followed this very closely, has anyone determined exactly what is being sent?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#326

Post by orangepanda »

t-writescode wrote: post #306
fbelzile wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you correctly point out, those are revenue figures, not profit. $10 billion from Google out of $60 billion in profit is significant. Apple saying they 'care' about privacy while making +15% of its profits from Google alone is hypocritical.

You just spun terms in your own comment. > those are revenue figures, not profit > $10 billion from Google out of $60 billion in profit is significant

What expenses are there to keep google the default engine?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#327

Post by thewebcount »

fbelzile wrote: post #205
LC_ALL wrote: post #50

Say what you want about Apple but they are by far the most privacy focused big company. Their income is from selling physical devices. Typical megacorps in 2020 are leveraging economies of scale to sell their users' attention. Apple has a unique value add in that when their users benefit they benefit. Sent from my Thinkpad.

> Their income is from selling physical devices. Not entirely true anymore: 1) About $8-12 billion paid by Google to have their search engine default. [1] 2) About $20 billion from their 15-30% cut of third party app developers. Where the App Store is protected from competition. [2] 3) Apple services (like Apple TV+), which collects usage data for itself and third parties. [3] [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/25…

> 1) About $8-12 billion paid by Google to have their search engine default.

And Mozilla, who wrote this article, also gets the majority of their funding through paid search, mostly from Google.

> Precisely 94% of Mozilla revenues came through royalties received by search engines to be featured on its Mozilla Firefox browser.[0]

[0] https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-mozilla-make-money/

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#328

Post by thatcat »

jefftk wrote: post #316
willstrafach wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>2

Of course they look different over time, isn't the problem here that same data can be used to do statistical analysis for other purposes than fraud prevention?

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#329

Post by pradn »

thewebcount wrote: post #324
pradn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple gets on the order of $12 billion a year from Google to make Google Search the default search engine in iOS. All that money comes from ads. They care about privacy until it hits their pocketbook.

That's a rich sentiment considering the article is written by Mozilla who gets the some money for the same purpose!

Yes, that same hypocrisy applies to Mozilla. And it's been a total and unfortunate way to run a nonprofit - getting money from a direct competitor that wants to pay you as little as possible. The lower the browser market share, the worse their negotiating position got.

I wish they had come up with an alternate revenue stream.

Re: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

#330

Post by t-writescode »

orangepanda wrote: post #326
t-writescode wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just spun terms in your own comment. > those are revenue figures, not profit > $10 billion from Google out of $60 billion in profit is significant

What expenses are there to keep google the default engine?

I'm not sure this is the correct question. Every company has cost centers and profit centers.

Historically, for example, Playstations were sold at a loss and the games were sold at a profit and a licensing fee to offset that loss.

In the more modern world, Steam and Apple and Epic Games all charge a percentage-based commission for the games and in-app purchases their games have (at least some of them charge the latter). The cost of keeping the game in their catalog is very low compared to the price they charge. The markup is very high; but, it does offset development costs throughout the company. Those development costs may or may not help drive traffic or even use the services that the money-making services boulster, but the money-making services do help pay for it.

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