I'm not sure how the anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws work, but isn't it conflict of interest, if you limit others in how they can use your platform, but allow yourself to do the same things you're limiting others in? Or am I wrong?
They track everything about the device - and the user has almost no control over it.
Sure, they aren't tracking what you're doing INSIDE the FB app. But they track every time you use it, where you use it, the context that led to that usage, etc.
> Sure, they aren't tracking what you're doing INSIDE the FB app. But they track every time you use it, where you use it, the context that led to that usage, etc.
So does Facebook (as much as they're able and allowed to), being fair.
FB absolutely can and does correlate events and various metadata sent by the "Facebook SDK" spyware which litters most mainstream apps. ATT does not prevent that because the fingerprint it collects, combined with your IP address is sufficient to link all the separate instances of the SDK by correlating enough events.
If I use an Apple device then I am clearly using an Apple product and I have a relationship with Apple.
If I use an application then I am clearly using their product and I have a relationship with the application developers.
If that application embeds third-party tracking, I am not clearly doing anything with the third party and I don’t have a relationship with that third party. Therefore Apple requires that the application developers ask for my consent first.
Only one of these needs the user’s consent, and it’s clear why. Apple can act fairly and still hold third-party tracking to a different standard.
But that argument is not limited to tracking, isn't it. For example if I use an application that integrates with Shopify or Stripe, by that logic Apple would also be in the right to ask for consent (while the integration with Apple Pay would be pop-up free). In fact I don't see any reason why Apple shouldn't go after those businesses next - there's a clear privacy angle they can play here too. As much as I like Apple Pay as a consumer, I don't think Apple should get a blanket pass on favoring its own infrastructure over any third-party integrations just because the user is less confused about their relationship with Apple.
On the other hand, third-party tracking is not silently disabled either - instead, it prompts the user on first run and the user is given the choice to opt in or out per-app.
Is there any evidence that Apple themselves are tracking across 3rd party application advertisements (this is me assuming that they do track across 1st party apps, which is not fair).
> Apple doesn't limit anyone from advertising; they just limit third-party tracking, no?
They don’t limit third-party tracking either. They limit third-party tracking without the user’s consent. The only thing advertisers need to do is ask the user for permission to track them.
You can compare the pop-up language Apple shows for an app like FB and the one they show for their own personalized ads to see what I'm talking about. They've also run misleading ads and have made comments that confuse people about what's actually going on.
I'm no apologist for ads, but Ben Thompson is right to point out that this hurts small companies that rely on these targeted ads in order to exist a lot more than it hurts large players like FB.
For example - a grocery store doesn't want to manage 'first party' user data to track what you purchase (and you probably don't want them to), they're bad at that and more likely to do it poorly. They'd rather rely on an ad company they can use instead. This applies to most small businesses that rely on targeted advertising to get their business in front of users that would want it. In Apple's model Amazon doesn't need to say they track you because all purchase data happens on Amazon, but FB does because others use FB to target third party ads. The data doesn't leave FB though so a reasonable person could argue why is this worse?
My personal opinion is that we'd be better off in an equilibrium where these ad driven models are not viable because the models that would replace them would be better on net with incentives more aligned between user and product.
There is a problem here with how user data is handled in some cases, but Apple is also being at best misleading about the issue in a way that benefits themselves and reasonable people could think they're doing the wrong thing.
> The data doesn't leave FB though so a reasonable person could argue why is this worse?
Because the user has a relationship with the grocery store application and as far as they are aware, only interacting with the grocery store application. They aren’t given the knowledge or opportunity to decide whether to send their data to Facebook or not. All Apple are requiring is that the user be given that knowledge and opportunity.
Apple limits third party tracking without user's consent by both calling it as third party tracking and having it opt in, while Apple's tracking is "personalization" that is opt out.
It's absolutely a dark pattern meant to destroy non apple advertising while making the owners of the OS the only real way to advertise on it. It should be clamped down hard.
> Apple limits third party tracking without user's consent by both calling it as third party tracking and having it opt in, while Apple's tracking is "personalization" that is opt out.
You just seem to be skipping over the fact that Apple is not a third-party here. The user has a direct relationship with them.
> the only real way to advertise on it.
The advertising industry has existed for over a hundred years without pervasive third-party tracking. Pervasive third-party tracking is not “the only real way to advertise on it”.
Apple isn't the only online advertising platform, and they don't have anything close to a monopoly there. They are free to build their own ad tech and keep it to themselves, or give themselves preferential access.
> That's missing the point, Apple owns the platform
People make a lot of to-do about it, but, that's not really an unusual thing in the market anymore. Sony has exclusive control of their store, does not permit sideloading, and no, the hardware isn't subsidized.
Is there any evidence anywhere that Apple is doing, or is intending to do, the same things they've blocked others from doing?
Apple hasn't stopped anybody from advertising, they've only stopped them from doing overly-intrusive cross-app personal tracking. They don't seem to intend to do over-intrusive cross-app personal tracking themselves, so it seems to be a level playing field. So far, at least.
>they've only stopped them from doing overly-intrusive cross-app personal tracking.
It's important to remember, they aren't stopping them from doing the overly-intrusive cross-app tracking, they just make you actively consent to an app allowing that tracking.
You do have to consent, but there are many parts where they don't let you say no and continue using, while all third parties are forced to make you say no and to continue using.
Apple is doing the classic "we don't share with third parties, we just collect a shit ton of data from everywhere and then make people buy our data indirectly via our ad sale services" like google and facebook do today. So it's not shared with third parties, but because of their scale it might as well be in effect size .
> I'm not familiar -- do you have to actively consent to Apple's tracking too?
It's called App Tracking Transparency and there is a scary prompt when Facebook/others do it. It's called Personalization and a friendly prompt when Apple does it.
These two are not the same thing. Every app is allowed to serve you personalized ads, without asking. ATT is about cross app/site tracking between other companies, which is something Apple has never done.
> They can target you in app store based on your activity on the Kindle app - is that not tracking?
It doesn't say that in the article and that's patently false. Apple does not have access to Amazon's data about your activity in the Kindle app. Can they potentially track you in the Apple Books app? Perhaps, but if you trust what they're saying, you're presented first with an opt-out dialog about ad personalization.
> …they've only stopped them from doing overly-intrusive cross-app personal tracking.
They've required consent for cross-organizational tracking. For a single organization, they have only required disclosure in apps (via the privacy nutrition labels).
For instance, Google can still push you to sign into a Google account so they can add all your interactions across services/devices to your profile. They also can still share information between Google native apps for unauthenticated users. This would include if they start to move over apps from other acquired companies under the Google umbrella.
The difference is that I can make an opt-in choice (if possibly a difficult one) on whether I want to interact with Facebook services directly, but I couldn't make a such a choice before on what information Facebook was gathering about me without my consent or knowledge via tracking.
Let's be clear though, the information FB got was always a subset of what Apple got, so it's a little invidious of them to ban cross app tracking for everyone else except for them.
The vast majority of what FB saw (and used to optimise) was first open as a proxy for install, and purchases because they make companies money.
Apple have all of this data (in fact, it's automatically collected and much better quality) because they own the platform on which the data is collected. Therefore, Apple can supply the same services as FB (on iOS only, obvs).
... and compelled OEMs to not uninstall IE (p18), or add a competing browser in a visible way (p24)
... and entered partnerships with ISPs to have pre-installed listings in IE if the ISP didn't mention a competing browser (p29)
... and entered into arrangements with companies to switch browsers being used (p17)
... and attempted to get Netscape to agree to not compete with Microsoft for Windows browsers (Netscape would be Unix and Mac only if that was done) (p14)
Only if they use the data people seem to be assuming without evidence that they are using.
That a single corporate entity is capable of collecting data does not necessarily mean that said entity is collecting and using that data. Maybe they do! But so far I've seen no evidence of it anywhere from anyone ever.
No, you're not wrong. If Apple follows through with this it's pretty much the textbook definition of an antitrust violation: leveraging their market power in one market to circumvent competition in the target market.
When I watch Netflix, I have no reason to be surprised or shocked that Netflix is using that information to target movies I want to watch. It’s the same with Amazon and Facebook.
What I don’t expect is that when I shop on Amazon I get ads showing me what I searched for and bought on Amazon to show up on Facebook (which of course does happen).
What would be the consumer friendly thing for the government to do? Allow more cross app data sharing? Refuse to let any company use the history of what a consumer does at that company for targeting?
I can see the marketing aspect now “if you install this third party App Store, the apps you can install can ignore the privacy guards and advertise and track you better!”
Or a company like Facebook can once again encourage users to install a VPN that allows them to track all of the traffic to and from your phone.
This has been possible for many years now on Android and that has yet to been an issue, even though it's been brought up for years as a potential concern.
It turns out that people (or at least Android users) aren't as dumb as Apple users think they are. (Or maybe it says something about Apple users that Apple and other Apple users think that Apple users are too dumb to be able to make this decision for themselves?)
In the era of anti tracking, Amazon doesn’t need to worry about it. It’s knows what consumer preferences based on “revealed preferences” - what people buy. It’s a “strategy credit”.
Amazon also created its own line of devices and its own fork of Android and replaces Google Play Services APIs with its own. But how many applications are successful distributing only on Amazon’s Android store? How many western developers are going to bypass Google Play Store?
- Company F was doing ads using X mechanism on Company A's devices.
- Company A banned X mechanism under the false claim of "privacy."
