I am not a native English speaker, but I am not sure about that. Look at the word "track" -- pretty much no one would want to be tracked, right?
I guess if they replace "track" with "identify", more people would actually allow that. Something like "Allow this app to identify your device across apps and websites". Average users usually don't have problem being identified. They use the same email across websites, and will prefer facebook login on 3rd party websites if it is an option...
End of day, the thing getting blocked by the prompt is iOS IDFA, where letters "ID" mean "identifier".
But still, I don't mind Apply play a little wording game here. The ad industry, on the other side, did way uglier than Apple in the last decade.
I am a native speaker, and we are being far more than “identified” by these invasions. Why should Apple be using softer, less accurate, English to protect the likes of Facebook? This is not something to sugar coat, it is something to call out plainly.
I mean if your asking for ID, they Why is always there: to prove age, to track, etc. So, calling it "track" in their (Apple) messaging is good. Its the Identifier to Track You.
In different parts of your iOS settings, Apple will ask you it it's OK for ads to 'track' you, OK to 'personalise' ads and OK to 'measure ad effectiveness'. Framing is important.
I’m on Apple’s side, and think all three phrasings are fine.
However, I think that “track” sounds much more invasive than personalize. Of course we know they’re the same damn thing, but “personalized” sounds more innocent.
How do you "measure ad effectiveness" without tracking the user? Tracking is definitely the worst of the bunch so "measure ad effectiveness" have to be better/less pervasive than allowing tracking if it is unbiased, otherwise it should say "tracking".
Apple (Webkit) has proposed a browser feature that would allow tracking ad click-to-conversion without tracking the user or click. It involves the browser phoning home with low-entropy identifiers.
From a pure privacy perspective, it's odd because it involves the browser collaborating in measuring the results of your behavior. I think it shares several of the concerns with Google's FLoC and "privacy sandbox" proposals.
It only makes sense if you buy into Apple's perspective that there's a level of "acceptable" tracking, and new tracking features under that threshold are acceptable if they give Apple the political capital to kill tracking technology that crosses that threshold. It's a bit much to swallow. But they are at least trying to address that concern.
> "App Name" would like permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies
> [Allow Tracking]
> [As App Not to Track]
And then also the app developer can put in their own small description that shows in addition to the above.
This seems incredibly fair and conscience. It is an objective statement of facts that is only biased because the reality is something that most people probably don't like.
"and Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes" ... "We could spend a lot of time arguing about the rights and wrongs of privacy and Apple’s framing and steering and use of its market dominance"
Nice demonstration of apophasis there.
Regardless, how else should they frame it? The question seems incredibly concise and matter of fact. Indeed, the question simply claims that it will "ask" the app not to track, which seems pretty broad and permissive.
Can apps require tracking permission to be granted? For example, if you start the Facebook app and it detects tracking is disabled, can it pop up a message telling the user that they have to allow tracking to continue?
Not disagreeing - I meant that generally, not specifically. You can still target by knowing something about the user, rather than relying solely on the content itself.
Chrome's FLoC and TURTLEDOVE proposals are nascent web standards under the Web Incubator Community Group (https://wicg.io). My understanding is that Chrome is hoping to come up with something that other browsers also like?
As someone who helped connect various DMPs and server side systems in the ad industry, I don’t really understand floc. With first party cookies / server side data passing, things are tracked anyway is it not?
You visit a.example. It talks to a central server and says "I saw a user with identity a.example:foo". Then you visit b.example. It talks to a central server and says "I saw a user with identity b.example:bar". Without third-party cookies (or fingerprinting) how does the central server correlate these requests?
Ah, indeed. Appreciate that example. I guess my frame of mind comes from knowing what the large agency conglomerates are working around by using Unified ID or some other identity graph from pieces of data like hashed emails etc. Of course this means that the advertiser themselves are permitting such use.
I mean, yes, if you explicitly tell two websites who you are then they can agree on who you are. But that's very rare, no? What fraction of sites are you logging into?
In case you happen to know... I keep getting logged out of all websites on Chrome, pretty much every day. That’s a recent development. Is this symptom of how flock FloC works?
