https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...
The harder something is to find and disable, the shadier it seems.
If Apple is indeed favouring their own ad services they might indeed be the target of very well funded antitrust-based legal campaigns. I assume the adtech companies would have at least threatened them with this.
So they are probably going to retune their own ad service to comply with the same before they go live with this change.
Nobody cares about individual users in the end, once in 50 years you might get a politician who rises to a populist challenge.
But when you take 1/2 of some major adjacent-competitors money away, then it's war. The stakes are 10's of billions and every lobbyist, lawyer, marketer, PR person is going to be engaged.
I wouldn't quite speculate on Apple's motivations here, but it's a very real and big issue. They can screw you and I, and even Fornite, but Facebook? An then 'self deal' with their own ads? Even that is a risk.
Compare this with third-party advertising, where the use of IDFA does explicitly hand information to third parties that they otherwise wouldn't have. For example, the Facebook SDK is integrated into a bazillion different apps, so Facebook can track a single user across all of these different apps even if the user doesn't use Facebook login (or if they use Facebook login for a single one of these apps, Facebook can then associate the usage of all the other apps with that same login too).
The two are not remotely equivalent.
If that is true, it absolutely contradicts Apple's claim that "Privacy is built in from the beginning":
I'd personally prefer not to have any of the ad tracking stuff, especially at the OS level.
Before the wave of whinging I'm not pro ads. I'm just pointing out this is a big disruption to the financial models of many free apps.
I feel like taking billions from Google to be the default search engine on iOS also did that
What a bummer! As an iOS user, I was eagerly looking forward to this feature, wanting to tell others about it and how the upgrade to iOS 14 would be worth it just to clearly expose apps that want to track users.
I already have ad tracking limited in my settings (Settings->Privacy->Limit Ad Tracking), but that was something I had to explicitly turn on, and there’s no notice on which apps use the ID for advertising.
I think waiting until early 2021 is better than having anything that depends on ad revenue see a huge dropoff until the industry figures things out.
That's an excellent reason to do it.
Any computer I own (including a phone) is supposed to represent its users interests; It is not supposed to be some compromise between betraying their trust and making money for ad networks.
(Personally, I already have limit tracking enabled. And I use custom DNS filtering, and a bunch of other BS. But my friends and family shouldn't need to do that to have their phone refuse to give information about them)
Disappointed in Apple on this one.
In no other domain is implicit, cross-arena tracking by default acceptable. Computers _should be_ no exception.
Maybe you don't think it should be acceptable, but it's the norm everywhere. Computers aren't an exception.
Your purchases are tracked by credit card companies. Your license plate is tracked by road cameras. Your financial history is tracked by credit bureaus. Your phone calls are tracked by your telephony provider.
And you haven't opted into any of them.
In fact, except for the annoying cookie pop-ups on websites, I've never encountered opt-in tracking anywhere in my life. Everything is tracking-by-default, and you're lucky if you get an option to opt out anywhere.
Most of the tracking you mentioned is done for purely functional purposes (the product/service can't work without knowing who you are, etc) where as the majority of online tracking is purely there for wasting people's time with ads.
What's a domain analogous to computers without tracking? I suppose all those are "by computers" at the end of the day, but I can't think of anything I do that isn't tracked somehow.
Facebook's concern isn't oriented around their revenue - it's about the 3rd party advertising ecosystem on mobile in general ($2B of FB's $80B revenue). FB and Google will take a small hit from their 3rd party mobile ad networks going away, but they still have their dominant 1st party businesses to fall back on.
Who this really hurts are the apps that don't directly sell their own ads and rely on a 3rd party network to monetize. Those apps' revenues will be chopped in half overnight, sending a shockwave throughout the entire mobile ecosystem.
FB and Google get poked in one eye, but most ad-supported apps will be blinded.
"We are committed to ensuring users can choose whether or not they allow an app to track them. To give developers time to make necessary changes, apps will be required to obtain permission to track users starting early next year. More information, including an update to the App Store Review Guidelines, will follow this fall."