- Now Company A is going to use X mechanism to launch their own competitor to Company F's platform (because X is what makes the ad platform a worthwhile expense for advertisers; Company A already uses X mechanism to market its own products and services to its customers, and they simply banned Company F and third parties so they could eliminate existing and potential competition.)
Or in other words, almost as textbook an example of anticompetitive behavior as you can get.
You don’t see the difference between Amazon selling ads based on what I do on Amazon’s platform and Facebook selling ads based on what I do on Amazon?
It’s the sane thing in this case with Apple.
Besides, Apple isn’t banning third parties from sharing information. They just have to ask permission. What’s the government suppose to do? Say Apple isn’t allowed to ask consumers whether they want to be tracked across parties?
My understanding of a "conflict of interest" is that they happen when a personal interest interferes with a duty. Ex: a company executive receiving a gift from a potential supplier.
This situation would not be a conflict of interest because Apple has no duty to third party advertisers
I will happily buy into an ecosystem with stupidly priced accessories if it has no ads and solid protection for privacy. As soon as I see ads (in anything) it's shit. If it's loaded with spyware and constantly invades privacy it's shit. These are things I associate with low-end trash.
It was $1000, and actually a brilliant move because actual Pro users don't use fixed stands (and so aren't offended), while wannabe-Pro rich people will buy it in droves. Thus increasing the luxury branding without actually offending actual Pro users. For those people, the $1000 stand price is a conversation starter and a reason to buy in itself.
I get that work is probably paying for most people's but it's not really usable out of the box without a pricey add-on. You can literally buy an entire monitor (with stand and VESA mount) for $200.
This is by biggest concern and one of the reasons I use apple products. absolutely ads, and now I heard that they are injecting them into apple maps, I may have to switch to google maps if this happens.
They're reinvesting like 5-10% of profits on r&d? Something tells me they're already living fat off their existing wins. Ads would only further send apple into the realm of unicorn money printing behemoths.
As much as advertising can suck, I highly prefer not having all news sites hard paywalled and not needing premium subscriptions for essential services like search, email and YouTube.
eMail pre-dates the ad ecosystem; search is actually pretty nice but Google is slowly losing ground to SEO, a new paradigm might be necessary; and YouTube is basically bad.
If it is cancer, it's very lucrative cancer. But actually it's not cancer, because it powers a lot of things. 99% of all interactions that people have on the internet today is due to advertising. Email, chat, videos, search, games, apps, news... all created, popularized, and funded by ads.
I would prefer it if we weren't a consumer society, if our entire way of life wasn't powered by selling things, with advertising being the biggest underlying aspect. If Apple is smart they will retain their brand image of quality and elite lifestyle, because that's how they advertise their products. But they certainly aren't going to abandon ads.
Apple's news app is unusable for me because of the ads. Their app store is just this side of unusable because of ads.
To be clear: I have adhd. Ads are intentionally designed to catch the attention of your average person with reasonable control of their attention. I have no chance in hell of keeping my attention on the article when I have to blast past 6-7 unblockable ads per article.
> ”Apple is also reportedly taking steps to build its own demand-side platform (DSP) … If true, it would mean that Apple is jumping on the ad tech bandwagon, something that it has so far resisted doing.”
Not entirely true: Apple’s iAd platform ran for a few years in the 2010s before being canned in 2016.
Yeah, I found that to be a very narrow definition of "ad tech." Apple already has campaign management for ads today: https://searchads.apple.com/advanced
iAd lasted shorter than a Google chat app. It was DOA.
When people say "ad tech" now, they mean DSP -- selling their party ads unrelated to the boat company. Apple Store ads are Apple ripping off iOS devs for product placement in its own store, not generic interest-based ads.
This is also about the ninth rehash on HN of the same newspaper article that was written three months ago.
Every blogger with an axe to grind has been re-spinning this same point with more and more hyperbole since because "Apple bad" = click click click click.
Marketing campaigns often convince people to think things, however subconsciously, i.e. Lincoln is associated with Luxury or X cereal is a wholesome breakfast.
What I hadn't seen until this was a marketing campaign that actually proselytized so many into proclaiming the message for free. On HackerNews, Reddit and in public places you're likely to find someone vouching for Apple's privacy practices sometimes with the same verbiage that's on the billboards! Maybe that's a testament to Steve Jobs's lasting marketing impact.
I personally see the incentive structure which makes Apple more privacy-friendly than say Google. But I'm deeply suspicious of such a convenient message that the largest corporation in the world puts its resources behind. Also, being more privacy-friendly than Google and being privacy friendly are two different things.
I have huge concerns about this, I think it's really hard for any publicly traded company who gets into ad-tech not to end up making some questionable choices. The incentive structure in the ad business is such that no matter how strong a core org you think you have, it likely corrupts over time. While Apple's track record on privacy is commendable, Tim loves (and needs to keep shareholders happy) a good Services growth story.
It's also clear at this point, the most profitable ads in the industry are the ones that most take advantage of personal data - this isn't a secret. The difference in profitability can be stark too, which is why I worry so much about the incentive structure.
You might be surprised to know that Apple has been doing ads for over a decade. [0] They‘ve had ads for a long time, and still do - App Store search ads[1] and Apple News ads, to my knowledge.
Let's not forget that App Store search ads replaced iAds, which was an in-app ad network. I assume that it was shut down because of too much competition in the space, but perhaps we'll see it come full circle as Apple diminishes the "effectiveness" of third-parties.
And there was the Steve Jobs era ad network that has big, interactive type flash ads that Apple had to approve as being "good". I don't remember much except working on a video component of a Geico ad that was mobile only in ~2009.
Apple was and is so bad at advertising that people think they didn't do it until recently.
Part of it just comes with the territory. Apple is a computer company that prides itself on not only having a sense of taste, but being able to impose that sense of taste on its business partners. This is contrary to the goals of advertisers - tastelessness kind of comes with the territory and advertising inherently messes with the user experience.
Few months ago when launching apps on Mac Os became sluggish because their telemetry service had high latency -- that was the moment I lost faith in all of Apple's privacy claims.
PS: Still use a MBP, iPhone and an Apple Watch. :(
That "telemetry" (which is misleading in the current context) was about checking for malware. I'm talking the specific case of launching apps on macOS.
Part of the issue IIRC is that application names were exposed in the request, not encrypted in any way. So there are legitimate privacy/security concerns in publicly announcing every application that you open on your computer.
That telemetry could easily -- more easily in fact -- have been done in a privacy protecting way: have your machine ship with a signature database and then have it randomly and frequently download deltas. Then check the signature database locally. It would be faster too. Especially on the mac we're not talking about an enormous database.
Rather disappointed that Apple didn't take this route. They do do something similar with their virus database (XProtect).
> "Also, being more privacy-friendly than Google and being privacy friendly are two different things."
in theory, that's ok, if we have healthy, functioning markets that are free from undue influence of any individual participant. the "invisible hand" of the market would drive it iteratively toward more privacy (assuming this is valued by more than minor segment, greater than ~15% of the market). the market would (and should) be an ongoing conversation between suppliers and consumers to reach all the profitable corners of supply and demand, rather than a couple behemoths with megaphones telling us how great they are, rather than showing it through their products and practices.
p.s. - has anyone else noticed adguard doing port-scans on your gateway from their dns service IPs? i haven't dug into it yet, so i don't know whether it's spoofed or whatnot.
> functioning markets that are free from undue influence of any individual participant. the "invisible hand" of the market would drive it iteratively toward more privacy (assuming this is valued by more than minor segment, greater than ~15% of the market)
The market is for advertisers, and advertisers - whether they are small or large businesses - value tracking and measurability of their advertising investments.
advertisers value a way of determining ROI, which doesn't necessarily require pervasive tracking (see: nielsen ratings of yore).
in any case, my point was about the consumer electronics market, which is apple's core industry, and which, in a healthy and well-functioning market, also has a key stake in this conversation (driving it toward non-distorted, optimally efficient outcomes).
I disagree. Incrementality studies (which measure ROI) as advertisers want them are basically impossible with ATT. You need to be able to pass an ID between apps.
yes, but you haven't shown that that translates into more precise and accurate ROI. marketers and advertisers believe it should, but there's no solid proof. that's because markets (and any human endeavor) is complicated beyond our ability to model (and solve) it deterministically. attribution models (such as incrementality studies) can sometimes give you clues, but can't really tell you why any given person bought something with any certainty. it's the old adage of half of advertising dollars are wasted, but you don't know which half.
Before ATT happened, FB has a tool that would run experiments to assess incrementality of your advertising. It's possible, but there are a bunch of privacy trade-offs..
right, but again, those are very likely probabalistic, population-level models that make assumptions about how to attribute credit--does it all go to the first view/click? how likely is the first view/click really the first view/click? do you instead apportion credit across clicks/views? how? it's somewhat useful at a population level, but not at all at an individual level, especially not for the tradeoff in privacy, anonymity, and autonomy.
but the kicker is, is it better than just doing studies without the more invasive attribution data, especially in relation to the higher price and market consolidation? very unlikely. ad monopolization means more of the value in the value chain goes to the monopolist regardless of the proportion of value they provide in the chain.
> is it better than just doing studies without the more invasive attribution data,
Absolutely, as the controlled incrementality study is impossible without either attribution or some group-based approximation of attribution (ie. federated cohorts, etc.)