> Before the internet, that meant car ads in car magazines and watch ads in the Economist. Ads were based on context, and on inferring the audience from the context.
You can still do this. Car ads on car websites. Watch ads on the Economist website.
Has there been any research on the effectiveness of retargeting?
There is a tremendous amount of research on the effectiveness of retargeting. This is dubbed "incrementality" in the field. Issues are:
1. Incrementality is extremely hard to measure due to noise and biases, in particular when trying to account for the multiple agents in the game. Attributed sales are easy to measure. For global, incremental sales, it is much harder.
2. Because of 1, this research needs large amounts of data, which only large ad tech companies have access to.
3. Because the topic is so hard to pin down and so sensitive business-wise, no private ad-tech company would publish ground-breaking material on the topic.
What I find most telling is that in the article, not a single thought is dedicated to the user.
A deep introspection of advertisers, browsers, publishers. Users, the fundamental owners of the data we're talking about, seem to not even be at the table.
It seems to me that behavioral data is jointly owned by users and websites. "Here is what user X did on website Y." Can website Y share data with an ad network about that user? Can user X share data with an ad network about that website?
I for one am enjoying the new world of random ads I am getting. It feels like being let out of a bubble. I get to see all sorts of products I had never thought about. Not relevant ones, but the personalized ads never worked anyway.
Personalized ads were always about showing you ads for diapers just after your child had outgrown them, or ads for a crappy car just after you had bought a good car. Meh.
> When those publishers are in the news business, this is another trade-off - pay walls (and privacy!) conflict with reach and public purpose, and again they tend to work best for the strongest.
I think the most interesting "ads are good" argument I've heard is being able to give free tools to people who don't have the discretionary budget to pay for things like premium news. A bit sad about information paywalls over this.
At the same time, I'd still gamble that this 'apocalypse' will prove to be created because there wasn't pressure to perform better with a limited ad capabilities. My bet would still be that things will be fine even after the playing board is tamed -- the markets just need some time to react and correct.
Presumably you wouldn't be blasting ads for luxury goods or premium products. You'd be blasting ads for payday loans, gambling, get-rich-quick schemes and other scams.
Morally, ethically and potentially even legally wrong (technically the ad network should be held complicit if they're promoting a scam), but it does work. "No discretionary income" doesn't mean the mark won't spend money if they believe they have a high probability of making it back + more.
There are some other interesting ideas that aren't simply "invasive ads" or "subscriptions." Obviously, advertising was effective before the advent of the modern internet, so it seems like it should still be so if we rid ourselves of privacy-invasive hypertargeting and everyone has a level playing field (that being said, as the author and you yourself note, this does concentrate power in the hands of the best advertising "spots", e.g. Facebook or Google). There's stuff like BAT, which seems like it has a lot of potential but hasn't really taken off because most people just don't care enough about ads, and ads work well enough that there isn't sufficient motivation on the part of businesses to make it happen.
> Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes
Not quoting the question makes it easier for the author to frame the formulation as malicious without risking the reader coming to a different conclusion. Here's the question:
"Allow APP to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites?
Your data will be used to deliver personalized apps to you.
[Ask App Not to Track]
[Allow]"
(AFAICT, the second sentence can be different, e.g. "Your data will be used to measure advertising efficiency", depending on the app.)
Are you talking about Google display or Google search? I assuming the former given the context but wanted to ask to be sure. Google search shouldn’t be any different. I find it a common roadblock for one to think about advertising as a one sided transaction. Customers hate it, most advertisers don’t love it. Agencies and publishers love it because they get the fees. If you solve the customers problem, it’s a matter of reaching them in a contextual way.
How is your organic funnel, trade marketing, direct mail, etc. I don’t know what industry so it’s hard for me to give a specific example
(Disclosure: I work in marketing/advertising and audience analytics and attribution is one of my focus areas)
Could it be that the auctions got that much more competitive because display budget has gone elsewhere? (Genuine question, it's been a while since I heavily invested into search)
Wish I knew the reason why. All I can say is that every metric except conversions remained the same. So it kept charging but in exchange for nothing. We turned AdWords off last week. Email works fine and returning customers behave the same. Industry is organic beauty products
I think the article misses the point totally. I think the question is how much data is enough for advertisers and companies? The problem I see is that companies like Google/Facebook is that they have too much information gathered about users.
