The context for this proposal is Apple has already been rolling out privacy protections for Safari and iOS, other players (like Big G) have had complaints, and this proposal undercuts those complaints. It's a negotiating tool, effectively.
Apple's privacy protections have made life harder for Google and other folks in the advertising space. Apple has basically tried to make it hard or impossible for anyone to stitch together user activity across different sites and build a profile of that user.
Advertisers have complained about losing ad attribution, and that complaint is legitimate. But, the existing techniques that are used to measure ad attribution also allow a excessive amount of additional data to be collected. Arguably, the ad attribution angle is just a PR-friendly fig leaf over what they're really worried about, which is user profiling.
So, Apple's counter-proposal: Here is a way to get ad attribution! Also, by the way, it doesn't allow user profiling, but that's ok, right? Of course it is. And now, ideally, we get to watch advertisers squirm as they try to come up with outlandish attribution scenarios that justify the collection of profiling data, while struggling to not admit what types of profiling they actually do and what fraction of their valuation that comprises.
That is the basis of a good law (prohibit a specific behavior, not the implementation thereof). In that lens though, Apple's proposal is a solution in search of legislation, which screams "regulatory capture" to me - another reason I'm against it.
But the simple act of "I placed an ad on this site, is that ad driving sales?" is perfectly benign, and if we can enable that use-case without enabling any privacy leakage, that's unambiguously a good thing because making the privacy-conscious approach easy and reliable means people will use it and won't resort to the more privacy-invasive techniques.
This is the same underlying justification as the "ping" attribute, which is basically, it enables in a privacy-conscious manner the basic functionality people want, and which they already have other less-privacy-conscious means to get, so let's make the most user-positive option the simplest and most reliable.
Also by standardizing how this works it enables content blockers to block these requests. This ad click attribute proposal even explicitly listed this as a feature. If you don't want ad click attribution, use a content blocker that blocks /.well-known/ad-click-attribution/ and you're done.
There is no implicit link between "stuff on the internet" and advertising, this "free service" isn't free, we're all paying a gateway fee to get into the internet to begin with, then many content providers have judged their content valuable enough to justify asking for payment, with others relying on soft/burst funding sources like crowdsourcing. The internet and most people's sites really aren't so expensive to maintain that we need this level of crazy marketing.
Why are they falsely entitled? You're choosing to give your attention to a site in exchange for its content. That was your choice. The site turns around and sells a tiny slice of your attention to an ad provider in order to actually make money. But make no mistake, this was the attention that you chose to give to the site in exchange for its content, and that site can spend your attention how it wishes. If you don't like how it spends your attention, don't patronize that site anymore.
Advertising isn't voluntarily entered into by us, it's forced on the consumer. Personally I try to avoid patronizing sites that use heavy advertising (except interesting articles forwarded to me) but I am more speaking on the harm to us all. I suppose I could reword my comment above a bit more accurately to "I reject the normalization of advertising in society."
They want 2 billion in revenue from advertising by 2020.
They are testing the waters, and there's no doubt a faction within the company that believes that in the long term, getting a slice of the firehose of ad revenue is worth a small loss in revenue from opinionated anti-ads users[1] leaving their ecosystem.
The best part about the Apple walled garden is that once ads become an important part of their revenue stream, they'll be able to ban ad-blockers on their platform.
[1] What are they going to do, switch to Android? Communicate by carrier pigeon?
Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition and personal to Tim Cook given that in many cases gay and other minorities are killed due to privacy leaks.
From earlier today :
"Note: Though we cannot bring an official Tor Browser to iOS due to restrictions by Apple"
(https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-85)
Money is the only part of Apple's selling proposition. It's nice they cater to the privacy conscious for the time being, for the time being.
> Note: Though we cannot bring an official Tor Browser to iOS due to restrictions by Apple, the only app we recommend is Onion Browser, developed by Mike Tigas with help from the Guardian Project.
Your truncated quote makes it sound like Apple doesn't allow private Tor browsing. There are other Tor browsers on the App store. What Apple doesn't allow is third-party HTML renderers and JavaScript engines (Tor Browser is based on Firefox)
Is it part of an immutable corporate charter? Is Tim Cook an immortal lich-king, with absolute authority, that will preside over Apple between now, and the heat death of the universe?
Company culture changes, company priorities change, company leaders change, and shareholders always want more money. If advertising will get Apple more money, it's just a matter of when, not if.