> right, but again, those are very likely probabalistic, population-level models that make assumptions about how to attribute credit--does it all go to the first view/click? how likely is the first view/click really the first view/click? do you instead apportion credit across clicks/views? how? it's somewhat useful at a population level, but not at all at an individual level, especially not for the tradeoff in privacy, anonymity, and autonomy.
So the idea is that you run the experiment, and this can then help you understand where you should attribute value, as you know that the only difference between the two groups was the exposure to FB ads.
Now, to be fair, unless FB is most of your spend, you still have a bunch of problems, but they'll wash out equally across conditions (theoretically, at least) so the estimate should be good.
I think modern incrementality studies give solid proof of the value of an ad on the basis of a good model of how the world works. Of course, models can be wrong - it could turn out that solipsism is true, physics is false, and the world outside of your own mind is a figment of your imagination!
That the world is complex and models are inherently wrong does not mean that nothing of value to businesses was lost with ATT.
no, there's a belief of value (and fomo), but not concrete proof. there's little correlation between the price of an ad and the value of attribution beyond the value of the ad itself.
Incrementality studies provide concrete proof of how your ad impacts behavior. How you value that behavior change is up to the business and reflected in the price they are willing to pay.
> the market would (and should) be an ongoing conversation between suppliers and consumers to reach all the profitable corners of supply and demand, rather than a couple behemoths with megaphones telling us how great they are
I agree but where do we see this? Everywhere I look it’s mega corps. Food, fuel, power, electronics, clothes. I can’t think of a good example of the ideal relationship.
mostly in commodities markets (almost by definition, ha). if we had an anti-trust division with any teeth, we'd have many more markets like this, as that's the whole point of anti-trust enforcement--to un-distort markets to drive greater efficiencies and maximize value across the economy (not just in large corps and solely for the already wealthy).
Monopolies are optimally efficient across the economy, as long as the monopolist doesn't get too greedy. Competition is wasteful -- competition is why the deadweigh loss ad industry exists!
monopolies seeming to be efficient like that is only true in a limited static analysis. in a dynamic and complex economy, there's great value in the flexibility, ingenuity, resilience, price discovery, and creative restructuring provided by multiple competitors in a given market.
It was quite a thing to see Apple's huge "What Happens on iPhone, Stays on iPhone" billboards up around town, at the exact same time they were announcing the rollout of a new content-side illegal-material scan-and-notify system.
(I think they've since delayed the rollout of that system indefinitely, after public outcry.)
It was restricted to that for the time being yes. But still a big step in the wrong direction. I don't want my own phone spying on me. It's a bridge too far. Scanning on a cloud service is a very big difference.
Does it matter in practice? No. But it makes me feel very different about it. That's important too.
Same way I feel about it. When the data is on your servers, I fully expect it to be analyzed and checked to ensure it's compliant with the host's standards. That's part of our agreement, as customer and service. When you move that software onto the device I use, now I have to be conscious of everything I interact with. It's a horrible sinking feeling that isn't easily mitigated by platitudes like "we promise not to abuse it!"
When you sync or upload folder to iCloud, iCloud is Apple’s property. They were scanning content before it landed on Apple’s property to enable S2E crypto.
Sounds like you’re taking exception with the explicit parental notification, where a parent with a child enrolled in their iCloud “family” can request to be alerted when their minor child takes an action on the phone owned by the parent.
The EFF wrote an awful blog that deliberately confused the already confusing release from Apple. Your privacy is almost certainly weaker as a result, as various entities can use a subpoena or warrant to access your files.
The problem is that the data wasn't on their servers, it was just flagged to go to Apple's servers.
And once you're scanning files with one flag set, nothing technologically prevents the scanning of files without that flag being set. And to quote myself from the Google Stadia brouhaha - "companies lie in PR statements" - so I have no reason to trust Apple's statement that they would never scan other files.
> And once you're scanning files with one flag set, nothing technologically prevents the scanning of files without that flag being set.
You need to read up on how the system worked, because they picked a design that made absolutely no sense if they wanted to do that. They’d have to redesign it to work in a different way if they wanted to do that.
If you don't trust them to do what they are saying, when they are saying it happens - then why on earth do you trust the device to not do it just by avoiding iCloud?
You’re getting upset because they chose to tell you that this is happening.
The material that they scan for is illegal to possess. You should assume that anyone that accepts cleartext uploads of binary data is scanning for that and other material.
At the end of the day, you don’t have the juice to negotiate contractual protections, so corporate self-interest is really your only real protection.
> The material that they scan for is illegal to possess.
Do you know what else is illegal to possess? Proof of abortions in some states. Proof of being gay in many countries. Winne the Pooh in at least one country.
> You should assume that anyone that accepts cleartext uploads of binary data is scanning for that and other material.
Again, since this seems to be lost every time, this isn't being checked post upload. That matters.
The Apple philosophy though is to think of the phone as an appliance, not a general purpose computer. The model of "ownership" is also a lot more gray with Apple devices. The idea that Apple has more control over the device than you do is the accepted norm. Given that, I think they could easily argue that your data is on their device, so analyzing/checking is expected. They've been slowly iterating more and more to this model for years, likely because I think a lot of people will not go along with it unless the heat turns up slowly.
Nothing. And since it's uploaded, I've agreed that it's OK for them to scan and report on them.
The key point I'm trying to make is that where the data is located matters for whether Apple (or Microsoft or Redhat or whichever company) has the ability or right to read and report on that data.
> at least you are protected from future policy changes if your files in the cloud are encrypted.
If, and only if, that data is never synced back to your phone (which Apples does currently).
Yes, that's fair and true -- they promised the scanning would self-limit to content being synched with iCloud.
But I think that's pretty thin gruel, since now you're just a feature-flag (or even a bug) away from all content being scanned. More broadly, the entire endeavor is very much at odds w/ the sentiment expressed in their public advertising.
They want to scan on device so they do not have to scan it in the cloud.
Because people are in full FUD mode on this, we're stuck storing photos without full end-to-end encryption because Apple has do the scanning on their side.
How does this work in regards to a companies obligation (if there is one) to scan for illegal illicit material (I don’t feel like typing that term out that we all know) ?
I don't think there are many governments in the western world that wouldn't get to that point. The entire point of client-side scanning was to head off the possibility of a law saying they have to scan everything server-side for the exact same reasons.
> Well, there is another option: Apple could actually respect your privacy, support end-to-end encryption, and not scan your content at all.
This is not an option you, or Apple, think there is to choose.
Peoples FUD and misrepresentation over what was happening and your snark over "yes but their advertising campaign says things stay on the phone" (which is literally true) is IMO likely actually accelerating the privacy degradation. When they are compelled by law to scan this all centrally in one place in the cloud, I guess you will be happier that it's more invasive but just happening "elsewhere"?
> now you're just a feature-flag (or even a bug) away from all content being scanned.
That’s not true. The system didn’t work the way you are assuming. The device had no knowledge of any matches. The “scanning” was a coöperation of client-side and server-side code, each with an extremely limited knowledge of the data involved.
I don't think you're correct -- the phone uploads security vouchers from photos, any photos, to Apple's servers. If enough of the vouchers match the image database, Apple can decrypt the vouchers to a low-rez version of the photos.
Apple says this would only be used on iCloud synced photos, but I don't see any technical reason the process could not be performed for any photo.
I wouldn't trust a corporation of this size to make sure there aren't recurring bugs which cause scanning of things I have on my device, but do not upload to their servers. If the code for scanning, flagging me and reporting to authorities is on the device, then I expect bugs (intentional or not) which will trigger it, even though I don't use iCloud. Put the scanning in the cloud, then I'll be fine with it - I don't use the cloud.
Also the scanning was calculating hashes based on content, not just metadata.
> To be fair - wasn't that scanning on-device, and only uploading metadata on things that you yourself were already uploading to their cloud?
On-device scanning like that would be pointless, though. IIRC, stuff uploaded to their cloud is already accessible to Apple for server-side scanning. The controversial thing was the on-device scans would trigger some kind of upload of un-uploaded stuff to Apple for further investigation.
> IIRC, stuff uploaded to their cloud is already accessible to Apple for server-side scanning. The controversial thing was the on-device scans would trigger some kind of upload of un-uploaded stuff to Apple for further investigation.
No, the stated behaviour was that it would be uploaded to the cloud at the same time as the encrypted image. Uploaded data was still "encrypted" "at rest" (but possible for them to decrypt, just not done routinely). The whole point of the client-side scanning was that scanning was done locally on the phone and uploaded with it, as an explicit alternative to them regularly decrypting and scanning all user data on their servers. The stated operation was; if the phone fingerprint matched a public CSAM fingerprint list, then it would be automatically decrypted and scanned with a second, private fingerprinting algorithm on the server - only if this second, private fingerprint matched would the data be flagged up for potential violation (and inspected).
The alternative to this was them just regularly scanning all data in their cloud anyway. Apparently people are happier with that option.
Actually that’s perfectly in line with it “staying on your iPhone” that they were proposing to do content scanning on your phone. Not that I agree with it. But it is consistent.
But results about matches don't stay on the phone, which I think is clearly a violation of the statement (unless you are interpreting it in an extremely literal way).
It only gets sent to Apple if you turned on iCloud photo syncing to send the photos to Apple.
That means the alternative would be to send the photos to Apple and Apple scans the photo. Either way you send the photo to Apple and meta data gets generated about CSAM. It’s just a matter of where the data gets generated.