I get that all this information is great for targeting me with better ads, but I think there should be a limit to what data is collected and for how long it is kept.
Personally, I hope Congress (USA) creates some laws to allow consumers to opt out of all this tracking. If it is truly beneficial for users, then they will opt-in
That's a tough conversation to have because if you're worried about data retention, then you start looking at Apple. It's a new regime, which is off-putting because it flips the tired hero/villains narratives in unexpected ways
Unfortunately, in theory, _everything_: law enforcement stopped pushing for decryption because Apple became responsive to requests for icloud backups, which are _not_ encrypted, and no plans to. Word on the street is that was a negotiated understanding with gov't
In practice, Apple says they use the following data for targeting: search queries, news articles you've read, any content bought through their various store fronts, App Store searches, and app usage data and using it for targeting. Some of this is un-differentiable for privacy/needs to be stored server side, the Apple docs neither mention this distinction nor differential privacy at all, and there's no public indication any of this is covered by differential privacy
Done well, it's actually ok: you read the article looking for that last breadcrumb from the headline, and find it in the last paragraph with a sort of 'a-ha!' moment.
Here it's done badly, with some vague handwaving about how ad spend might go to Fedex for free returns.
As a consumer, if I were given a choice between intrusive cross-site tracking and free returns, the choice is completely obvious.
From the article -- "Ads were based on context, and on inferring the audience from the context."
This is incorrect. Since the beginning of advertising there have been people who survey those who read a particular magazine, newspaper, watch a particular show. And for those who are willing to share those habits with advertisers PAY THEM MONEY for that. Ever heard the term "Neilson family"? That was a family that agreed to put a special box on their television which recorded which channels you watched, when, and for how long. It would then aggregate that information and send it to advertisers and broadcasters alike. Based on who the "audience" was, they would negotiate advertising rights. And from the very beginning broadcasters try to "game" the results with known desirable content during "sweeps weeks" which were the weeks where the statistics were gathered.
Nearly every periodical I ever subscribed too occasionally sent a "marketing survey" with some compensation for filling it out like an extra year of subscription or a branded bag or something. There were, and ARE, periodicals today where the only "subscription price" you pay is giving up your personal data about why you want to read that periodical.
So the "apocolypse" here, is that these platform owners found a tasty revenue stream by disintermediating all of the surveyors and poll takers and returning statistics with 100% participation. No modelling necessary, here are the exact characteristics of your readers.
They didn't give their users a choice, they just took that private data and sold it.
And now they are whining, loudly, that OMG that value we were stealing? They want us to pay for that? That could ruin us!
Newsflash, it won't ruin you. Does this mean the end of "free" journalism? Maybe, but it was never free to begin with, it only felt free.
The surveys you're describing is the inferring. The ads are still based entirely on context, so the article is correct.
The inferring is still just statistical aggregation. Readers of the Economist may be on average wealthier, but a poor college student may still be reading it and seeing the ads for expensive watches. Even if they personally filled out a survey. Which is why the inferring is often wrong.
In contrast, actually search for watches today, and get watch ads for the next 3 months on every site you visit...
I read Benedict's statement "inferring from the context" (which is quoted) to mean that simply a magazine about camping (which is the context) "inferred" that the people reading it were people who liked camping. And while that would be a fine and benign thing, it wasn't the "inferring" the advertisers were doing back in the day.
Back when I did freelance writing for magazines there was a book that was published annually called "The Writers Guide" which published the demographic information for the readers of various periodicals. That was developed from surveys, not from context. It helped writers like me to understand what the editor would consider appropriate for their readership.
I feel that the solution to the pay for content problem is micropayments.
Why do I have to pay subscription to 10 news papers if i only read 2 articles per month from each? Why can’t I have a button at the bottom that says pay 10 cents to read the whole article where payment happens instantly without redirects and filling credit card info.
