Even more, it speaks to the power of removing choice. When app tracking is enabled by default it effectively removes choice because most users never touch settings (and may not even know they exist). Therefore users are not choosing anything. Someone else is choosing for them. "Tech" company employees will respond to criticism of their employer's behaviour with something like: "But users can choose to turn this off." That is not relevant if 96% are unaware of this "choice". The question is: why is tracking on by default. That was a choice the user did not make.
Only when faced with a screen asking the user if she chooses to be tracked do we get a chance to find out what a user would choose. And even then, developers will use "dark patterns" to manipulate the decision-making process toward a self-serving outcome.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether there should even be a setting to enable tracking. If the majority of users would choose to turn it off, if they were presented with the choice, then why even have it. This is essentially "privacy by design".
This is no different than when developers argue to HN that it is not worth catering to the preferences of privacy-conscious or minimalist users since those users comprise such a small percentage of users overall. By the same token, it should not worth catering to the small percentange of users who want to be tracked.
Still shouldn't be on by default, but asking up-front seems perfectly reasonable.
A service provider makes one decision and it impacts N users. A user consumes from M service providers. A user evaluating whether a service provider is trying to “pull one over” on them in the TOS costs M units of time, 1 unit per service provider. A service provider deciding to choose the cow path as the default saves N units of time and costs the service provider 1 unit.
I engage with service providers that respect my time. If I suspect your default is user hostile, and provide a “we won’t exploit you in this relationship” as an option, I look elsewhere.
This breaks down in places though. Example: I haven’t found a communication provider that doesn’t default to building a profile on me and selling it to anyone willing to pay.
The lack of choice for me makes me wish a governing body would intervene and give me a marketplace where I didn’t have to waste my valuable time making sure the person I was engaging with wasn’t going to pull one over on me.
If Google or Apple remotely installed a hastily built tracker controlled by a government agency on my device I'd be pretty miffed about it.
> Except it wasn’t hastily built
They were built very hastily with little oversight with iterative beta cycles in plain sight.
> nefarious way that you’re implying
I didn't imply any nefarious intent what so over. All I implied is that your location data is being tracked and put into some database somewhere and you don't control it.
Who has this data? No idea. How will it be used a year from now? 10 years from now? No idea. Does it draw more energy on my device or use more processing power? No idea.
That alone is enough to not use it.
In this system, it’s not easy at all for government agencies to track you. That was very explicitly part of the design, as is shown in all the public docs. It’s not like how it works is a secret [1].
Your location isn’t being tracked and put into a database. Nothing about exposure notifications uses location.
No idea if it's using the official API or what.
I honestly just don't believe that it can work well enough in some places. Especially here in Hawaii where gatherings are on a beach and people leave their cellphones in their car or backpacks or whatever. I was even recently at a camp where people were sharing a blunt and there wasn't a single phone in sight cause it was out of signal range. Could have easily been a super spreader event and the tech solution would have failed.
I get that you have an axe to grind here for some reason but I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make.
This is patently wrong. Exposure Notification apps (those using the official APIs, anyway) have no access to location APIs. The absolute worst they could possibly do is to log your IP address when you reach out for new data, but this is also true of every app you use, and every website you visit.
You don't really seem interested in understanding how they actually work, but if anyone else cares, https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ is a pretty reasonable explanation.
There were many locations who built their own apps that did not follow this privacy model, or used it incorrectly, but for most cases "your location data being put into some database" is not accurate.
That <something> by the way is to take the database that's only on your phone (and never uploaded) and show only you an alert. That's it.
If this is immoral, but letting covid spread around the world and have people needlessly suffer because you refuse reasonable interventions, then I don't know what is moral.
We agree then.
That it strays into the irrational at times is as human as the inevitable corruption that fuels the mistrust.
For someone without full knowledge of the technology to assume (in this case wrongly) there's a privacy issue is entirely practical. It's an assumption that will be correct far more than it won't.