I’m also uneasy about it happening on the phone. But honestly, by it being processed on the phone, that means it can be encrypted before it gets to Apple’s servers.
I’m basically working under the assumption that scanning for CSAM is legally required.
> I’m basically working under the assumption that scanning for CSAM is legally required.
It is explicitly not legally required in the US [1]. Providers are required to report "apparent CSAM" that they find on their own, but they are not compelled to search their servers or private devices for its presence.
And this is the case for a very good reason: if it was mandated by US law, then prosecutions would be subject to much stronger 4th amendment review under the "state action doctrine" (i.e., the companies are searching your files without probable cause as compelled representatives of the government.) The current arrangement evades this review under the very thin fig-leaf that US providers are doing the searching on their own.
FOSTA/SESTA and other law push back on that, wherein a neutral host (website, hotel) can be held responsible for crimes commited on their property if the government decides they are generally aware.
Apple doesn't want to be an accessory.
So even if they can't be required to scan, they can be punished for not scanning if something illegal turns up
IANAL and certainly don't want to defend those laws, but I believe FOSTA/SESTA ban providers from operating services with the intent to promote or facilitate various crimes. In other words, the provider has to knowingly distribute the material. I'm pretty sure that Apple encrypting its photo backup service would not satisfy these criteria, but if it did and the only way to comply with those laws was enforced CSAM scanning, then many CSAM prosecutions based on it would probably be tossed out.
As far as I know, it's not legally required, at least in the US, though I wouldn't be surprised if suggestions from gov behind the scenes were the inspiration for this. I guess the EU is in the process of trying to mandate something like this.
Which would be unfortunate. At that point, you won't be able maintain digital privacy from the govt w/o de-facto becoming a criminal.
CSAM is, I think, simply the initial justification for these systems, since it's widely reviled. But the system itself is not CSAM-specific, and the temptation to expand its scope will likely be irresistible.
If your goal was to become an authoritarian tyrant, you would be very happy to have this in place. :-)
I don't think it's possible to exist as a public-facing corporate entity without some kind of content scanning mechanism. If that were possible, then every child abuser would simply move their data onto those platforms and they'd become untouchable.
Even MEGA, which signals the virtues of privacy/security through the prominence of decryption keys on its UI flows, will still report illegal content to authorities and display a message saying so if content was removed for that reason.
Any publicly traded company that touts perfect privacy cannot deliver what they are claiming, or they'd become the service of choice for every type of disenfranchised person - including child abusers.
Apple has received much more flak than the average corporation over this issue because this fundamental impossibility of perfect privacy clashed with its own privacy signaling in a loud way, and the flurry of debate over the technical merits of the novel, widely shared on-device scanning solution caused much more scrutiny than the boring server-side scanning that has been ubiquitous for decades.
But the fact is that no matter how Apple tries to approach the CSAM problem, it will ultimately have to weed out child abusers from its servers or be publicly and legally lambasted. That is what society has decided is best for the welfare of children, and as a result we will have to live with an imperfect level of privacy as provided by such entities.
My mom who is not British and has spent almost no time outside of the Great Plains uses this term. I think the “lous” come from louse, the singular form of lice. A great abundance of not a great thing.
TIL! But my partner has heard it used in the UK like "I'm lousy with options" as in, I'm overflowing with choice. That was a fun convo as I was like ... What??
"Lousy" also has a definition of being infested with lice (the singular form of which is louse); according to the Etymology Dictionary this may be the original meaning
(https://www.etymonline.com/word/lousy)
From there, it seems to have developed as an American slang to describe "infestations" of other kinds.
I see you were right, but I think both choices (loathe and likely) are acceptable. I originally thought jack was saying "its unfortunate to find" or "it's disgusting to find".
I remember Tim Cook said they are not in the Ads Business. Unfortunately I am too busy, Apple's PR has worked hard to delete those tracks of what Tim Cook said, or Google's search engine is longer showing what I am looking for.
And I remember that "Apple is not in the Ad Business" before 2018 was the most cited defence and reason on HN. That was before the war on tracking, the submarine articles on ads, and the attack on Facebook.
Because you know what? Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right. And because iPhone is the only smartphone that values your privacy, banning iPhone sales in your country is also against Human Right.
>But I'm deeply suspicious of such a convenient message.
I was probably the only few who was deeplydeeply suspicious of the "Dont be Evil" Google in the early 00s, in an era of "Dont be Evil", when everyone in Tech thought they were Saint.
The self righteousness of Google, I thought nothing could be worse than Google's hypocrisy. I mean how can something be worse than "Dont be Evil"?
Well here we are. The era of "Fundamental Human Right". A company that worked with CCP, invested $275B to build and improve the whole CE supply chain in China. Helping those companies to compete in area where CCP has a strategic interest, Continue to invest and help those companies to set up operation in India or Vietnam in the name of "Diversification from China" as PR headlines.
> I was probably the only few who was deeply deeply suspicious of the "Dont be Evil" Google in the early 00s, in an era of "Dont be Evil", when everyone in Tech thought they were Saint. The self righteousness of Google, I thought nothing could be worse than Google's hypocrisy. I mean how can something be worse than "Dont be Evil"?
I don't think that's accurate or fair, and I think (as I often see) it misses a lot of context around where "Don't Be Evil" came from, and what it really meant.
"Don't Be Evil" was basically to highlight and contrast Google's desired culture from Microsoft's at the time of the late 90s/early 00s. That is, at the time, and especially early in Microsoft's existence, MS was pretty famous for "dirty tricks". E.g look at the early history/origins of DOS, anti-competitive tactics WRT DR-DOS [1], how they fought the browser wars, the full history outlined in Microsoft v United States, etc. The icon for MS in Slashdot at the time was famously the Gates "borg" icon, and that is how a lot of people viewed MS.
When it comes to Google, I think the whole idea behind "Don't Be Evil" is that they believed that you could make money withOUT dirty tricks, and up until 2010-2012 or so I think this was largely true. People flocked to Google and their products not because they were forced to, but because the products were genuinely much better than the competition at the time. Search, GMail, Maps, StreetView, Chrome - when all of these came out I remember thinking "holy shit this is amazing".
The problem, though, is that at some point all very successful companies reach a size where I believe it's only possible to respond to your economic incentives, which are to grow at any cost. I mentioned 2010-2012 (maybe a little later, 2012-2014) because that's when I feel like I really saw Google's approach change to really squeeze the pennies from their existing business, e.g. when they made ads more and more indistinguishable from organic results, or when they made it so that any remotely commercial search term has an ENTIRE page of ads above the fold. Paying "the Google tax" became a real thing, e.g. you'd have to pay Google for an add JUST on your domain name because competitors might bid higher.
Thus, if anything, I give Google props for "holding out" a good ~12-15 years before their growth and economic incentives made it "must increase revenue at all costs" and the beancounters took over.
I would argue Google turned evil quickly, pretty much the moment they released the surplus behavioural data they could glean off their users when they used their services could be extracted for profit which begun even before gmail, allowing them to “personalize” your services. And by personalize, I mean Google built a profile on you to better learn how they could poke and prod at your behaviour in order to manipulate you into doing things for their customers, the advertisers.
I think the doubleclick acquisition hopped this into overdrive and also allowed Google to start screwing both sides by extracting larger and larger rents from advertisers with its near monopoly power and ad cartel with Facebook. We saw the Google tracking cookie spread like a plague shaking down users for data even if they did not use a Google service, as sites effectively needed to install googles tracking cookie on its customers computers to take full advantage of the Google ad monopoly, obliterating the pretence of consent you had with a service like gmail where you were at least consciously agreeing to data scraping.
I honestly think it took them almost no time at all to go from pagerank and spiders to leap towards building their panopticon and the modern surveillance economy. I think the reason people didn’t consider them evil is that what they were doing was so innovative and groundbreaking that people didn’t fully understand the implications. The way their business operates shouldn’t even be legal with them playing both sides of the ad market and their relentless spying being opt-out at best if you have sufficient technical knowledge. The spying of Google and companies like that it’s undermining government privacy protections at this point as the government can acquire spy data it couldn’t gather itself legally (for good reason) from private companies.
The modern internet gives me a strange sense of amnesia. I swear everything is heavily censored and redacted now, but how can I prove it when my primary view into this world is the search engines themselves? It feels a bit like the simulation hypothesis.
Which is why increasingly I want a browser to record everything I read. So I can always go back to it. Instead of relying on Search Engine, where I could have quoted the "exact" phase and still not get any decent results.
There is a speech that was given at EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) in 2015 that is likely to have the quote you are looking for.[0][1]
There is a short clip of his speech at the event which was reported by NBC News, in which he states the boundaries of their advertisement program at the time.[2]
EDIT: There is also this story from the Verge in 2014 which includes a lengthy quote about the advertisement program.[3]
> I remember Tim Cook said they are not in the Ads Business.
Yes, he said that after Apple failed in the ads business, just as it was focussing on leveraging its platform control against the firms that had beat it to reshape the field for the next try.
> I remember Tim Cook said they are not in the Ads Business. Unfortunately I am too busy, Apple's PR has worked hard to delete those tracks of what Tim Cook said, or Google's search engine is longer showing what I am looking for.
The first sentence of the actual article links to when Tim Cook said that.
They're not in the search business because the potential is much more limited compared with selling hardware and services. People use YouTube and Facebook for many hours a day and the amount of revenue compared with what Apple can get from ads in app store, news, perhaps iPhone search and other Apple apps are orders of magnitude higher (hundreds of billions of dollars compared with single digit billions for Apple).