Why does paypal/stripe have a fixed minimum fee of $0.30 for doing a database update?
Here is an example of what I am talking about that is implemented via the lightning network: https://yalls.org/
> Why does paypal/stripe have a fixed minimum fee of $0.30 for doing a database update?
That's Visa + Mastercard's network fee.
------
Y'ever noticed how no-one has ever actually disrupted the online payments industry? It's because Visa and Mastercard own the very substrate of e-commerce through their private inter-bank networks. You cannot get anything done without going through them - and their minimum fees.
That’s the problem that cryptocurrency originally tried to solve, but of course that comes with its own set of drawbacks and shortcomings.
The fundamental problem is that the US Dollar was not designed for digital transactions. When bank networks came into existence, they stopped trading physical bills and just started flipping bits in their privately owned databases.
What needs to happen is the Federal Reserve needs to create a digital Dollar system that is secure, is accepted everywhere, and can be transacted quickly with zero fees. Erase the bank networks and turn banks into customer service centers who are given custodial powers (credit, chargebacks, rewards, etc) over your wallet in return for fees.
The government could even levy taxes over the entire US economy this way. No more tax dodging and loss of trillions in public funds. No more TurboTax.
Ut already exists in the form of the Web Monetization standard, which uses the Interledger network. Sadly it isn't very popular yet ( even if the Internet Archive, Imgur and Hacker Noon already support it).
I am not sure. I think the bundling of content might have a positive side effect:
I think there is a lot of content that people love to consume (cat videos, food porn, sports, etc.), even if it is not particularly “worthy”, and vice versa content that is important or worthy, and that you might want to have (even if you don’t always want to actually consume it!), such as deep investigative journalism exposing misdeeds of the powerful, operas, what have you.
With bundles, like The Economist or any other newspaper, or TV channels, you can support or cross subsidise the latter with the former.
With micro payments, not sure that would work. It might lead to more clickbait.
It’s a bit like in the experiment where you could preorder your food at the work canteen for the entire week - people would pre-order a nice balanced healthy diet, while when you make the choice every day, you end up with pizza most days.
Or how people would buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica for home for a substantial amount, and then rarely if ever use it.
However, one thing in favour of micropayments versus ads: they allow you to support an article without having to read it…
TLDR: subscriptions and bundles might allow “the better angels of our nature” to support better and more valuable content than micropayments or ad financing.
As someone who works in marketing, I tend to think that traditional mediums like billboards or direct mail tend to be highly underrated specifically because the tracking is not as detailed. As we move to a world with less data for digital ads, I have to imagine the playing field will be levelled out.
But really, the winners are Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn etc. Nearly all of our digital ad purchases have been directly on the big platforms. In-app or network ads have increasingly been absolute dogs for user acquisition anyway.
Meanwhile, I can pay Facebook directly to access their users and they don't have to give up any of their valuable data to anyone to do it because it's all in a closed system.
I've long assumed that the benefits of mega-targeting are overstated: we've all seen the ultra-targeted ads for say, TVs right after we bought a TV. Unobtrusive targeting based on the content of where the ad appears feels like it should capture much of the value without all the data collection.
Maybe I'm wrong and the targeting really does work that well that it should displace practically all other forms of advertising, but it just feels like a situation where it's to nobody's benefit within the ad buying/selling system to really take a hard look at whether this is worth it.
I think the issue is that we've actually moved away from targeted ads somehow. These ads aren't targeted ads, they are a best guess what you might want to buy. A targeted ad to me is something like an ad for some niche interest piece of gear on a website or magazine for that specific niche interest. 100% of your ad dollars in this case go to throwing an ad in front of what is guarenteed to be your customer base. When pampers tries to sell me diapers because I am of that age where people tend to have kids, that falls flat because they only guess that I am their customer base, rather than targeting that base explicitly like banner advertisement on a new parents forum.
Yeah I mean this is the thing. The ad market is dominated by the players who have a bunch of info about users/visitors and do user-specific targeting with that data. My understanding is that the payment rates for "targeted" ads in the sense of "place them on this site/article because it's a relevant topic" have plummeted.
