In the mean time, I'm glad Apple is. If Apple wasn't doing this, no one would be.
If the government regulates something, that very often means that the incumbents will donate/bribe officials to pass regulations that favor the mega corps.
Getting government regulations that actually favors the consumers is somewhere between difficult and impossible.
Why should governments force their opinion about what is right onto everyone else? Why not allow freedom in the market so that users can choose what matters most to them? Right now, Apple is serving the market of those opposed to tracking and in favor of greater privacy. If it turns out this is what consumers want and are willing to pay for, competitors will feel pressure to follow suit. No heavy handed government regulation needed.
In isolation it doesn’t matter if you want to sell your privacy (and all your friends’ privacy!) for access to a Facebook quiz on what breed of dog you are. As a collective whole on a societal or global scale it makes a difference.
The NSA doesn’t become less scary because it’s “free market” instead of a government agency. If anything the lack of accountability to the public makes it more scary.
This is exactly where government should be involved—when the desirable individual action results in negative outcomes for the group.
This is not a linux PC. Average joes and jills are not avid users with understanding of security. Think billions of users, not just HN community of 30k developers.
Android allows many things Apple doesn't, including alternative app stores and there is no massive problem with ransomware, blackmailing and similar.
On the other hand do you really think you contacts are not sold of if you sync them with e.g. WhatsApp on a apple device?
No one ever said that phones should not run apps in a sandbox or not have a permissions system or not have opinionated app store(s!) or not throw warnings at users when side-loading apps or similar.
It's about apple being a quasi monopoly for millions of phones which today are the most commonly spread and used general purpose computers. And it's about Apple abusing that power for their own benefit sometimes also in ways which happen to profit the end-user.
Allows third party app stores and apple can do whatever they want in their App store. And yes most people still would mainly use the Apple app stores. (And yes you might still allow Apple to "ban"/"reject" third party app stores which act malicious/abusiveness. But on legal basis. I.e. if they ban a third party Appstore the banned company must be able to sue for damages if the ban is found to be baseless. And no absurd arbitrary max damages TOS clause like there currently is).
I do not like tracking at all.
But I think this is something which needs to be handled by governments (laws/regulations) not by apple forcing their opinion about what is right onto everyone else by abusing their marked positions.
In this case it might be beneficial for the users.
In others cases it was not beneficial for the users at all but only for apple. Like if I remember correctly apps where not allowed to state that they are Pebble compatible because Pebble did compete with the Apple Watch at least theoretically, similar platforms like Netflix/Amazon Prime got special terms wrt. the pay cut but a Netflix/Amazon Prime for gaming wasn't allowed at all for dubious reasons (with that reasons any content gateway like browsers, newsfeeds, Netflix etc. would not be allowed) oh and guess what it seems Apple is currently working on their own Gaming/Game Streaming platform...
So yes anti tracking is good. But I still belive Apple is again abusing their monopoly like positions for their own benefits, let's not forget Apple has their own app network which likely isn't affected by this.