Privacy is very different for most of the ads Apple are currently showing too. Search ads work without the need for tracking because when people are searching for something you show them ads for things they are searching for now, not from some model of their interests created from their tracked internet history.
This is why Apple can have an ad business and also destroy Facebooks (and others) ad business based on tracking - they don't need to squeeze every dollar from targeted ads.
I degoogled long before it became popular to do so. And I was on gmail early enough to have needed an invite.
But the writing was on the wall for anyone who knew what to look for. And it's the same with the likes of Paypal. I refuse to use these services because they're not banks and are not beholden to the same rules (they're getting more regulated, and my find themselves to be a bank equivalent eventually).
> The self righteousness of Google, I thought nothing could be worse than Google's hypocrisy.
I wasn't very suspicious at the time, but learned to be. My take on this is different though. I don't think it was a case of self-righteousness as much as extreme naivete of some postdocs that were just entering the business world. naivete in thinking a statement such as that couldn't be twisted to the point it meant less that it already does ("evil" is not well defined), and naivete to think they wouldn't be the ones twisting it, whether on purpose or subconsciously, as business needs slowly changed and they had to justify keeping their business afloat and profitable, and people in jobs, and shareholders happy.
You either set up your business such that it's incentivized to align with your morals, or your business (the market) will incentivize you to change your morals to align with it.
If nothing else, we've learned that practices that seem mostly benign one decade at low scale can become very troubling the next decade when done at a much larger scale and/or when additional consequences of the practice become known. Choices made that align with your morals at one time may have consequences that mean you were wrong, even if you couldn't really have known it, but now your business relies on this prior decision.
Running a business is hard, making overreaching statements you can't live up to later is easy.
Not only that, in my experience, the support is fanatical in nature. I often get downvoted and flagged for daring to state the obvious, which is that Apple is positioning itself to become one of the largest companies in the Ad space. It's probably more than just great marketing / PR (at least - of the usual kind).
I like to say that Apple is a marketing company that makes decent tech products. They absolutely played this market like a fiddle. They sat back and watched Google and FB absorb tons of bad press and I'm sure they were feeding it behind the scenes. It always felt to me like a ploy. As much as ads and the SEO game had their problems, they were there to support the open web. Apple kept tapping the breaks on improving their web browsers and driving users to apps because that was their walled garden. Owning an iPhone now is essentially a status symbol, owning an Android means you're poor. The privacy rules designed to kill ads was only ever designed to hurt Google, not to protect users.
As a counter example of marketing gone wrong, Amazon has very steadfastly never sold their customer data to anyone. No one ever thought for a second that they did this because they were interested in privacy.
apple uploads and modifies all photos you take on your device with the explicit stated intent of referring you for prosecution. That doesn't sound very private to me.
'Deeply suspicious' is an understatement. These corporations don't have your back, and if something benefits the user, it's only as a side effect. Sadly, many still buy into the messaging, which must be hard to avoid when Apple's marketing has always been around making you feel like the kool kid in the block. Anybody who has ever believed Apple's pro-privacy scam is living in a fairy tale.
I propose a law, that states that advertising is only permitted in certain locations, in certain industries (phonebooks, highway ads, TV stations), and that anywhere else, it is completely illegal to advertise, full stop. Do not even think about advertising there if it's not on the short list. If you want to advertise on a product, no money must exchange hands, or Congress must pass an amendment.
EDIT: Forgot when writing this down (been thinking about this for a while), but this would only apply to Publicly traded companies.
Since you're already making carve outs, here's $100,000 for your reelection campaign if you exclude Apple, too.
Ethical marketing is a hard problem to solve, I don't think the best solution is focusing on where it happens, instead it should be focused on how it's happening (targeting) and what the content is.
I'm not so sure about that. In many states, if you sell a product, the government can compel you to put speech on your product (such as, for tobacco, giant warnings about addiction.) In my home state, Minnesota, advertising certain products (like adult-themed stores) is banned on highway billboards. If that is legal, you could maybe at least force a giant black-and-white text warning covering up half the side of TV saying, "Warning: Contains non-removable built-in advertising and user behavior tracking features." If you were really nasty, you could force a "sin tax" on the manufacturer for doing so - just charging 10% per product with built-in advertising would quickly end the practice. Treat advertising like tobacco - even that would be a start.
Well first of all tell us how we should read the first amendment. Do we do it based on what the FOUNDING FATHERS believed or what the language of the amendment says, or some other doctrine?
Because if we do it based on what the FOUNDING FATHERS believed, unless you can find a quote where they said the first amendment would apply to advertisements, then we can conclude that the first amendment doesn't apply at all.
> Because if we do it based on what the FOUNDING FATHERS believed, unless you can find a quote where they said the first amendment would apply to advertisements, then we can conclude that the first amendment doesn't apply at all.
A dangerous line of thinking. If we're just going to keep what the Founding Fathers said as the only standard for the First Amendment, then only the Federal government would be bound by it. States could could still pass their own laws that punish the exercise of individual rights, free speech included.
I agree that sticking to what the founding father's said will greatly roll back civil rights, but this is what conservatives frequently claim they want to do.
Curiously, conservatives say this is more democratic since people will get to vote on anything they want without judges getting in the way, even though there's no right to vote in the constitution.
> Because if we do it based on what the FOUNDING FATHERS believed, unless you can find a quote where they said the first amendment would apply to advertisements, then we can conclude that the first amendment doesn't apply at all.
That's an unreasonable view. The First Amendment says nothing about text on computers or lyrics in music being protected speech, yet we accept that they are and the Supreme Court agrees.
I think you mean "certain Supreme Courts in certain time periods agree..." The 1942 Supreme Court said in Valentine v. Chrestensen commercial speech isn't protected by the first amendment at all.
This is a brilliant idea, however there are a few problems. The first is that for better or worse, you could bring down a lot of services, businesses, content creators (i.e. YouTube) and most likely a great many people will lose their job.
The second problem is, this is probably not going to fly against freedom of speech, because it's effectively censorship of a certain kind. And if it does pass, what could be the next flavor of communication to be outlawed? Maybe it's not something you're going to like.
I much prefer blocking ads (which I've come to be incredibly effective at), and still have the law allow people to advertise. And I hate ads with a passion! But the alternative could be worse.
So if a publicly traded company wants to advertise on TV they either have to find a TV station that will run their ad for free or they have to buy a TV station, because of the requirement that no money change hands for the ad?
I know everone hates ads, but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment? Did Apple’s blocking of facebook’s targeted ads improve the consumer experience? Or did that just make advertising more inefficient which then led to just more irrelevant ads. A good example would be American tv. Everyone has to suffer to through those stupid viagra and antidepressants ads because there is no targeting.
No. Because targeting means you’ve built a profile on me by collecting data about my habits and interests without permission and will sell/leak that to god knows who. Websites can tailor their ads to the audience likely to visit them.
I would be fine with paying for youtube premium, etc. if they did not track and build profiles on paying customers. I get mining my data in exchange for using it for free, but I do not think it is fair to mine data on paying customers without giving them some discount/opt out.
Turn personalized ads on or off
Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising, then turn Personalized Ads on or off.
Note: Turning off personalized ads limits Apple’s ability to deliver relevant ads to you. It may not reduce the number of ads you receive.
Plus: they're often even worse than the wholesale because what they think they know about me is basically always pure nonsense. (Other than offering me an ad to buy the book I just fckn bought.)
The reason for my no is that if there are ad agencies committed to building a profile of you, that's far to easy for that profile to get sold/stolen by bad actors. For example, if I was a trans man, and I was buying feminine hygiene products, I could be targeted for harassment by a leaked advertising profile.
If there's no money in building profiles it makes it less likely that one will be built, not that it can't. But that's a reasonable tradeoff to me.
Sure, but it's not as if the data used to create the targeted ad disappears after the ad is served, or that the data in a single, secure location. It's shared with 100 other analytics companies and could end up in the hands of your health insurer, or God knows who else.
I'm against all ads, but I'm particularly against targeted ads because building and tuning systems that are designed to track people and personalize messages to influence behavior have far too many uses that are far worse that convincing someone to buy some pants or whatever. It's highly tuned and personalized psychological warfare at scale, that can be deployed for any number of reasons.
If you want a contrary opinion, I disagree. On the face of it, I agree with your premise. However, targeted ads unfortunately also means creating profiles which are sold to data brokers. Targeted ads are I suppose ok. However, collecting data, profiling and selling to whomever is paying has very significant ramifications.
If advertisers figure out a way to target ads without profiling, I'm all for it. In fact, it's not that uncommon for me to watch "sponsors" on YouTube. It's targeted because people who are watching a video on mechanical principles, might be interested in.. Say "brilliant".
That said. VPN services and ear pods can gf themselves.
Maybe not so much for the individual user's experience, but society as a whole.
We're seeing that targeted (political) ads are a powerful way to hack a democracy.
If everyone is seeing the same shitty advertisement, at least they have something to complain about together - even that much common ground is better in my opinion than everyone with their own version of reality.
I think that's the model everyone (eg: your average consumer) likes and is most familiar with.
Advertisements on TV are tolerated because it's not targeted and just a random broadcast to everyone who might be interested.
Anxiety that certain things may be used against you in the form of advertising is a very real problem people face. A teenager who is researching transgender topics would be potentially frightened if the TV station the family usually watches that never shows any ads about transgender health suddenly started pushing those kinds of ads and the parents disapproved.