Further, the extreme trackability of actual ad engagement I think has devalued the sense of value in just "your ad in front of eyeballs": I don't know that an ad you don't click on but that causes you to buy through other channels later really gets valued (though with the amount of tracking that happens maybe people are actually capturing this too).
The other thing that doesn't necessarily get tracked would be "your ad is so annoying/invasive/battery-draining/spookily-targeted that it actually turns people off from buying": they're just non-converted impressions same as any other. (There's also clearly a large component of "very few people really get turned off by ads, if they noticed you even out of annoyance that's good on balance" which might be true, I don't know.)
We'd have seen a shift in ad dollars regardless just owing to how much time people spend online and on mobile devices especially, but how much of the shift is driven just by the availability of the metrics? Again, the metrics are one of these things that's good for both theoretically-opposing "sides" of the ad market: the ad networks can obviously pitch them to marketing, and marketing can in turn use them to justify the ad budget.
Some of it is really effective! Being able to push an ad on LinkedIn to, like, only HR people at Fortune 500 companies is absolute gold. And saves a lot of people from looking at poorly targeted garbage messages.
The problem is that the markets are so danged efficient. Because everyone can so efficiently target the right people, you get exactly what you pay for. So you can blow a lot of money to find out that your message isn't right. Ironically, the amount of targeting data available makes it harder to justify A/B testing just because of the cost involved anymore.
I don't have a link right now, but I recall seeing at least one study within the past few months that showed just that: that despite the increased intrusiveness of data collection and ad tracking and targeting, conversion rates have not increased appreciably over simple context-based ad placements like we had a decade or so ago.
Those are two different datapoints. The assumption being if they went back to context ads we would have rates similiar to 2005. The consumer has changed and is smarter than the group of who joined aol and discovered the internet. Clickthrough rates have been falling since so it doesn't compare well.
People will pay more to target fewer because it costs them less to get sales.
How much have clickthrough rates been falling because people know advertisers are maliciously trying to siphon their data and ruin their browsing experience for a few more cents?
The ad network tracks what you've been looking at but obviously can't actually access your purchases. So all the ad network knows is you've shown intent to buy a tv, not that you've bought a tv.
In this case, the ad network would presumably not know or else they wouldn't keep showing you ads.
But it's worth noting that ad networks are more interconnected than most people realize. You can go to Facebook and see the "off-Facebook activity" they have received about you from partners, many of which are retailers. I imagine purchase-history is part of what's shared if you make purchases with those retailers using a email/phone number that's also associated with your Facebook account.
There are a few reasons why this re-targeting makes sense.
First, I would bet that multiple stores 'know' you searched for a television, while only one 'knows' you purchased one. The stores that don't know you already made a purchase will keep advertising in the hopes that you choose them, and the one you bought from may not have implemented a feature to 'de-target' you, because their conversion rate is low enough that it doesn't cost them much to keep targeting you.
Also, you may return the first one in favor of another, 'better' model; or you may be purchasing for other people or business use.
One thing I actually like on Facebook are the ads. I am into some very niche interests and they always show me interesting new products in that niche instead of broadly targeted stuff I don't want or need.
Ditto! I get a lot of ads for beer and board games. It's hard for me to argue that I would rather be getting ads for products I hate in the name of privacy.
I assume as in "gone to the dogs" - meaning gone bad, got awful, isn't good anymore. Old expression, came from (IIRC) when human food went bad and was only fit to give to the dogs.
FTA: "One side-effect of this was relocation of value - you can target an Economist reader a week later on a different website."
Don't this new tracking restrictions favor content creators at the expense of advertising networks?
Let me explain better: If I understand well, now The Economist could sell exclusive access to their readers by selling advertising directly to the advertiser? I believe this gives media with a certain volume of visitors and engagement an entire new leverage over "legacy adtech"
Correct. Previously, advertisers bought segments of 3P cookies, then targeted those IDs wherever they appeared. Cookiepocalypse means that advertisers will be unable to buy segments of domain-agnostic IDs (3P cookies), and so it will be up to the publisher to segment up its viewers and sell access to those segments to advertisers.