People are responding to fear of past president. One could argue that it is highly unlikely that it will happen again. One could even PROVE that it is NOT happening again NOW - but you are still dealing with someone responding out of fear.
I feel like we are seeing the exact same phenomenon with (SOME) people who respond out of fear of catching the virus.
I would be really interested to learn more about why some people 1) are fearful of government tracking 2) are fearful of the virus 3) aren't fearful of either.
Personally I've watched my self move between all 3 over the past year - it has been a WILD ride
The amount of data that the Covid tracking API of Android and iOS makes available is precisely known. Germany's and a few other (https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...) are open source.
> Who has this data? No idea.
The users on their individual devices.
> How will it be used a year from now? 10 years from now? No idea.
It will be all but useless.
Except if you're in Singapore. Their tracing app morphed into a spy software for law enforcement: https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1384566617330229250
That just doesn’t make sense to me.
I still have it on my phone (although at least within my house I’m blocking their metrics via pinhole) but I 100% understand why someone would not want it on their phone.
What are you able to infer about the contents exactly?
https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-app/blob/97bb16034140...
But the fact that they could be tracking which citizens have and have not been shown a "You have been exposed to Covid" alert, and there's no way to opt-out, is a little scary.
> What are you able to infer about the contents exactly?
Most days, you are not exposed to covid and you don't interact with the app. So most days, the app transmits a "background-check" event to the server. This means the contents of the message will be the exact same length every day.
As a passive listener, then, you can watch for days where the length of the message is abnormal, and then because there's only so many different kinds of messages that the app sends and they all have unique lengths, you can infer what metrics events must have been sent to the server based on the delta of the message lengths. You can figure out if a user has been shown a "You have been exposed to COVID" based purely on passive listening to traffic from the device.
Right away I notice the glaring omission of “the surveillance state” in the wording of certain sentences like “People who test positive are not identified to other users, Google or Apple“.
“With Bob’s consent, his phone uploads the last 14 days of keys for his broadcast beacons to the cloud”, also giving away his geolocation in the process. My read of the “doesn’t collect location data” is “doesn’t explicitly collect location data”, like just because it doesn’t send a field ‘geolocation’ they can technically say that and not be lying. You should check out one of my very favorite blog posts of all time: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
And even then the default OS on the newer pinephones uses KDE as a DE which had telemetry built in at one point.
What happened next was people stopped going out with their phones, because any exposure would result in a Police enforced 14 day quarantine
I'm extremely skeptical that a big chunk of people in such a highly online country just left their phones at home. Maybe some of the Hardeim but I would guess 95+% of people wouldn't do this.
Would you really bring your phone with you, when going out for a beer or coffee, even if it could easily result in you being forced to stay quarantined for 2 weeks?
Is your smartphone really that important to you?
Even though I have personally stayed socially distanced and worn a mask everywhere it was required, it makes perfect sense to me, after seeing how a lot of people have reacted to the pandemic, that a good portion of the population, would let their phone stay at home, so they would not risk a police enforced quarantine.
In israel, this was done centrally by cell tower triangulation rather than app/os, so no way to opt out even with dumb phones. However, reliability was not very good - e.g. people got notice that they must quarantine because a neighbour 2 floors up was positive, or because they stood outside a wall of a closed room where a positive person was on the other side of said wall. The appeal process was initially non-existent, then slow and cumbersome - so the risk of being "jailed" for 14 days due to false positive was small but serious.
This IMO makes two scenarios likely:
1) The market is currently just dragging along, hoping this will all go away and we're really in a major ad-bubble that's about to pop.
2) Tracking... isn't that profitable after all. All the personalized tracking shit can be replaced with a simple "users who clicked on canon printer also clicked on cheap ink refill kits" type of model that gets the same results or better. Which also puts into question a lot of what FB and Google are actually doing.
This happens on every single HN thread on this topic. I'm not a total expert but there is a lot of arm chairing that's wrong.
