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This isn't the end of tracking, just the platform owners angling in on the market and setting up toll booths for advertisers. It does have the advantage of potentially less tracking overall, but personal data is still valuable and Apple just wants a piece of the pie on something they perceive they own. Tracking will be allowed as long as it doesn't significantly impact the user's experience or over-burden the data usage.
Sounds like it's entirely up to the author of the block app (and the user's choices in configuring that) to determine what's blocked. Think about how much tracking most desktop adblockers also block.
This is not true. Apple most emphatically does not want a slice of the pie that is personal data. They've made it clear time and time again that they do not want your personal data, they do not monetize it, they do not collect anything more than aggregate statistics necessary to improve their own products[1], and Tim Cook has made it very clear that Apple's executive leadership values privacy very highly.

Unlike a lot of other companies (cough Google cough), Apple makes money by selling hardware and software. They do not make it by monetizing your data. And they view this as a competitive advantage.

[1] For example, you can bet they collect aggregate statistics on Spotlight searches that search the web, but they get rid of any personally-identifying information, so they can't tell anything about any given user (i.e. no tracking).

> They've made it clear time and time again that they do not want your personal data

Until they do. Which may or may not happen, but remains an extant problem regardless. Relying on the beneficence of a corporate entity is never a wise decision.

This is a preposterous statement. This is not about relying on their beneficence. This is about relying on the core values of the company, the things that the company views as a competitive advantage, the things that the company believes is one of the reasons why they've achieved unprecedented success and made boatloads of money. So you're actually relying on capitalism.

The argument for why other companies (like Google) do want your personal data is the exact same one for why Apple doesn't. Because that's how they make money. You might as well claim that Google may one day decide to just throw out all the personal data they have on everyone and become a charitable organization that gives away its software out of the goodness of its heart.

There is literally no reason to think Apple will change course about this, besides complete ignorance about how Apple works and what the core values that Apple believes in are.

>This is about relying on the core values of the company, the things that the company views as a competitive advantage, the things that the company believes is one of the reasons why they've achieved unprecedented success and made boatloads of money.

You're being incredibly naive. History has shown us again and again that all companies will eventually screw their users over to make a quick buck. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sooner or later some MBA grad will get shuffled in to a C-level position and decide that they can harness that good ol' Big Data for profit.

That's not even remotely true. Every company has some amount of data on their customers (some more, some less), and the overwhelming majority of them don't abuse that data. The problem is you're treating Apple exactly as you would treat Google or some other company giving away its products for free, which is complete nonsense. Of course the companies giving away their products for free are going to have to monetize the customer data they have in order to make money. But Apple doesn't give away its products for free. It sells them. It's exactly like the millions of other companies in the world that charge money for their products and don't attempt to monetize their customer data.
>This is about relying on the core values of the company

I think you place too much emphasis on companies having moral values. Companies don't have values other than profits. The people in charge may have them, but they are relentlessly driven to produce value for the shareholders, which is not necessarily an evil thing. It's not the purview of a company to have moral values.

Apple have made themselves by becoming a platform rather than being strictly a hardware company. Their hardware can be regarded as tools or tokens necessary to access Apple's services, rather than products in and of themselves.

Not all companies are driven to maximize short-term profits. Or more generally, there exist companies which believe shareholder value is about more than short-term profits. Apple has demonstrated itself to be one of those companies. As a particularly public example of this[1], at the company's annual shareholder meeting in 2014, the National Center for Public Policy Research (a conservative think-tank, climate-change denial group, and investor in Apple) asked Tim Cook and the board to pledge that Apple wouldn't pursue any more environmental initiatives unless it improved the bottom line. Tim Cook's response:

> We do things because they are right and just and that is who we are. That’s who we are as a company. I don’t…when I think about human rights, I don’t think about an ROI. When I think about making our products accessible for the people that can’t see or to help a kid with autism, I don’t think about a bloody ROI, and by the same token, I don’t think about helping our environment from an ROI point of view.

And then he told them to sell their shares:

> If you only want me to make things, make decisions that have a clear ROI, then you should get out of the stock.

[1] http://mashable.com/2014/02/28/apple-ceo-tim-cook-climate-ch...

