Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

Re:Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone by damnyou on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @12:28PM (#25432497)

In general I'm not a fan of advertising, but one of the most important things it does is level the playing field across income levels and countries. $5/month would be outrageously expensive for a very large number of people, most of whom are not on Hacker News, and any discussion of replacing advertising with a subscription model has to start from that basic fact.

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Re:Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone by airstrike on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @01:13PM (#25433078)

There's no reason Facebook can't charge Brazilians 5 BRL instead of 5 USD.

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Re:Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone by damnyou on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @01:26PM (#25433225)

Sure. We're not talking about Facebook here, they'll be fine. We're talking about random sites and apps. How many apps on the Play/App Store actually implement differential pricing by region?

This cannot be an afterthought—it must be the central question all advertising skeptics must start with.

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Re:Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone by airstrike on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @03:51PM (#25435087)

If ad companies manage to set up international ad networks that show relevant ads to the user according to their home country and interests, I wonder if all that effort and hard work couldn't have instead be spent building a platform for collecting payment internationally

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Re:Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone by inetknght on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @01:05PM (#25432978)

You're justifying the abuse of people's privacy because they can't afford to buy out of it.

That might be legal for the moment but it is in no way moral.

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Re:Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone by damnyou on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @01:29PM (#25433264)

I'm not justifying anything, I'm merely stating what I think is an unequivocally positive side effect of advertising-based models: they have automatic price discrimination built in. Subscription models do not have it built in—developers have to do extra work to introduce price discrimination. I think this is a demerit of subscription models, though not one that outweighs the demerits of advertising models.

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Re:Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone by inetknght on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @10:43PM (#25438800)

> an unequivocally positive side effect of advertising-based models

Democracies are bought on advertising.

Hiding the price of the user's attention is not a positive side effect to the user. Hiding who buys the user's attention is not a positive side effect to the user. Hiding how many other people's attentions are also being sold is not a positive side effect to the user. All of these are detriments to the user.

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Re:Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone by airstrike on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @07:24PM (#25437379)

> they have automatic price discrimination built in.

How, exactly? It's entirely opaque to the user.

At a minimum, you should offer a free, ad-supported version alongside a paid, ad-free (and tracking free) experience.

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