BTW, you can here the same story from small businesses' narrative: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-ti...

So Ramon wants to sell a niche product and that means I have to be tracked across the internet so companies can sell a digital profile of me? Get real.

People want to advertise to customers where the customers actually go. Customers actually go to Facebook not weiner dog forums.

Don’t use Facebook if you don’t like the value proposition. I’m guessing most people who complain about tracking on HN don’t use Facebook properties anyways.

But do those customers want to see the advertising? People primarily go on Facebook to connect & keep up with their friends.

Being able to advertise is not some kind of right, nor is being in business. If your business isn't sustainable without stalking people (or paying a third-party to do that for you), maybe you shouldn't be in business.

Which is exactly the justification Apple uses. What I don't understand is why people paying upwards of $600 to buy those shelves from Walmart and use in their own homes are ok with Walmart insisting that those shelves actually still belong to them and putting up their own products in the shelves you bought from them and installed in your home.

What an insanely illogical but also misplaced metaphor. Apple didn't "save" anyone - they found a new revenue stream and tightened control over data their platform produces to monetize it further, just like Google. What is the "saving" nonsense you all believe?

But of course, Apple will fight to the death avoiding regulation. US authorities don't seem to care, but the EU is getting pretty pissed off.

This remains a Facebook privacy story.

1. Apple did use their market power crush small companies. 2. Facebook does have an awful privacy history.

So the question is, do you think improving Facebook's privacy must hurt small companies? Another example, Google is working very closely with UK's Competition and Markets Authority to make sure the plan of replacing third-party cookies won't punch other companies at their faces.

You can frame it as "crush small companies" if you want. But that framing is just as valid as "Apple's narrative".

Third-party cookies should have never been a thing. Google shouldn't get kudos for barely rolling back this privacy nightmare they created while Apple gets punished for being more pro-privacy and pro-user.

…while rolling out their own alternative, complete with user tracking.

2. Facebook (the comparison here)/Google/etc don’t sell to third parties either.

3. Is tracking customers the issue, or is facebook tracking the issue. Most people seem to indicate they don’t support tracking writ large

Please help me with this - what is Apple doing with its ad network that Google is not?

"Privacy" is a marketing angle for Apple to monetize data - they do it in exactly the same way as Google. But why Google bad Apple good to you?

> Apple is prioritizing user-privacy which necessarily means it is more difficult for advertisers to place their niche ads.

Google provides the exact same privacy preferences on Android / Google ecosystem: the ability to enable/disable personalized ads, deviceId which is unique to the device, can be reset. The ability to delete your data automatically. It does not sell or share your data.

I don't like personalized ads, but we can't hail Apple for being a champion of privacy when its basically doing the same things Google does.

Companies using third-party cookies deserve much more than a punch. They deserve corporate euthanasia.

What small companies? The ones buying/selling my data without my consent? Yeah, they can take a long walk off a short pier.

Also, TBH some FB and those "small companies" poor performance cannot be taken with a grain of salt - cheap cash is no longer there given the interest rate hikes and collapse of crypto - so maybe the performance has more in common with all those startups that lost runway this summer than Apple's rules.

Nobody owes him an audience for ads.

A better question is whether or not anyone who isn't in the ad business actually gives a flying f about the shift in power dynamic. Is it an ABUSE of power? To the majority of consumers (by a wide margin) the answer is "NO". They don't want to be tracked and have their data exhaust vacuumed up for capital gains of billion dollar titans.

So this is the underlying motivation on why nobody cares that Apple is flexing hard on ad companies.

It's like if the mafia came by your business every week to collect their $1000 to not break your kneecaps and say "look at all the happy businesses who pay us walking around, and the people who don't do business with us dragging themselves across the floor with their hands. We're an important factor in keeping people walking!"

If someone decides to purchase ads for "HBN App" searches, you're out of luck on your own trademark. You have to pay for ads too.

Let me count the ways that we're now beholden to app store mafias:

- Downloads are no longer free to distribute

- You have to obey draconian and arbitrary rules, and your engineering team has to jump through the hoops constantly

- You can't deploy on your own time. No emergency hot fixes.

- You can't leverage JIT engines and dynamic code (WTF!?) to solve for a bunch of headaches.

- You have to learn multiple platforms

- You're taxed (15+%!) for the privilege

The whole concept of app stores and walled garden downloads is so inherently broken that the DOJ needs to break up the party wholesale for all of the major players.

