The "without their permission" part can't be reiterated enough here.

Apple didn't hurt Facebook. Apple simply gave its own users more control over what was happening, and people acted in their own best interests, as they have every right to do.

If revealing the truth to people and giving them a choice worked out very badly for Facebook, I'd say that speaks vastly more about Facebook than it does about Apple.

I think your second sentence is the one worth iterating ;)

> Apple didn't hurt Facebook. Apple simply gave its own users more control over what was happening, and people acted in their own best interests, as they have every right to do.

It's easier to attract allies with a narrative that Apple is attacking you than it is with the truth that 96% of apple users have opted out of your 'service.'

This is all chickens coming home to roost too.

If FB had invested in some decent privacy switches and education - instead of trying to dark pattern everyone to just hand over everything - then they wouldn't be in this predicament, because people would already have settled on some suitable privacy settings.

If it's true that 96% are opting out, that just shows what a terrible job FB have done at approaching privacy up until now. After all, why would people opt out of tracking if they trusted the service in the first place?

Everything points to the fact that keeping users in the dark is their business model.

Which, makes sense. The steady erosion of any control, the tiny sparks of "settings" to assuage some privacy issue brought out in the open, the behavior of Zuck in the Congress. It is amply clear that for FB to make money, it's users should have no choice.

I think that's what offends me most about Facebook's whole ham-fisted victim routine. They adopted a business model that was dumbfoundingly, arrogantly unsustainable: trying to fool all of the people all of the time.

Even the smartest, most devious minds in tech should have realized that that gravy train had a limit.

People are opting out because Apple have explicitly barred Facebook from offering them anything as a reward for opting in (other than better targeted adverts, which most don't see as a positive). Obviously if they didn't do this Facebook would use dark patterns (such as crudely gating the entire functionality of the app behind the opt-in) but it's disingenuous to say that this is a free exchange when one party is prevented from bringing anything to the table.

That's an interesting way to look at it. If I understand Apple's position, it's that Facebook can't deny functionality based on privacy settings. But it's less clear to me whether they're prohibited from offering something of actual value. Like if Facebook had a point system—"Facebucks"?—where users could buy stickers/apps in exchange for targeted ads, I wonder if Apple would permit that.

That, I honestly wouldn't have an issue with. If people choose to sell their privacy for something they actually want, that's up to them. It's the shady coercive crap that I despise.

Apple explicitly barred Facebook from rewarding its users for opting in. Obviously this is done with the color of protecting its users (from, say, Facebook gating the entire functionality of its app behind the permission check) but it's still a restraint on Facebook's freedom of trade.

I also remember Steve Jobs say on stage that Apple tracks user behavior on their devices to inform their business strategy. “We know , we see the data” or something along those lines.

All of Apples moves into services and many other interesting business decisions may theoretically be attributed to their surveillance of potential competitors on their devices.

I would be curious to see the scale of their internal “tracking”

Not sure why you're being downvoted - the current number one story on HN [1] is a list of IOS 0-days, one of which shows that the analytics data is collecting and reporting health metrics like heart rate, menstrual cycle length (?), and other somewhat less unusual information.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28637276

I believe CoreDuet information is not shared with Apple?

And all is explicitly opt in

. . .During device set up, with soft language, amidst a slew of other settings that have a “default” big blue button that consents while a tiny text link that goes into “customise” settings.

You should read the requirements and the user flow for App tracking transparency. Apple prohibits the permission dialog from firing more than three times in a long window. The default big button is negative consent. The language is “Ask app not to track”

It’s ridiculous that the owner of the platform gets to suppress competition that way without regulators getting involved.

> Not sure why you're being downvoted

Said something not positive about Lord Steve.

Apple is explicitly asking you for that information when you first activate your device or after updating to new OS.

If you're happy with that, then the same standard should apply to all apps on their platform.

In reality, Apple adopts exactly the scummy UX practices for their permissions flow during device set up that they go out of their way to prohibit third party developers from using.

They use language such as "share device analytics with Apple" which is broad amd covers pretty much everything while they have mandated under penalty of an App Store Ban, the explicit call out of every single use case of every single permission not just in the permission flow but also on the App Store page.

While here we are, with no idea about the usage of core Apple "Analytics" for the things we know about, leave alone the undocumented data access such as their "Find My" network basically giving them the real world secret peer to peer network to identify everything from all the devices in your immediate neighborhood to every single person you've met within range of their proprietary radios carrying a compatible device.

We don't know, because they refuse to have any transparency into their internal use of their data collection and analytics and id' argue, they can simply slip an update with an undocumented library that sends data off over this network even when you have everything turned off and permissions unconsented to because there is NO PERMISSION CONSENT for the Find my network as a simple example.

"Privacy" from everyone who isn't Apple isn't "Privacy", it's an exploitative commercial practice that disadvantages competitors directly and disenfranchises customers for sheer lack of knowledge of the unknown infinity amount of ways this may be abused right now that we have no way of opting out of or discovering.

All analytics data collected by your iPhone is viewable under Settings -> Privacy -> Analytics & Improvements -> Analytics Data, or via a computer. None of it is hidden from you. And they have published privacy labels for their own apps a long time ago, so there's nothing inconsistent here.

Please show me the logs for the Find My network.

It may help reading the whole comment. The analytics logs on device are not the complete picture of device information sent back to Apple servers and used for intelligence on device use.

...Unless they own both the tracking and the end user browser and/or device. Like Google, and Apple.