> This is about relying on the core values of the company

I have never seen a reason to believe such a thing actually exists, and herein lies the disjoint between your worldview and mine.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Apple is (indirectly) going after any ad that they themselves don't power with iAd. Is that even considered "fair", in a legal sense? Seems pretty anti-competitive.
It's a different domain. Content blocking only applies to Safari. iAd ads only appear in third party apps if the developer chooses to use them. They could also use a different ads provider. That's not affected by content blocking because it's not a web page inside Safari.
we don't know their plans for the future. as long as it is a webview, they own it.
The future doesn't apply today. Today, webviews don't implement content blocking. GGP appeared to assume webviews did implement that.
That's complete nonsense. They're providing content blocking in Safari. They're not blocking in-app ads, which is the area that iAd competes in, so they're not harming any iAd competitors.
Personally I don't care about tracking if it means advertisers show me adverts I might want to click on (and thus the ecosystem I use can be funded). But I do care about adverts that aren't targeted to my needs and wants. I'd block those if I could, and leave the targeted ads alone.

   How likely is it that these apps will be built? 100%. One of those is
   Crystal, by Dean Murphy. His pitches: ... Pages render more than 3.9x
   faster on average.
How is that measured?

Do ads delay the rendering of the important, non-ad content by nearly 4x? Or does that content render before ads, and the ads take a long time to render?

Put another way: am I going to see the content I care about 3.9x faster?

Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing the content until you've clicked through the ad, then I think it's safe to say that removing the ad lets you see the content faster.

   Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing
   the content until you've clicked through the ad
In my experience, ads on mobile that don't block you from seeing content are more common than those that do.

I wonder if anyone has any hard data on this.

I'm happy with advertising. It pays for all the free stuff. Apple wants to kill all the free content so you only have the choice of paying Apple to do anything.

Companies built around an advertising model should detect and reject Apple browsers.

Individuals who value getting free stuff on the web should switch to non Apple browsers to show support for advertising.

Not to mention killing ads kills the primary revenue source for its primary competitor. (90% of Google's revenue in 2014 came from ads.) Though to be clear, Apple isn't trying to nuke all ads. It's just trying to steer people away from the web and toward apps.
I hope they succeed. Web is for interactive content not apps.

<rant mode>

too many scars of web projects trying to replicate desktop experience with pixel perfect requirement across browsers.

</rant mode>

I'm happy with advertising. It pays for all the free stuff.

But not magically with free money that just appears when a company decides to buy an advert. Adverts are paid for by businesses that consequently charge a little more for their goods and services, a cost passed directly to you and me. We don't get free services, we get services that we pay for indirectly through other things. Free is a myth.

Yes it's an ecosystem I want to be healthy.

Many, many software engineers have jobs and many startups exist because there is an advertising ecosystem.

The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy. In whose interest is it to kill that?

Apple should stop advertising if it hates advertising so much.

The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy.

I don't think that's true. Advertising (or rather, marketing) is a way to circumvent word of mouth - instead of making something and telling the small number of people in your network, who tell other people and so on, an advert is essentially paying someone to go and tell lots of people all at once regardless of who they are and whether they're interested.

It feels necessary because it's how things are done at the moment. That's not the same as actually being necessary.

Mind you, I don't have an alternative. If I did I'd probably be writing an application to YC right now.

> The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy.

I doubt that; it distorts competition by making false / aggrandizing claims about products and their prices and capitalist markets would work much better with transparency instead of the smokescreens of advertising (i.e. more comparison shopping).

> In whose interest is it to kill that?

Consumers and small businesses would profit greatly if advertising played a smaller role (big businesses spend a lot of money in advertising to sell inferior products, small companies find it difficult to compete even with better or cheaper offers).

Also, page load times and traffic plans, obviously.

Small companies sell better and cheaper products than big businesses, but somehow people have never heard about them, and that's because of "advertising". Sure, buddy. You keep telling yourself that.
>Yes it's an ecosystem I want to be healthy.

There is nothing particularly healthy about an advertising ecosystem. It skews the incentives of content creators towards dishonesty.

>The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy. In whose interest is it to kill that?

Anybody who believes that market power should be determined by the quality of your products rather than your advertising budget?

Sao Paolo banned advertising. As far as I'm aware they are still a capitalist economy.

Do you think mailchimp is worse because of the ads it puts in podcasts? How about Squarespace?

Arguing that all advertising is misleading and evil is just as silly as saying that all advertising is truthful and trustworthy.

Honest salespeople know that selling a product to someone is a win-win situation. And honest ads can help people find things they are genuinely looking for, and solve a problem they are having.

I'm not arguing that all advertising is misleading and evil, I'm arguing that the nature of the industry skews companies incentives towards intentionally misleading people.

Take Google for instance - it started out with good intentions and it has consistently blurred the distinction between its ads and content ever since. Why? Because that's how you get more ad dollars, of course. If being misleading didn't mean profits, Google wouldn't do it.