While I'm happy Apple removed tracking, I also want the government to prohibit Apple, Google and the rest from doing these other godawful things.

This is harming innovation and productivity massively. This is bad for small, medium, and even large businesses. Startup founders, engineers, and business people alike should be up in arms.

We live in the crazy times Stallman warned us about. And as a capitalist, I couldn't agree more with Stallman.

Above, I’m using it to mean “appropriate”.

The reason for this is we don’t just post 24-7 about how amazing we are.

We post 1-2x a week, and our followers genuinely like us and are fans of the business.

So… the changes on FB haven’t impacted all businesses in such a negative way.

And that means from Apple too!

Note that "tracking" includes data collection. And this is where Apple's duplicity on privacy really annoys me - Apple has never stopped data collection of their users data. Instead they mislead their users by just informing you with a popup that your data can be used for personalised ads, but you can opt out it - opt out of personalised ads, not from the data collection part ( https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/02/apple-personalized-ads-target... ). And even this happened because French regulators started an anti-trust investigation into how Apple gave itself an exception (by ensuring that the "Personalised ads" options is enabled by default on ios) while blocking everyone else ( https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/09/french-antitrust-complaint-al... ).

So let's not be under any illusion that Apple is "protecting our privacy" by blocking others. They are just protecting their bottom lines by blocking their competitors. All this PR spin on how Apple blocking Facebook and Google from tracking is good for the consumers is bullshit, when all you are doing is replacing Facebook and Google for Apple! Remember that once they have our data, all they have to do in the future is to update their terms of services to use it as they want. This kind of creeping encroachment is why we need to strong data privacy laws and regulations to prevent even companies like Apple from abusing their consumers trust, and create a more fair market.

Not justifying what FB did / does, but what apple did, does impact the small businesses and end users negatively and it did stem from Apple wanting to get a cut of FB's business, there is a published email thread for this, it's a known thing.

Google makes strategic decisions that are user-hostile, because they can't wound their golden cow.

How much more ad revenue expansion at Apple before suddenly user privacy's priority decreases a few notches? And on a much more locked-down, controlled-platform, no less.

We like the trade offs.

All these so called "privacy" features are also designed to help Apple data mine your personal data too ... the more data you funnel through Apple servers, the more they know about you and the less data their competitors have.

Remember that once they have our data, all they have to do in the future is to update their terms of services to use it as they want. This kind of creeping encroachment is why we need to strong data privacy laws and regulations to prevent even companies like Apple from abusing their consumers trust, and create a more fair market. Otherwise all that is happening is that you are cheering for the replacement of Facebook and Google with Apple ...

Yeah, I know Apple claims that they cannot "see" the data as it is funnelled through some other third-party - CloudFlare, Akamai etc. ... would Apple be willing to reveal the terms of the contract they have with these third-parties? How can anyone be sure Apple hasn't outsourced datamining or made another PRISM like deal with the US government to provide their users data, but through a third-party? We'll never know because there are no US laws and regulations preventing Apple from doing so.

(And when it comes to privacy that's the key thing - in the absence of laws and regulations, it is incredibly foolish to believe BigTech's word. They exist only to make money, which is their right. Hiding the truth, and exaggerating through marketing is an established practice in their world.)

Another thing to note is that BigTech are interested in promoting these kind of technology only to become gatekeepers of collecting and mining users data. Currently, some ISP's collect and store their users history. And make money from selling it. In effect, these ISP's are potential competitors to ad companies. Techs like these (https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/) are designed to disrupt these kind of data collection from the ISPs and undermine their business of selling data. With techs like these, BigTech now again get the upper hand in collecting, mining and monetising user data.

It's bad for distributed internet as a whole (where users have more control) because now BigTech are forcing themselves to be another intermediary, another step between accessing the data we users want.

Politically also, such techs are designed to tighten the grip of US / BigTech on the internet over that of a country's government. That is a big no-no for any democracy as a citizen loses the power to question its government's policy on the internet (including commercial and privacy laws related to it that a government may not be able to enforce because of such tech). It also weakens a country's security surveillance apparatus. Yeah, I know 'National Security' is a bogey that is used by all governments to try and curtail our rights. But would you really prefer that the usage of some of your rights be indirectly dictated by the whims of foreign BigTech or your democracy?