There will be more layers of aggregation on top of that, such as SSPs (supply-side platforms, which aggregate access to publishers' inventory) or PMPs (private marketplaes, which are effectively funnels of select inventory per some critera for some client), but the general principle is that targeting capabilities are shifting from the demand side to the supply side, closer to the viewer. So instead of picking the right segment, effective advertising will be about picking the right publishers. That's good for Google and Facebook because their 1P data is so rich.
I am always so surprised when I read articles like this by people in the "ad tech" space by the amount of sheer entitlement to people's attention and data. Apple making this move is treated as if they were denying access to a natural resource, like Nestle putting a fence around your local lake and selling you the water.
Ads are not inherently good, consumers don't need them, and ad companies don't have any right whatsoever to our attention or data. If it can be abused, it will be, and Google and Facebook have shown you can make tens of billions off of personal data and attention. To me it's fundamentally immoral. To see the terrifying endgame to all this, check out "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff.
I don't work in ad tech at all and never have. I'm just interesting in trying to work out what's doing on and what might happen. I also try to avoid moral panics and hysteria.
As someone who has helped build an attribution platform tying offline sales to online impressions, my hunch of what might happen is that the 3rd parties (in this case ad tech companies) will become more of the “connecting the pipes” role more than they already are. What is happening now with cookies has been happening since direct mail flyers were (and still are) a thing. Advertisers are selling purchase data (or trading) so you get commingled onto a list of people who like wine, watches and steaks. That list is then matched blindly with a 3rd party credit agency and commingled with other identifiers etc. Cookies are just a medium among many many identifiers, albeit a really easy one to use.
> But it’s also worth stepping up another level again, and asking what advertisers are trying to do, anyway. People say ‘privacy’ so often that one can lose sight of the fact that advertisers don’t care who you are - they just want to show ads to people that might be interested in them, and not to show ads to people who won’t be interested. They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’ - they want to show diaper ads to parents, car ads to people who want a car and watch ads to rich people.
This guy says this like advertisers have an inalienable right to show ads to people. Get the heck out of here.
No - it's pointing out what advertising is trying to do, which is not necessarily about privacy at all.
Meanwhile, it's apparently also worth pointing out that advertiser do not show anyone ads. Newspapers do. The media you enjoy and value shows you ads, and is paid for by them.
I have long discovered HN isn't the place for discussions about Ads, Retail, Supply Chain and Business Model. Which is strange because every single one of them are important to Startup.
There is the angle of Apple's hypocrisy in terms of Ads and Data Collection, which is of course out of scope of this article. All while they are expanding their own Ad network [1].
And just want to say Thank You, for your newsletter and blog post.
Advertisers also want to actually get that private data, so they can refine their targeting.
And then of course there is the problem of leakage (Cambridge Analytica et al).
So it's not quite so benign as you suggest. Every marketer I've ever met has a voracious desire for any/all data about anyone they might consider marketing to.
I mean, they have a right to _try_. Publishers can put (basically) anything they want on their channels, and take money from (basically) anyone to promote their content. Whether that's a winning strategy for publisher or advertiser is down to consumer choices.
Hopefully the worst offenders here (Samsung Smart TV ads?) are rightfully punished by their users here.
I’m quite confused by the paragraph arguing that advertisers don’t want to violate my privacy. So if I’m a parent and rather keep that private from everyone, how’s showing me diaper ads by obtaining that information from somewhere I didn’t suspect not a violation of my privacy?
> I think it’s very likely that Apple is looking at offering this in third-party apps and in Safari as well
[browser analyses your behaviour and puts you into (mostly) anonymous, interest-based cohorts]
"advertisers don’t care who you are - they just want to show ads to people that might be interested in them, and not to show ads to people who won’t be interested. They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’"
"here’s a bunch of reasons why this might not work, not least that no-one except Google and Apple want Google and Apple to have that much control over publishing and advertising. "
I've said this previously, if you for a second think Apple is protecting you against evil "Social Media company" or "Evil X Advertiser", you are wrong. Apple is only looking out for Apple. And they want to be the one who controls user data. Plain and simple.