With GDPR cookie warnings, you’re required to opt in, but everybody uses dark UI patterns to make you “opt in” (like forcing you to uncheck each tracker individually, and claiming it takes several minutes to “update your preferences”)
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidenti...
"The advertisingIdentifier is an alphanumeric string unique to each device, that you only use for advertising."
Apple created an API for advertisers that gives them a unique identifier, specifically for the purpose of tracking users. This has been available since iOS 6, released in 2012.
Shame, shame on advertisers for using the thing that Apple made for them to use!
If Apple cares so much about privacy, why did they make this in the first place? Where has Apple been for the past 8 years?
Didn't seem to work.
> The advertiser I'd had always been opt in so it was progress for privacy.
It's opt out: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074
Edit: It’s funny how on HN, you can tell the ones who get triggered when you say something disparaging about adtech. Just interesting to see here vs other tech media outlets.
SKAdNetwork was poorly designed, it did not involve publishers and channels and till this week it was literally impossible to test. A 3 month period will allow all actors in the advertising industry to integrate and come up with solutions that protect the user's privacy.
If this was released in the current state, you are giving the whole advertising market in a silver plate to google and facebook, who because of their huge share of SDK integrations are much better prepared to overcome the limitations. The market would also shrink instantly, many publishers and channels would disappear, specially the small ones.
Having already pissed off the advertisers, Apple felt threatened enough to turn around and alienate its power users.
Couldn't have been an easy decision...
They certainly still get to claim they are focused on privacy even if they decide to kick the can a few more times, since the notifications/controls will come “eventually”.
If you want to flip the switch right now for all third party apps:
Go to Settings > Privacy > Advertising. Turn on Limit Ad Tracking.
But, I bet this is mostly antitrust related, the risk is too big on that front in the current context. Now, what I wonder is whether they'll adjust to play by the same rules as everyone else (and not using some extra features as detailed in the Forbes article mentioned in another comment [0]) or revert in some way.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...
What was Facebook going to do? Pull out of iOS? They had all the power.
0: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/28/apple-blocked-facebook-...
I was about to grab some popcorn.
I'd liken it to reading a post on mumsnet.com with 100+ middle aged women arguing about 5g.
The "Do No Track" header is the perfect example, largely abandonded because when ad companies realised how many people would set it they just ignored it altogether. Thankfully with Apple's changes they, as the gatekeeps of the walled garden, can ban apps that don't respect the user's "don't track me" signal.
The ad industry has had an abundance of chances to fix these issues, but haven't. As a user I welcome Apple forcing their hand even if the business models of many apps will be broken as a result.
It's a cleansing by fire if you will.
If adtech collapses, a lot of scum will go out of business and will be replaced by something more lean that people would be happy to pay for (a social network can easily operate on $1/month/user). Nothing of value will be lost.
The entitlement of ad tech is unbelievable.
> I'd liken it to reading a post on mumsnet.com with 100+ middle aged women arguing
Yeah, women, amirite?
Ads without tracking are an even less effective business model. We don't have to make ads stop working entirely, we just have to make them sufficiently ineffective that they're not worth paying enough to make ad revenue worthwhile.
And no, without apps people would be able to discover new things. Current ads are not about facts but connecting feelings with products.
I don't have any trouble with advertising and tracking... so long as it's clear and obvious that it's happening and you have an easy way to opt out. This should make both sides happy.
Google could mine Photos I suppose, but there's no user graph there, and no text blurb, and no "likes", so it's less valuable. Google is also more reliant on tracking due to DoubleClick and ad exchanges. Be that as it may, Google search ads should also be unaffected.
Where this really hurts are ads shown in apps which are not controlled by Google/FB. Those would need an ID to know who you are in order to boost relevance. And that's being withdrawn. I'm not sure how much exposure FB has to that, though. I know Google is heavily exposed.
I also wonder why, because their apps already require a user to sign in. It must reference to cross-app tracking, I'm also surprised they were so dependent on that.