If you want to find the most egregious behavior in the advertising industry don't look at the small fry. Follow the trail of profit.

>And honest ads can help people find things they are genuinely looking for

They can, but that's a happy accident and a byproduct. The advertising industry is not geared to help connect people to things they want. It is geared towards invoking desires for things people didn't otherwise want and putting your name ahead of competitors in people's heads.

Yes, the advertising industry is made up of magicians who make people desire things they don't want.

Why is it you don't believe THAT's the happy accident and byproduct, while diffusing information is the main mechanism?

If you'd ever tried to convince someone to buy something they don't want, you'd have a good idea about how likely that scenario is.

Have you ever bought something you didn't want?

Why is the notion that you can invoke desires so unbelievable to you?

What exactly did you think the purpose of high production values advertising that tries to convey a lifestyle or invoke feelings of inadequacy? You think they'd do all that to 'diffuse information'?

They're trying to hack your amygdala, not passing on a message.

And yea, I've bought a McDonalds hamburger while drunk before that I felt disgusted by after.

That's a pretty naive way of doing it. Without advertising, many (real as in "sells goods" sense) businesses would not find any real growth. Advertising is a business cost like any other. and websites with ads sell eyeballs.

Things cost more because of advertising or marketing in general only in the sense that said things would not exist without them.

That's like saying conferences actually cost more because of sponsors.

Without advertising, many (real as in "sells goods" sense) businesses would not find any real growth.

I think you're conflating advertising with marketing. Marketing is what grows a company, and advertising is a part of marketing (how big or small a part depends on the business). We could have no advertising and still have companies informing people about their products.

>Companies built around an advertising model should detect and reject Apple browsers.

Companies built around an advertising model should die in ignominy.

There's no reason not to use advertisements to fund your content-producing efforts.

Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, podcasts, internet forums... pretty much any of this content is paid for by advertising.

Would you rather everyone have to pay for SeriusXM, basic cable, etc?

If it means no ads, then - yes, that would've been fantastic.
> Would you rather everyone have to pay for SeriusXM, basic cable, etc?

That is what we already do in Europe anyway. Most countries have TV and Radio tax.

Additionally in countries like my own, if you don't subscribe to cable, there are only 4 lousy channels available, with deplorable content.

Most radio stations that aren't publicly funded are complete trash and I would not miss them in the slightest. My tax dollars already fund the CBC's excellent news and classical music service and that's all I need from radio. If I want to listen to pop I'll download some.

Most of what's on TV is complete shit, and I'm happy to pay for netflix. The only thing I miss are hockey games, but I can always go to one live, or go to a bar.

I'm happy to view content supported by ads that are not animated, are not hosted or tracked by third parties, are not disguised as normal content, and which do not execute scripts. It's also easy enough to sneak that type of ad past an ad blocker. Win-win.
I'm tolerant of ads[1] but I remember an Internet before ads; a WWW where most pages were not ad-driven, and it was amazing.

A lot of content now is not ad supported but ad driven - they meed the clicks to get views for ads. But ad views pay so little they need people to click the ads. So ads become manipulative and scummy ("HELLO!" Punch the monkey, mosquito, you won't believe, etc) and also content becomes dumb to drag in people who can't tell the difference between links to other content and ads.

I miss the WWW we used to have.

[1] although i strongly feel that I should be allowed to opt out of gambling and alcohol ads - not being able to do so pushes me towards ad blockers

You may be recalling "the web we used to have" with nostalgia. The web we have is MUCH better and Google does it share of paying for it.
Speak for yourself. As a Microsoft fan, I am considering switching to GNU/Linux as all commercial operating systems seem to be moving towards the model of "don't pay us with money, pay us with data". A lot of this is driven by the trend to make web applications out of web pages when there is no need.
what is the determining factor for "better"? if the web is for transmitting information, I'd say it is significantly fatter, slower, and more difficult to parse in that regard.

is it shinier? yes, it is much shinier.

Do you remember when the only way to make your site discoverable was to 1) get yahoo to add you to their hand-curated list of sites or 2) trade banners with a super scummy link exchange? If we still had that internet, the only sites that would get any traffic at all would be the ones that could justify their existence with traffic, i.e. these[1]. How do you get traffic if you can't get listed? You can't unless you advertise through other media.

Is everything better? No. Privacy's worse, signal to noise is worse (that's a natural consequence of availability, anyway). Are a lot of things better? Yep. Niche sites can get traffic in a way they never could before. That's the natural consequence of taking humans out of the loop- instead of having to interest Jerry or David, now your only requirement for indexing is to interest anyone who is also interesting.