The problem lies in the tracking technology. In order to make informed decisions about what people might potentially be looking to buy includes learning that individual's preferences and the rather unfortunate part of everything being online is that includes everything you could possibly imagine. Everything from the type of job you have right down to your porn preferences and other proclivities are potentially up for grabs and I'm sure the vast majority of people would feel greatly unnerved if Google, Facebook or whoever showed them just what kind of person the algorithms have determined them to be just by the data they've already collected.
First of all, yes I rather get irrelevant ads than being targeted. If you worked in certain industries you know that some advertisers are extremely cynical, and I simply don't want to be in a constant state of mental warfare against these people. This has a real effect on stress and in my opinion is worse than seeing an irrelevant ad. At least I know this ad isn't tracking and profiling me.
There is also the concept of identity, and specifically, who owns your identity. If you are the owner of your own identity, including interests, wants and needs, then no company should be allowed to create a profile of your identity ("shadow profile") without your permission. However, the big ad corporations like Google and Facebook (and recently TikTok) all create shadow profiles for you, like it or not, with or without your consent. Why are they allowed to do this? Should I not be paid if my unique identity is being used and monetized?
This "ownership of identity" complaint makes no sense to me. You are the owner of your identity, but I would still be free to think you are an asshole if I so wanted (I don't, to be clear, just an example :) )
Making inferences about you doesn't mean you "own" your identity less.
Of course you can think what you like of me, but how did you obtain this opinion? In all likelihood, from a personal interaction - perhaps you met me or replied to my misguided comments. Now imagine a person constantly badgering you for personal information that you don't want to share, and then using whatever info they found to manipulate you. There's a law against that, it's harassment, nobody wants this. But when a machine does it, it's supposedly okay.
I would consider consenting to being tracked and offered personalized ads if I got paid to see these ads. If I am the owner of my identity, I should be the one monetizing it. Why would I agree some corporation should make money off of my very being? I resent that. Either don't profile me (especially against my will) or compensate me.
Getting paid for your thoughts is not something new. People are constantly being paid to take part in focus groups, AB testing, polls and surveys. So why not pay you for the right to use this information in advertising?
> imagine a person constantly badgering you for personal information that you don't want to share, and then using whatever info they found to manipulate you. There's a law against that, it's harassment, nobody wants this. But when a machine does it, it's supposedly okay.
Badgering you for personal information? You are freely choosing to go on their site and interact with it how you want. The comparison with "harassment" seems extremely hyperbolic.
> So why not pay you for the right to use this information in advertising?
You're being compensated by using their free product, which you are free to not use.
> You are freely choosing to go on their site and interact with it how you want.
Only that the entire effort of collecting your data and profiling you happens without you being able to notice, stop or interfere (unless using some extension or sometimes a specific browser). It's more akin to you visiting public places (the visible websites) while a creepy stalker follows your every move and tries to profile you. This might be a form of harassment, but even if it isn't, I rather avoid this situation.
> You're being compensated by using their free product, which you are free to not use.
You might not be awere of how some of this works then. TikTok can seemingly track users visiting WebMD and Weight Watchers [1]. You can visit the webpage of your church, a clinic or even some municipal authorities and still get shadow profiled. And TikTok is new to this. Imagine the data collected by Google and Facebook.
We're not talking about visiting websites like YouTube where you enjoy a "free product". We're talking about virtually any website you visit including some essential services.
I strongly disagree. Targeted ads are significantly worse than generic ads.
The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings. Targeted advertising means you have even more data specific to an individual making it easier to manipulate the individual. More generic advertising (for example, TV ads) means all you have is the general area they live in, or the general interest of the individual (magazine ads). You cannot manipulate people based on their personal traits anymore.
The focus of the advertising shifts immediately from the consumer of the ad to the product and/or message of the ad, because you simply do not have enough information about the consumer.
> The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings
The entire point of your comment is manipulating human beings.
Advertising often just seeks to make a consumer aware of a certain product. If that is manipulation, so is pretty much any content that seeks to change what people know.
> The entire point of your comment is manipulating human beings.
The difference is in the intention for said manipulation. His comment isn’t trying to get us to part with our hard-earned income for ultimately frivolous goods.
Sure, if the good or service is actually frivolous, but what about the case where the human is actively searching for some good or service that offer some actual value?
Sometimes ads do that. I recently had a purchase that I got a lot of value off of based on an Instagram ad to my partner. I would not have known about the product otherwise.
There's so much noise online now, ads are necessity for me to eventually find something I like.
As an example, a couple of months ago I was searching for some new summer outfits. Went through Google, Reddit, various clothing blogs, catalogs, etc. but didn't find a lot that I liked. After a week more of targeted ads on Instagram, I was finally able to discover brands that fit my tastes.
Unless I'm buying something well-defined like a TV or Airpods, passive exposure via targeted ads has been one of the best ways for me to find something worth purchasing.
You may want a THING, but you don't know about a particular brand or style of said THING. Just by making you aware of them can be a win win.
Say you've been researching "THINGS" for a couple weeks and narrowed it down to 2 brands. An Ad pops for a brand you'd never heard of. Naturally you check it out, only to find out its better than either of the options you were previously considering.
I trust myself to find better products than what random ads will suggest. In my experience, that holds true. I hardly ever purchase anything from "new" brands except for niche products but ofc YMMV
What's frivolous about a wallet or a sweater? Ultimately, all your hard-earned income is to make your life easier via goods and services, some of which may be frivolous. If you can't trust yourself not to make all frivolous purchases, that's a problem you can try to solve on your own.
How many wallets or sweaters does one need? That is the reason I included the word "ultimately" in my comment
I'm not arguing we don't need to buy anything ever. I'm arguing most ads are either pushing stuff you don't really need 99% of the time or selling outright junk. And let's not get into how close some ads are to plainly false advertising (I'm looking at you, wellness / nutrition)
Sounds like you are experiencing poorly targeted ads if 99% of yours aren't things you need :)
Question. If your ads were perfectly targeted in that 100% of advertised products were something that you're interested in, is that not ideal? Isn't that what companies like Google and Facebook are trying to do? Wouldn't you be happier if you didn't get the Wellness / Nutrition / Viagra ads?
I studied and worked in marketing for a little while before becoming disgusted by it and leaving. The vast, vast majority of ads have a primary goal of raising awareness, not triggering a purchase. It's extremely hard (and often ineffective) to trigger a purchase, unless the ad is seen while literally standing in front of the product at the store. The best marketing technique is to raise awareness of the product, so that when the user thinks about their own need, your brand/product is the one they think of as a solution.
I think the difference is in what the two are trying to manipulate you to do.
His comment is trying to manipulate the reader into believing something that he believes is better for mankind. He doesn't materially benefit, and the reader doesn't lose anything.
Ads and advertisers are not trying to manipulate the viewers into buying a product. They are manipulating viewers into becoming the type of person that buys products impulsively and with little research. The product of the advertiser is not an ad; the product of the advertiser is you. This is not to your benefit.
So, trying to reduce gp's comment and ads in general to equivalence is misguided imo.
What if an advertiser truly believes in their product and thinks it will better mankind? What if they've done a bunch of research into the product and theirs is actually the best on the market? I think the two are closer than you'd like to admit.
That's not really how things work in a modern context. Today we have to distinguish between the people making the stuff, who really may "believe" in their product, and the people advertising those same products, who don't care, and who aren't the ones creating anything of value.
As a shoemaker, you might think your shoe is the best shoe on the market. Google doesn't care which is the best shoe. Google simply sells a product, namely, a credulous audience, to the shoemakers, who want buyers. And their ecosystem is bent toward improving that product. The shoemakers' noble ends don't justify the evil means of the advertisers.
This is kinda what I take the old adage to mean, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." You might think that Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. are free services because they don't cost you money. But that's like saying that a stay at the butcher's is free for the cow. They're not free at all; advertisers have to pay good money for access to their product, which is you.
The vast majority of products people buy help them solve problems of all kinds. An economic transaction is a win-win for both buyers and sellers. Look at products like the computer, the car, the telephone, etc. I think the world is becoming a better place as a result.
> Advertising often just seeks to make a consumer aware of a certain product. If that is manipulation, so is pretty much any content that seeks to change what people know.
That's what advertising used to do before tracking was a thing. When this was introduced the industry realized that targeting and manipulation is far more profitable and this made ad campaigns that don't do this unviable. Because nobody ever wants to go back to a lower profit margin.
PS Not sure why I get 0 points here :) I have it on good authority from some webmasters that were trying to offer non-tracked ads that advertisers simply don't want them anymore.
They're so addicted to tracking, and 'retargeting' (meaning repeat ads) that they're just not paying for untracked anymore. Not nearly enough to make an ad-supported website work anyway.
Due to GDPR and the cookie ban, things are turning in Europe though. Because now they no longer have the choice.
"Advertising often just seeks to make a consumer aware of a certain product."
And this is why shiny new product is often placed along a half naked beatiful women or alike? Sex sells?
Some marketing indeed exists, that just tries to make a consumer aware of a product. But most marketing campaigns try to associate a certain product with certain attractive person/livestyle/object.
The Malboro Man, the Taste of freedom. Etc.
It is highly manipulative to its core. And with targeted ads, you can play with the target persons fears and desires in a automated way. So far this likely not happening (very well), but the potential is very real and dark.
> The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings.