I saw something amusing last week.

It was an ad being played on a local TV station. It had one of those little blue swirly "Your Ad Choices" arrow icons in the corner that are displayed on advertisements on the web.¹

This was being transmitted by a television station over the air. What, exactly was I supposed to do with that?

On a related note, getting an ATSC OTA DVR is an awesome way to watch television with zero tracking, and 100% portability. Record video directly to a USB stick, and transcode to whatever device I want for free, and keep it forever, for free. No streaming. No tracking. No subscriptions. No network charges. Just $35 to Amazon for the box.

I know that not everyone has a lot of OTA choices, but in some cities, like mine, there are over 100 channels. About 40 if you filter out infomercials, religion, and non-English. I was surprised to find there's a 24-hour news,² and 24-hour weather station³ OTA these days.

1: https://youradchoices.com 2: https://www.newsy.com 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Weather

Assuming your TV isn't tracking what you watch.

https://advertising.roku.com/resources/blog/insights-analysi...

And the opt OUT of Personalised Ads? When did HN's narrative changed that opting out was ok? Or even Ads were not evil? I can assure you 95% of comments in the past 5 to 6 years on HN front page with Ads were all religiously Anti-Ads.

HN is full of Facebook and Google engineers so I doubt that's accurate.

FB had $11B in profit in Q1 on $30B of revenue, and that's after massive drop due to R&D expenses; it's hardly crushed.

I have a problem with Apple's hypocrisy of doing that but labelling it as a move of privacy. And this hypocrisy is only the tip of the Iceberg.

But the saddest thing is that most people dont see it. iPhone 14 will likely continues to sell like hotcakes.

As with most centralization or “regulation” (this case from a private company), it hurts the smallest companies the most.

Large brand advertisers don’t care about granular targeting because they have the budget to just advertise to everyone. By definition the very smallest advertisers are the one who are getting restricted here.

Luckily ATTv2 will actually fix some of this, but that’s because apple has realised they’ve killed an entire ecosystem which actually hurts the iPhone in the end.

All they are saying is that tracking is ok as long as you just ask the end user first.

Here’s Steve Jobs in 2010

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ij-jlF98SzA

Are they perfect? No. But at least they haven’t changed their stance in 12 years unlike Google et al.

As it currently stands, there is no way to "opt out" of being tracked by Apple.

[1] https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

What do you mean? Apple tracking is optional, they straight up ask when you setup your phone.

> We may also use local, on-device processing to select which ad to display, using > information stored on your device, such as the apps you frequently open.

But who's counting?

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...

If you play around with definitions enough, nobody is collecting unrelated data I suppose.

I think you made a poor choice of words. You probably meant 3rd party apps not related.

Regardless - I also don’t think it’s meaningfully better that Apple links financial and health data to sell Ads vs. Google or Facebook linking the same data from two external sources.

Revenue and regulations are not relevant factors in this argument.

Tbh if you are charging $1000+ for handsets.. why are you trying to scrape my data as-well or show me ads ?

Forget personalized vs. non-personalized. I paid a premium, I want an ad-free experience.

Except apple has repeatedly claimed that everything on your iPhone including 3p apps is owned by apple.

2. Apple has claimed that any use of the iOS APIs is “apple’s data” (eg the Apple Pay system for in-app purchases)

3. Apples privacy policy claims that as long as apple’s data isn’t combined with 3P data, they aren’t “tracking” you.

4. Apple also lets you opt-out of personalized ads not data collection.

Ergo, apple will collect data about you from wherever and use it to target ads.

[1] apples privacy policy

Apple’s advertising platform does not track you, meaning that it does not link user or device data collected from our apps with user or device data collected from third parties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes

Between built in apps, changing defaults, different tracking rules, payment processing, access of hardware features, UI/UX guidelines, there’s a long list of ways apple priorities themselves.

And yet, Apple only started informing users of Apple "personalised ads" only after a French regulator started investigating Apple. More info here - French antitrust complaint alleges Apple allows itself to run personalized ads on iOS without getting user consent - https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/09/french-antitrust-complaint-al... and iOS 15 now prompts users if they want to enable Apple personalized ads, after it was previously on by default - https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/02/apple-personalized-ads-target... ). Yet again proving how we need governments to step up and be more proactive to protect us from corporate abuse and create a fair market.