Let's keep working to make things better, but let's also not forget the improvements that have already been made.

1. https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites

I never did either of those but more commonly one could:

3) Join a web-ring

4) Add a link in Usenet signatures

5) Ask to be included in the WWW Links section of your interest group's magazine

Or

6) Not worry about discoverability at all because the Web wasn't about growth and profit

My preference as a publisher and reader was for web-rings, they exemplified the attitude of sharing and mutual assistance on the early Web that has been largely lost nowadays.

I remember when websites were discoverable because they were good. People would link to good content.

That's how pagerank worked. Ads destroyed that.

You forgot to mention the blog, which stands for "web log", that is, a log of an individual's experiences on the web.

In particular, one way to make your site discoverable was to write to bloggers that might be interested in it.

Better is obviously subjective, but I tend not to agree with you. The modern web is a great place to buy things, but buying things is boring. I have a hard time finding anything worthwhile to read or participate in on the web that hasn't already been around for years. Personal web pages are a thing of the past and even blogs seem to have had their day. The "web we have" appears to be largely drained of vitality, as a small handful of commercial walled-garden sites have successfully diverted most available time and attention.
> I'm happy with advertising.

Good for you. I'm not. And I reserve the right to block anything appearing on my computer through my paid-for internet service. I also read and view a lot of content that is offered for free and that material has 1) no need for an advertising support model and 2) is often better than that supported by such models.

I am ok with adverting in small doses, not when 90% of the page are ads.
> Companies built around an advertising model should detect and reject Apple browsers.

Not sure why this gets repeated. iOS users whether you like it or not are a significant percentage of users (especially on mobile). They skew higher socio economically and are far more likely to spend money for content. There is a reason why iOS is the primary platform for development.

Companies should instead look at WHY people would want to block ads. They are often poorly implemented on mobile e.g. cover content or are unable to be dismissed. They don't take into account people are generally skimming through content. And they excessively drain the battery.

I believe that the growing aversion is toward the pervasive tracking and UX destroying variety of ads. Not all ads have to be that. It's not just an iOS user mentality obviously since ad block usage is increasing across desktops too. The ad ecosystem is out of control and in need of an overhaul. iOS 9 will simply help many more see how much ad-tech has slowed down the browsing experience. Also, free stuff will always exist on the Internet.
Advertising is useful, at least until we find a better way to pay for things we don't want to pay for.

Unfortunately, history has proven we also need ways to steer their behaviour. I don't particularly miss having metric tonnes of dead trees shoved through my front door. Or having my phone ring all evening. I don't think pop-up blockers have destroyed the internet as we know it. And I don't feel bad for any business model that's suffered from improvements in spam filtering.

While it's obvious the money needed to run out favourite services needs to come from somewhere, it's also obvious that we need to be able to enforce some limits to the never-ending war to make your advert more visible than the other guy's.

Is this really the right reference to go for? Chemo is universally hated, makes you look like not yourself, makes you throw up and feel sick all the time, steals all your energy, and, importantly, often does not work.
While I agree with you, chemotherapy is the layperson's only term for most cancer treatment. And make no mistake, advertising is a cancer that needs to be judiciously dealt with.

But this particular meme is derived from the bad old days of /b/ when most threads were spammed with stuff like

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

Can you block Apples iAd, too?

This looks like what Apple did with payments on IOS - only Apple's payment system is allowed, and Apple takes a 30% cut.

We are talking here about Safari content blocking. iAd ads are not displayed in Safari, they are for native applications and you can display ads from whatever publisher you want in your native app.
My theory is this is Apple's attempt to push people working in adtech towards Apple's Google-Analytics analogues.

It is getting a bit ridiculous how bluntly Google (the incumbent), Apple (whoa we track mobiles really well) and Facebook (wahey, we track real people, come over here) are all trying to push adtech people onto their platforms. They are now truly going for the Enterprise market, and are looking to lock them in.

Do Facebook and Apple really have an analytics platform anywhere as good as Google analytics? If one of them acquires kissmetrics or mixpanel of something I'd believe you but having used facebook's business interface first hand it's only good at analytics "on facebook" it tells you very little about your actual site even if you have their pixels on every page. With Google I can see my marketing funnel from on every platform.
I totally agree, but having a bad platform hasn't stopped people trying to sell theirs to enterprise, afaik.
Is this really different from what AdBlock already does on every platform? It looks like the key feature is that the adblocker app doesn't have to have access to your browsing data. But people will still have to install it, just like they already have to install existing adblockers.