That's quite cynical. No the point is to connect products to interested consumers. Case in point: we recently had a baby so I've been googling for baby stuff. Now I get some ads for more baby stuff. It's relevant to my life far more than Viagra ads or whatever other generic ads could be shown to me. It's not exactly manipulation because I do need lots of baby stuff.
I've purchased a handful of things that I have scoured the internet for hours and couldn't find because they later came up in an ad randomly. I am extremely satisfied with the products. In fact, the only thing I'm not satisfied about is how much time I've spent fruitlessly which shows search is still an unsolved problem.
That something has some positive utility does not justify all negative consequences.
For instance installing publicly accessible cameras in all rooms in all homes would help reduce domestic abuse, however that obviously does not mean it's a net social good. In the same vein helpful target ads do not make up for all of the other shenanigans in manipulating people politically.
You sound like a perfect candidate for Facebook's new and revolutionary suppository microphone, which analyzes your outputs to more effectively target your interests. Think of the time you would save!
It is manipulation of you, towards specific product, within domain you look for. So you and your subconsciousness are outright attacked to buy product whose manufacturer paid the most, regardless of actual quality.
(ie we also buy baby stuff but sure as hell the best products are not ie 'pampers' which are in every freaking ad block on TV I ever saw, probably... same for thousand other household products, advertised ones are very rarely proper high quality within their category, since so much is spent on pushing them down everybody's throat).
I can't comprehend how otherwise smart folks can't grok this basic principle of advertising, its pure logic and simple follow-the-money principle. Its fight for your wallet, and your brain controls the wallet. Maybe it doesn't insult your intelligence to be manipulated like a sheep, but it sure does mine.
I think the field of advertising successfully whitewashes its own public image as innocent and neutral, "connecting products to interested consumers". It's the same as in politics, religion, finance, insurance, and other kinds of mass fraud and racketeering - hypnotizing people with smoke and mirrors, make belief, a theatrical performance. It's insidious and sneaky how it masquerades as normal, how entire individual lived experiences are spent in manufactured illusion, a system of exploiting human beings through psychological manipulation, and extracting value.
Well, we have relatively little baby stuff compared to some parents, it's still enough though. Some monitoring tech, stroller, car seat, bassinet, diapers, clothing, some early age books to help develop eyesight (supposedly), plus bath stuff.
I guess we could raise him in a cardboard box, bathe him in the sink and not have half this shit that's really for our convenience, but it is all convenient. We're definitely not going that crazy compared to the typical American/Canadian parent...
Wouldn't you prefer to realize you need something, and then you actively go and get it? I don't want to be manipulated into thinking I need something subconsciously just because I've seen it a bunch of times.
It is a huge conflict of interest "learning" of a solution to a problem from an ad who's express purpose is to get you to buy it. I agree with the sibling comment; fixing problems is fine but do it from something trustworthy, not the company with the biggest advertising pocketbook.
Deodorant became popular after advertisements started emotionally negging people by implying that they were stinky and everybody around them were laughing behind their back.
Connecting products to interested customers often involve manipulating the customer into being interested. Think about sugary cereals targeted at kids with songs and colors.
Is emotional manipulation a good thing if it has positive outcomes? What about torture, is torture with positive outcomes a good thing for society? Why stop there, what about killing people without a trial, if we can find enough positive outcomes?
I think an important part of your statement is “interested consumers”. A consumer who is not interested should not have to be bombarded with advertisements. At this point (making someone do something they do not want to), is where it becomes manipulation.
For instance, I have no interest in receiving snail-mail ads for credit cards. I am happy with the ones that I have right now, and regularly research on my own via trusted third parties to see if any are available which would be of interest to me. Still, I am unable to stop receiving mail advertising credit cards to me. There is not even recourse I can take because states have fallen for the same “connecting producers to consumers” argument as above, in the most broad sense, where every human is a potentially interested consumer for every single product.
The business is worse off (because they pay to advertise to me, and I will not get one of their credit cards), I am worse off (because I am upset I receive this mail), the planet is worse off (deforestation), others are worse off (perhaps the time spent by postal workers delivering me junk mail could improve service to others or reduce costs).
So while I agree that advertising is not inherently manipulative, when the audience is captive and uninterested, it becomes manipulation.
Psychological manipulation is a thing. People write dissertations on this stuff. These people are then hired by advertising companies. Often the people they target are children or adolescents.
It matters at the point when an individual is accountable for having seen the ad. There are countless situations where you cannot possibly perform any normal function of life (shy of sitting in the house and having someone else do all interaction with the outside world):
- Billboards. You cannot possibly keep these out of your peripheral (or center of) vision while driving without endangering everyone else on the road.
- Mailed advertisements. You have to check your mail, for example, for legal summons, that you are required by law to respond to.
- Public transit (lest I be auto-shamed). You cannot, where I am, even look toward where a train arrives, without seeing ads.
To remediate just these three advertising venues, you have to drive and board public transit with your eyes closed and not check your mail. These aren’t even activities I’d consider voluntary - people need to get to work to support themselves, and check their mail for legal purposes. Unless your argument is that we all make choices to participate in our sovereign nation’s legal structure and to have jobs that require leaving the home (not everyone can work in a cushy remote role).
What's the line between "were making someone do something" and "We have an army of psychologists hard at work to convince someone they need to do something"? Is that line different when it's directed to a 14 year old? Or a senior citizen? Or someone you know is likely a addict of what you're selling?
Imagine a world where, if interested in baby stuff, you paid money for articles on baby stuff, and advertisers knew to buy pages of ads among those articles; or if you watched TV shows about people doing baby stuff, advertisers knew to bookend those shows with baby stuff?
Research shows contextual advertising (the way it was done for ever before retargeting became a thing) beats retargeting for both purchases per dollar of ad spend and consumer appreciation / satisfaction (versus annoyance).
> > The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings.
> No the point is to connect products to interested consumers.
You're both right in identifying points of advertising, and they're not in conflict.
Advertising has _two_ points, which I phrase as:
1. Increasing consumer awareness
2. Increasing consumer demand
Increasing consumer awareness generally feels useful: that's finding out what baby products exist, or showing people a new invention or service.
Increasing consumer demand generally feels manipulative: that's showing sugary cereals and crap toys to children, or associating vaping with success, etc.
The two goals usually are working together — but I find it useful to separate which parts of the advertisement are doing what.
Fun fact: the original word used for 'advertising' was 'propaganda', and advertising uses several propaganda techniques. There's nothing cynical about that, it's just a fact.
The problem is that advertising never gives you balanced information.
You would be better served by talking to other parents, by reading information from consumer organizations, by reading reviews, even by talking to shop personnel (where multiple brands are sold).
Targeted ads is why we see an explosions in new companies. With traditional marketing, new companies had no way to reach an audience effectively. You could start a company but couldn’t build a customer base. With targeted advertising, it gave us things like free trading with Robinhood that leveraged targeted ads to buy installs. It gave us a bunch of new banking options that offer zero fees. It gave us new clothing brands, razors, workout equipment, cosmetics and washable rugs.
Killing targeted ads will just mean the incumbents will dominate and without competition, consumer prices will rise. Gillette did their first price reduction because of dollar shave club is an example.
You seem to say that as if it were the only way to build an audience. There have been disruptors and innovators out there long before targeted advertising became a thing.
Targeted ads gave us none of the things you mentioned, it merely gave them highly-effective ad targeting. But a company can still buy TV ad spots, they can still spread via word-of-mouth or grassroots campaigns, they can still hire people to canvas and pitch, nowadays they can still go viral.
I agree with GP that ads are manipulation, and that we cannot give ad people (or any people, really) tools that are too good in this area.
Literally every big company in existence today started small, disrupting or innovating or just effectively competing at something. Yet somehow they managed to become what they are without targeted advertising?
> Everyone has to suffer to through those stupid viagra and antidepressants ads because there is no targeting.
This is no worse than suffering through "Raid Shadow Legends" ads because I have a "gamer" bit flipped somewhere in Google's profile of me. 99% (or even 100%) of stuff advertised to me is hot garbage, even if I'm in the right demographic for the product.
The problem is that targeting is only part of the equation of what you see. The other part is the advertiser's budget. And companies that spend big on marketing are often either selling digital crack (e.g. gacha games, scams, gambling) or simply have the most capital
investment (startup of the week, manscaped, Nord VPN, etc.). Neither scenario is a good signal of quality. As a result, the safest approach as a consumer is to ignore all ads.
I live multiple lives. I'm a father, a businessman, have multiple hobbies, do sports. Targeted ads mean this info can be combined. I can be profiled and abused. Algorithm has calculated what I might impulsively buy and shows me that personalized ad everywhere.
Non-targeted ads do not mean viagra ads. Non-targeted ads still have the context of the website/app I'm using.
Non-targeted ads mean that I can get ads about specific hardware when I browse my hobby forums; I can get ads about some interesting SaaS when I browse my work related news sites. I don't get anything that's targeting some calculated personality quirks of mine to the highest ad bidder.
If they were any good I might agree. But in my experience ad targeting just fixates on things you recently looked up, or actually already purchased. I don't recall ever finding a product through a targeted ad that I didn't already know about.
when I am on a kiteboarding forum I prefer to see ads that are relevant to kiteboarding and not ads for hand mixers just because I looked at or bought one last week.