Tracking is profitable and more so than contextual for a lot of direct response in a lot of industries.
Not in all cases, e.g. usually not for brand advertising. But it works.
For my clients is the direct data I have - and we have extensively tried every single other option. FB is the only platform that delivers strong ROI and we use the targeting iOS blocks. And yes - it's always retorted - I know 100% the donations come from the ads, it's incredibly simple to track even as simple as making a new page or individual product only linked from that ad.
So far this change is definitely effecting our ads and FB seems pretty buggy with the new ads manager changes. But they 'always find a way.' But so far it's not as bad as I originally thought it would be.
Plus you can still upload offline conversion data. most purchases have full contact info. We'll see if Apple comes after that, but they would then have to go after the entire ecosystem including Visa.
FB's stock prices hasn't changed because we haven't seen if this really impacts revenue to FB. We know that banner ads are extremely ineffective. So if FB ads are still more effective than that, they will continue to capture the lion's share of ad revenue.
They have a pretty huge privacy section in android settings where you can see exactly what data they have on you and how to opt out and/or delete existing data.
When you set up android, it ask you if your want in or out. You can even set up a new android device without a Gmail account and disable all Google services including Gmail and search. I don't belive you can do this with iOS.
All those nice settings (for google and everyone else) are only for the minimum they are required by law. That means anything that they can claim to be "anonymized" is fair game and not visible to you in any way.
One thing I really do appreciate about Google products is that I'm able to fully disable personalization. My Youtube homepage is completely depersonalized, because I went through their privacy settings and switched off everything. I can't say whether or not Google is still secretly tracking me, but my biggest concern is actually that algorithmic recommendations put me in a filter bubble. Google lets me turn off the bubble.
Amazon, by contrast, does not let me depersonalize my recommendations. Neither does Netflix. There was a period of several years where I would periodically go through my Amazon history and manually mark everything as a gift. This worked for a time, but abruptly stopped one day. I assume Amazon decided I'd marked too many things as gifts and my selections should be ignored.
Did you receive any ads in spanish or chinese recently? did you see any political ad to a party you vehemently oppose? All that is still decided by your profile and history. Just with hocus pocus anonymization on the front end.
So google is not that different from netflix and amazon. they just give you a blanket.
(Yes, I know there are some hacks to get around that )
That was how it was done for a long time. Advanced tracking was just a way to try and keep increasing revenue.
Whether it worked or not, only the higher ups at these companies can tell... probably.
Personally in the old days of newspaper ad's, I always wondered what the point was of anything smaller than a whole page; what is the point of a 1x1 inch ad in the midst of 200 others. Even today I ignore 99% of what's on the page other than the content.
In fact many people only bought the paper on ad day.
Whole different kettle of fish.
I opted into the FB tracking when I got the popup yesterday because I do FB/IG a lot and I click on interesting ads. Honestly, I tend to buy quite a bit from the ads that I see because they genuinely interest me, and a lot of them are from smaller businesses that I want to try out. If I see ads on FB/IG, at least I want them to be relevant to me rather than be generic.
That’s what people wanted for so long The choice to choose , nothing more nothing less.
Granted the fidelity and latency of SkAdNetwork is a concern but hardly enough to materially impact the bottom line.
Absolutely not. Using defaults because you know most people wont' change them to achieve a specific outcome that you, the default setter want, is exactly the same evil. Just because you're doing it for "good" doesn't justify it.
It was not an option of choosing an alternative from the default, the order was random. Same for the default search engine.
If this was setup in the same way i wonder what the ratio would be. With that i mean a fair yes/no choice, not the GDPR-joke where accept is a big green button and reject is hidden in confusing fine print 3 sub-pages deep.
If this holds, this will be cataclysmic for FB. You can't have a huge portion of your wealthy user base just disappear and expect advertisers to keep paying what they were paying previously.
BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out.