Yeah, but if they’re talking about physical location franchises individually owned by local residents (there are a lot), the tracking they want to do probably isn’t nearly as pervasive as Facebook as a whole.
For example, each location might want to track the effectiveness of ads for their locality. Facebook is probably a decent place for them to run ads too.
The big problem is that Facebook has earned a reputation of abusing all the data they collect, so most people are going to say the same thing as you and not have any sympathy, but it probably screws over the poster you’re replying to pretty bad.
In principle, you can know that an ad click resulted in a purchase without knowing who clicked the ad and who made the purchase. Apple supports these kinds of measurements for its own Apple Search Ads product.
The “entropy limit” you see people talking about elsewhere in the thread is one means that attempts to allow ads to be measured like this without revealing information about the users. But if every store *.shopify.com is in the same entropy pool, there won’t even be enough information to tell which ad campaign led to a sale on which store.
How can you give every subdomain in *.shopify.com their own entropy pool without also giving domains the ability to serve a distinct subdomain for each user (eg, user-1.example.com & user-2.example.com) and therefore bypassing the restrictions Apple is seeking to implement?
That’s the debate happening in the GitHub issue. I think a natural answer is with carrots and sticks. Shopify will police their platform if that is what’s necessary to prevent Apple from destroying its business by cutting them all off.
There aren’t that many “build your own store” SaaS platforms, so it is feasible to maintain a whitelist.
It may sound strange at first to propose that Apple should be essentially auditing the behavior of other companies, but they have shown a willingness to pick up that
mantle. Apple has already undertaken the huge effort of regulating the business practices of anyone on the App Store with the privacy label and other areas such as payments for digital goods. In this case, they’ve sort of delegated responsibility to a volunteer effort, which is understandable given how the situation evolved, but doesn’t seem sustainable.
If they know somebody clicked the ad and made a purchase, but they can’t know it was you, why are you bothered? Is it about something other than privacy?
Apple is doing some cool things to make personally identifiable tracking from Facebook ads much less pervasive, while still providing advertisers/businesses data about whether or not their ads are working. These things include sending batches of data every 36-48 hours instead of data as it happens, etc. But in order for these tools to work, Apple is asking Facebook to rely on this list to see if subdomains would be able to set up conversion events to collect this anonymized batched data.
This system will make ads worse, but I think it's an alright balance. Not being able to have any conversion tracking will make ads dismal.
I wish that Apple would work to maintain their own list that served this purpose, or provided support to the volunteers that were tasked with keeping this updated.
It could also be due to how awful the new user experience is on Reddit. A journalist would be instantly turned off to using it as a source.
If you haven't seen it in a while, using a new browser or incognito mode, view reddit without logging in. It is an absolutely awful experience. The content you see as a new user is basically all memes and you are blasted with trending content on top of the card based feed.
Completely agreed. If the redesign was the first impression of reddit that I had, I would have assumed it was another news spam site and not created an account or used it daily for the last 10 years.
Every recent feature they release that contributes to the "social media"-ization of reddit has not added anything useful to the reddit experience. I wonder what their driving goal is at the moment, besides the likely upcoming IPO.
I would say that we have different definitions of 'abuse' in the case of Google. Of course, Google doesn't sell your data directly to anyone, allow anyone to get your metadata, or allow anyone to view your data. In that sense, I also completely trust Google to be good stewards of my data.
That said, while I agree that Google does not 'abuse' my data by giving it to others in any form, Google absolutely does use my data to try to sell me things. From my perspective, this is abuse. Google is using data that I generated to psychologically manipulate my behavior.
When Google Search, gmail, and other like services from Google were released, Google was a tech company first and foremost. These properties/services were offered for "free". At the time, most people didn't realize that "free" meant paying with your data. Now, Google is an advertising company and I do not want them to have my data because of that fact. In a similar vein, if The Trade Desk or another adtech company provided a "free" email service it would likely not be widely adopted as it would be well understood that users are paying with their data.
No, it manipulates me into seeing things it thinks won't make me kill the subscription, just like youtube doesn't suggest a good video, it suggest a video that I am likely to click on.
My problem is different, I was all in with google, and with all my data of 20 years, they couldn’t recommend me a good next video on YouTube or better search for long tail keywords for which I did found site on their very own search engine.
And I don't, but some people are more or less forced to use either Google or Microsoft products by their employers. I really wish the solution was as simple as that.
If I remember correctly you were also tracking logged out users. Are you still doing that or how do I opt out if I don't have an account? Do I have to install Chrome?
Everything below is my opinion, or information to the best of my personal knowledge. I don't speak for Google.
That lawsuit alleges that Google was tracking people (with analytics) during incognito mode, which is different from opting out of ad personalization. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23552967 for HN discussion on the topic.
Turning off ad personalization doesn't turn off tracking; it just prevents that data from being used in ads. If you want to turn off data collection altogether (for your Google account) you can manage activity altogether https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols. (I don't know whether this affects analytics; I assume it does, though.)
If you want to disable analytics tracking when you're logged out, you can install another extension (https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout) or just install a content blocker like uBlock Origin that blocks the analytics.js/gtag.js scripts altogether.
Though I do agree with your logic. Google won't need your login info to profile you any more than Facebook does.
Your browser FP (such as hardware device info), IP address, frequent search terms (browsing habits) and distinct pattern will be sufficient enough to identify you without logging in. Metadata is everything in locking down targets.
>if there is a population of users who simply hate ads to the extent that any impression will be net negative value to the advertiser
This segment of the population absolutely exists and I would guess that it is growing. Many people in my circle block ads on every device possible. Seeing any ad is an immediate negative impression for my group of friends.
This is entirely anecdotal, but I've seen this same sentiment in many other circles and am hearing it more and more often.
> It's completely inacceptable that a single company holds the sole power to access such a widespread platform.
Why? What about Apple's practice is unacceptable?
What is the difference between Apple's behavior and how Nintendo or Sony run their platforms?
Personally, I do not want another store outside of Apple's because I value the review process. Compare Apple's app store to the Microsoft Windows Store. The relative quality of apps on Apple's store is significantly higher than on Windows Store.
It's not this simple, and security isn't about an individuals choice.
It is about ecosystem security. The platform is considered secure because folks can't (easily) install malware from sketchy app stores.
With an iphone talking to another iphone, one can be more confident that the other parties device is not compromised by garden variety trojanized apps, etc.
I thought the platform was considered secure because Apple is good at making a secure OS with working sandboxes. Their app moderation is bad enough that I would not want to rely on app store policy alone.
You'd be free to keep using the Apple App Store. Nothing would change for you. You can still value their review process. You don't need to ban everyone else's choice to use a different app store for you to keep enjoying the Apple App store
As for Sony and Nintendo, 3 wrongs don't make a right.
Agreed. When I saw this title and read the article, the first thing I thought was "Ok, how to I block this/opt-out". It sounds like this is only in Chrome though, for now. One hopes that FF will continue to be privacy focused and not add anything like this.
I know I'm just one data point, but I've been turning down recent Google attempts to hire me precisely because of situations like this. And no, I don't mean just "Hey, we have a few openings, want to interview?", but specific requests because of my skillset.
If you would have told me 5 years ago that today I would hold this opinion of Google, I would have laughed in your face. Today, Google is in the same tier as Facebook, my never companies.
Isn't that part of the purpose of the changes that Apple is making? As a user, this seems like a great change. Less tracking is a positive.