The enemy of your enemy is not necesarily your friend.
Things SHOULD change. Moving the power from one big corp to another big corp is not the answer. No matter how convenient it may seem.
"I've said this previously, if you for a second think Apple is protecting you against evil "Social Media company" or "Evil X Advertiser", you are wrong. Apple is only looking out for Apple. "
How are these two sentences at odds with each other? Apple is absolutely "protecting me against evil social media companies" because I give them a lot of money for their products that offer privacy as a feature. They are looking out for Apple by providing a high value, sadly unique service in the industry, and their users obviously appreciate it.
It is possible for there to be aligned interests between a user and a provider. Pointing out that they're doing it for their own reasons (which in this case is their product positioning) isn't the slam dunk you think it is.
I'm saying Apple is ok with exempting themselves. How come their apps are not using the same dialog? Why do they hide behind "location services", when in reality, they are used for similar purposes?
How can AirTags highjack ANY apple device to report their location, without asking the device owner? Do IOS owners get asked in a dialog about allowing air tag tracking? NOPE
"How come their apps are not using the same dialog?"
Apple isn't sharing your data with other companies / data brokers. They aren't selling your information, or buying your information. It is a silo. They aren't "exempting" themselves, it isn't relevant to them.
For that matter, maybe you haven't noticed but Google apps don't show this warning either. For whatever criticisms I might have about Google's data siphoning, they silo it and aren't data whores like Facebook and companies like that.
Again, this is Apple's business model, and it's one that many of us appreciate and will pay for, and more for. It is sadly a rare quality now.
"How can AirTags highjack ANY apple device to report their location"
"as apple is doing what you think they are not doing"
You are misunderstanding this entire topic, and neither of your citations remotely support your claims.
Fact: Google apps do not show the tracking permission. Now as homework I want you to go and study why that is, and then figure out how that same scenario might just apply to Apple.
Do you even understand what "third-party" means? Clearly you don't.
You realize that "attack" is possible explicitly because the protocol is private, right?
Apple can't know that it's not a legitimate communication because they don't know who you are, what device is calling for help, and who the device owner is.
And if you want to use my phone to upload a few bytes/second while I'm passing by, as long as the data isn't being stolen from an air gapped system, be my guest.
I haven’t paid enough attention to have a strong opinion, but my assumption is Amazon isn’t talking about a couple bytes of anonymous location data, so I don’t see how the two compare.
“Chrome and Safari are turning off third party cookies anyway.” Is that really true though? I though advertisers are getting around this despite browsers’ efforts.
Ad tech companies are building and releasing identity replacements, but not replacing 3P cookies. At the end of the day, consumers should gain more transparency and control over their digital selfs. https://principle.substack.com/p/consumer-transparency-and-c...
Yes, the primary tool is CNAME cloaking. On Firefox, uBlock Origin already detects and blocks this. Unfortunately Chrome and Safari don't expose the APIs to allow this there.
> ... one can lose sight of the fact that advertisers don’t care who you are
Companies were literally using Facebook's ad targeting to discriminate against certain groups of people [1]. There is also the Cambridge Analytica scandal to concern ourselves with too.
All advertising is already targeted. A billboard is targeted to a geographic area - it's not randomly assigned. A commercial is on a station who's demographics are critically important.
The HUD case was a bit unique because there are specific laws about how housing can be advertised.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is the real jarring one because they were given data normal Facebook advertisers couldn't even dream of getting a hold of.
That's not always true - traditional marketing included things like direct mail, direct calling, door to door sales, etc.
Also, unless you manage your own lead database, targeting to the individual level doesn't really happen in modern marketing systems. You build cohorts like "everyone who downloaded this app and put food as an interest". While it's certainly possible to de-anonymize people occasionally with the advertising data you work with, a) ad platforms never want to give it to you and b) there's an unbelievable amount of noise in the system so you just build programs with the assumption that ~50% of the data is going to be flat out wrong.