They have programs like Apple University and the memory of Steve Jobs will always loom large over the company.
And Apple could've focused primarily on advertising decades ago. But they didn't because it's just not in their DNA. They are and will forever be a widgets company.
You have no idea what they will be 20 years from now.
I love the privacy aspect, but is privacy really part of Apple's core strategy or are we just seeing them make use of the good position they were always in? Is there enough drive at Apple (Cook or otherwise) to keep privacy a focus, or is the topic just going to fall by the wayside when it suits the business?
They build these very carefully to keep your data secure, on-device and inaccessible to third parties. They definitely could've implemented these much quicker and arguably better (e.g. ML models) if they had a device-cloud hybrid.
Ummm, no it’s not. My browser is my user agent, and I couldn’t care less about advertisers’ woes.
You know what makes attribution even harder? Ad blockers.
It's not legitimate at all.
No more legit than a ransomware author complaining that a Windows patch destroyed their revenue source.
A standardized, privacy-centric method for companies to accomplish attribution will help end the arms race and move back to a more consumer-friendly model. Small edges are worth a fortune in Ads. This is like the war on drugs. Clamping down and assuming ad companies will walk away is way too optimistic. Instead, they will move deeper into the shadows at whatever the cost.
And I still don't think it's the browser's responsibility to help the ad company. This kind of stuff just doesn't belong in a markup standard. If ad company cannot exist with the way they currently track users due to GDPR or other regulations, and "need" some standard way for "privacy preserving tracking" - they can write their own browser that does it and give people incentives to use it.
By making it a standard that actually solves the needs of advertisers, the willingness to adopt it will increase because it's simpler.
That said, I think this proposal falls short of solving current tracking problems.
This can be addressed in law, but technical alternatives should exist. The alternative existing will also make it easier to pass it in law.
It's infected our news media, with ads masquerading as real news articles and news providers dripping with desperation to keep you frightened of the BREAKING IMPORTANT NEWS you MUST KNOW ABOUT right after this attempt to sell you razor blades.
It's infected our social media, where avatars that bear only the slightest of photoshopped similarity to the person they claim to be pretend to live a high-life, hiding their broke reality while trying to sell you herbal detox teas produced by failing corporations.
It's infected our telephone system, spammers trying to sell you a new rate on your student loan debt calling you 100 times more often than your own mother.
It's infected our email system, where no client without robust spam filtering is even usable, and you will delete 100 times more emails you never wanted to get than you will receive from your best friend.
Text messages. The postal system. Light polluting billboards on highways. You name it, if advertising has gotten its claws in it, it has either ruined or is ruining it.
Selling ads and selling users' PII are the two primary methods by which a website makes money. Both need to die.
Billions of dollars are at stake for companies that need to understand how their ads are working across ecosystems and to realize the value (or lack thereof) for media buys. Many of the sites that place media also are doing so to offset the costs for users.
There are few ways to toss a grenade in this complex room that does not harm all parties and force each to defend their own needs/wants.
If they really wanted to standardize something, why not make a Privacy Preserving Tracking as a Service endpoint and hit it with standard snippets of JS, instead of baking this controversial junk into the browser's core.
What should replace internet advertising as a way of funding content? This is not an advertising industry problem -- it also affects publishers. Will they have to start charging everyone micropayments to view their content? How will this affect the ability of third parties to index and archive content?
They use that because the privacy invasive monstrosities they previously relied on are becoming less reliable as public awareness of being spied on and manipulated grows and appropriate countermeasures are being taken. So now, every aware person is using an ad blocker and user-friendly privacy laws are being implemented. Sucks for the web advertising industry, but that's what they get for pissing upwards.
> What should replace internet advertising as a way of funding content? This is not an advertising industry problem -- it also affects publishers.
I will not be sad if platforms that so fundamentally rely on advertising that they can't find other means of funding their businesses die off completely. If people aren't willing to pay (users through donations and subscriptions or publishers out of their own pockets), maybe the content just isn't very valuable.
Why oh why would you want to normalize anything about online advertising by standardizing it as an HTML property? Why does anyone think it is the browser's responsibility to support this?
If ad companies are having trouble "attributing their campaigns" or whatever - that's tough? It's their responsibility to figure it out, not browser vendors, who should be on the user's side here (c.f. user agent).
This is a terrible idea, breaks the abstraction between markup and application, and should definitely not be added to HTML standard.