I'd suggest it's not groups instead of individuals, but the other direction; particular attributes (fragments of individuals) instead of individuals. An advertiser, at the point where they want to advertise their baby wipes, don't care whether or not you're into fishing. They only care about whether or not their ad for baby wipes is going to someone who has the attribute "in the market for baby wipes". To the extent they care about groups, it's only because they aren't interested in an advertising campaign that targets one person, but they don't need anything more than "a bunch of people who are in the market for baby wipes".
An advertiser may care about more than one of these things at a time ("interested in baby wipes" + "what culture do they identify with" so I can target things culturally, for instance), but even a very highly-targeted ad will be ignoring all sorts of attributes.
My point is that advertisers aren't interested in groups of people as they are whole people, but just fragments of individuals that happen to match very specific characteristics they are advertising at.
Under most circumstances this would be a distinction without a difference, but in this specific case it turns out to be important. If advertisers are interested in "groups" than they may still think of themselves as needing identity, and demographic breakdowns, and wanting addresses for those groups, etc... but if you conceive of all they care about as being "in the market for baby wipes" there is no reason to give advertisers anything more than "here is an advertising opportunity for baby wipes", and no other information. Not an aggregation of "individuals", with all the extraneous baggage that comes with, but aggregations of fine slices of attributes that they have no need to correlate to anything else. (Only residual desire because they're probably still used to thinking about "individuals".)
I understand that the parent's point is "people who are into fishing and baby wipes" is not a coherent or meaningful group (in the sense of 'stratum' or 'cohort') of the population. Neither fishing nor baby wipe marketeers would typically care about this so-called group.
If you are really applying attribute tags to individuals, you are not "grouping" them in the usually-understood meaning of stratifying.
In truth, you are still building an individual profile for each person, but describing it in a disingenuous way.
Advertisers want to divide the population into smaller and smaller and more and more specific groups. Given the technology they absolutely would target individuals.
In context the point being made is different from that you argue against and probably agrees with you. The context is that of "privacy" and the assertion is that advertisers are not concerned with individual person who a person is; rather the advertisers are interested in relatively non-private broad characteristics of targeted clusters of people. The author paints a relatively rosy picture of advertising based on the interests of an ad's targets instead of the discriminatory interests of the target-er but the concept still stands that on the whole the particulars of an individual are not germane to the business as currently conducted.
People say ‘privacy’ so often that one can lose sight of the fact that advertisers don’t care who you are - they just want to show ads to people that might be interested in them, and not to show ads to people who won’t be interested. They don’t want to ‘violate your privacy’ - they want to show diaper ads to parents, car ads to people who want a car and watch ads to rich people.
Advertisers may not want to "violate my privacy," but they also don't want to protect my privacy. They will be happy to collect rich information about me inadvertently, and then leak it with total impunity.
I'm sure the bull in the china shop doesn't want to break any porcelain, either.
At least the bulls generally succeed in not breaking any porcelain.
These "marketers", "ad-tech" companies, and tech giants could not possibly GAF less about the consequences for anyone else as long as they get their money.
It is more like "See no evil" than "don't be evil".
Yeah. Everyone boils this down to a debate between paywalls and ads. For example, from this article:
> When those publishers are in the news business, this is another trade-off - pay walls (and privacy!) conflict with reach and public purpose
But there are other ways. One which is already successful is community supported free content, just like this article's author is already doing: they release it early to paying people and then release it publicly. They still get paid, and they still get the reach. I even support quite a number of people on Patreon who provide no benefit to the payer. I like the content they produce, so I pay them to make it, regardless of who else gets to view it.
I think this is one of the most harmful effects of advertising-based business models: it kills other business models. If advertising pays well, then there is incentive for someone else to "steal" your content and slap ads on it. But if we destroy advertising as a viable business model, then that incentive disappears, and we can start exploring other business models.
> then that incentive disappears, and we can start exploring other business models
At times it feels like we're stuck in a local maxima. Momentum plays a part and it can take a significant shift (e.g. from privacy abuses and shifting expectations), before we bother to try alternatives. This _takes time_, and technology moves faster than policy, business, or culture seem capable of tracking.
Translation: Apple worded the question plainly and without deception.