I also think targeted ads are really bad for society in general. They have incentivized the building of companies that have created massive surveillance and manipulation systems on a scale nobody would have dreamt of some decades ago. Think about Stalin or Hitler having the datasets Google or Facebook have built up and how they could have used them. I can't see anything good about targeted advertising unless you buy into the vision that people's only purpose in life is to buy things.
I will add yet another voice to the heap saying "nope, targeted is worse." The point of ads is to trick me into buying something I don't need, I'd rather they were less efficient.
Further, lots of smart people are working on the project of ads. Talented programmers and data scientists. Hopefully less efficient ads will result in a less lucrative ad sector, and more of these folks can be convinced to do something productive with their talents.
Sure -- ads are a billion dollar industry so apparently they are getting some people to spend money they wouldn't have otherwise, what is says about me is that I don't think I'm somehow uniquely immune to them. Naturally, like most technically inclined people, I've adjusted to this vulnerability by using an ad blocker.
Seriously. I literally have gone to the page for my Google advertising profile and updated my interests to be more accurate.
Targeted ads usually aren't trying to trick me, they're telling me about products and services I genuinely don't know about. Maybe this will shock people, but I have actually bought things linked straight from ads a handful of times. (Only a handful, but that's more than zero.)
I infinitely prefer targeted advertising rather than the horrible lowest-common-denominator generic non-targeted "grow your dick" and "one weird trick" and "millionth website visitor" garbage. (I just wish there were a button for "don't show me ads for humidifiers anymore because I already bought one after researching, I'm not gonna buy another". So that the targeting worked even better.)
> but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment?
Better by what measure? Not at the expense of privacy. Where is the data going? Who is it being sold to?
Sure, American TV ads are annoying, but they're predictable and sometimes entertaining. American TV ads are so inefficient that they need to work for your attention.
One issue with targeting is receiving antidepressant ads, knowing the algorithm knows that you're depressed. Or receiving baby ads when the algorithm knows you were expecting, but doesn't know you had a miscarriage. There are countless examples of targeting being a danger to the public as well, being used for very effective misinformation campaigns.
Apple blocked targeted ads based on track individuals, and collecting personal data. There are plenty of ways of serving targeted ads without the tracking.
The most obvious approach is content based targeting. If someone is reading an article about baby names, put ads for baby clothes next to it. If there’re reading an article about cloud infrastructure, put an AWS ad next to it.
People managed to make and sell perfectly good adverts long before Facebook and Google came along. Have you never noticed that every advert in a trade magazine targets people in that trade?
1.) It's one of the main reason why surveillance capitalism is so widespread. Some of the worst things that came out of tech in past 20 years are directly or indirectly connected to "targeting ads".
2. ) Better name for targeted adds would be Machine driven adds. And with it comes the counter part of machine driven re-posters re-blogers, ai generated spam content etc. If you didn't have all those "targeted" machine driven networks there would be a lot less reason to build such sites. Since most advertisers would not want to advertise on such sites if they had a choice in it.
3.) With all the crap they bring, they still suck at targeting. They either focus on one search you did a while ago to the exclusion of everything else, they to sell you same expensive stuff for months after you already bought it, or completely irrelevant most of the time.
4.) They make pages load slower, sometimes a lot slower.
> I know everone hates ads, but isn’t targeted ads better than wholesale bombardment?
There’s a lot of people disagreeing with you, but it’s missing the point, I think.
Everybody can get the experience they want; both you and they can. You can get targeted ads by accepting when an advertiser asks to track you. They can get non-targeted ads by rejecting when an advertiser asks to track them.
The key thing here is that everybody is given the choice. And that’s Apple’s only requirement – they haven’t banned tracking, they have banned tracking without asking the user for their consent first.
I mean the main differentiator of Apple was the lack of Ads and tracking compared to google for me. If Apple starts hammering ads and providing tracking data and selling spots like google does with admob/android then is it really worth the premium anymore?
If the main difference between Apple and Google is selling your data, are they really all that different in the first place? Apple already collects plenty of telemetry from your devices whether you opt-in or not. OCSP sends data back to Apple's servers every time you tap an app, that's non-negotiable. They go out of their way to limit your traffic filtering capabilities solely so they can phone-home. The rabbit hole is pretty deep, and doesn't favor any of these FAANG faces.
Ad companies don't sell your data. It's one of their most valuable assets. They sell access to impressions that are targeted based on modeling of that data.
It is a nuanced, yet extremely important distinction.
Lack of ads IS the killer feature for me. What I use an iPhone for could just as easily be done by Android.
If Apple is enthusiastically running towards the ads hellscape then it might be time to get one of those Linux phones and start developing some apps for it. I need less than 10 apps for it to be a viable replacement, or if it get's really bad then I could make do with even less.
After reading the article, I still don't understand the exception Apple purportedly gets from its tracking rules. As I understand it, Amazon is allowed to use activity in the Kindle app to show personalized ads in the Amazon Shopping app without using the ATT prompt. Isn't that the same thing as Apple using News app activity to personalize ads in the App Store?
The part that is unfair is that no one but Apple gets to have an App Store or process IAPs, which has always been the problem with iOS. Trying to make it about ATT just seems like a red herring.
Apple has access to all data it blocks from other ad networks by virtue of you owning an iPhone. It uses this data in its DSP. One effect of Apple locking down privacy was to create a unique monopoly on data for itself and its an advantage it intends to capitalize on.
It could have access, but so far all of these articles calling Apple out haven't cited a single shred of evidence that Apple has replaced the previous invasive fingerprinting by third parties with their own. If nothing else, the quality of the ads you see from Apple would indicate they gather less, not more, than most advertisers. I mean, I see ads for Apple products I already own, or services I already subscribe to.
> Apple also uploads a lot of logs, etc from their devices to their servers, and opting out of apple level tracking at some basic level is often just not an option. Ex, they upload battery behavior info and use it to improve the battery perf of their devices, or upload people's locations and other location adjacent data like wifi networks with location services and so on.
Apple doesn't need invasive statistical fingerprinting, they already have your unique ID, unchangeable device serial numbers and apple ID account. An iOS device cannot install any app without an apple ID, and nowadays you need a phone number to create an apple ID which is pretty much the supercookie identifier in most of the world.
Apple also uploads a lot of logs, etc from their devices to their servers, and opting out of apple level tracking at some basic level is often just not an option. Ex, they upload battery behavior info and use it to improve the battery perf of their devices, or upload people's locations and other location adjacent data like wifi networks with location services and so on.
Apple cares about privacy from third parties, not privacy from apple itself. Which is very apple of apple. Apple also does not let you turn it off in some key parts. And they know they work with security services & authoritarian governments that force them to hand over any data that they have access to, in secret, which gets thousands of innocent people killed, tortured and jailed every day at their scale. Yet they still collect it.
Key parts of apple doesn't really like the existence of third parties in many ways, and if they could, they would rather have full locked down control, from what I can observe from external actions over the decades.
Any large group of people will of course have different actions and motives, and I do commend part of the company for caring, and funding efforts like lockdown mode and keeping %95 of the company thinking and caring about privacy at some level. But that key %5 that does not basically ruins it for many. The best we can hope for is to slowly change that last %5, although with this Services & Ads push, I feel like that bad part is only going to grow worse.
Long game, a successful Apple ad business creates bad incentives and is likely bad for customers. As evidenced by the AppStore really being a front door for the worst kind of skinner-box gaming, Apple will choose cash over any overriding principle.
Apple is blocking conversion tracking for third parties.
Think of this:
1.Fb shows an ad for angry birds
2. user installs the app
3. user opens the app and makes a ping to fb to tell user with idfa xyz opened the app.
The problem is not that only apple gets (2), but it is that because it gets (2), it thinks it should be able to dictate how (3) happens. Since apple is the only one doing (2), it puts everyone else at a disadvantage.
And since apple doesn't have web ads business, it sees no problem killing that altogether through att as well.
Just curious: I know developers can have deep links preserved through the app store installation process, so that e.g. after you install the app it takes you to the article you were reading in Safari. What stops you from putting an identifier in there?
the mechanism isn't important. what apple restricts is access to any kind of cross app identifier like the idfa unless the user explicitly opts in. sketchier platforms use device fingerprinting but apple also forbids that under it's terms
the only way to do cross app tracking in ios without the user opting in and without violating apple policy is via explicitly associating accounts across apps either via oauth or some kind of account linking
Couple things there:
1. Gdpr is eu market more or less.
2. There is no law dictating how consent should look like (to the font color/size level).
3. Apples data is first party, massive difference.
Up the thread someone claims Apple calls it "personalization" when they ask you to opt in to it from them but "tracking" when an app asks you to opt in to the same thing.
Matching the ad to the user is just more difficult as it requires more in the way of user signups, as opposed to e.g. cookie-based tracking which is more ubiquitous and requires less integration.
For the general public it makes no difference. For the privacy-conscious power user, it means 3rd-party blocking no longer works (unless you unmask the 3rd parties by resolving CNAMEs before applying the rules).
The Facebook conversions API is worse.... Rather than a pixel the website backend can call out to Facebook for better results (for the website), no pixel to block.
As a consumer, I do not want ad relevance. In fact, I hate targeted ads. I do not feel served when mega-corporations unscrupulously track literally everything about me so they can try to sell me crap I don't need. I play the worlds smallest violin for the businesses who have to "bear the brunt" of not knowing how many steps I've taken today, or what times I went the bathroom.
I think another way to look at it is: value exchange.
What do I get in exchange for what I share. To me, learning about new products and services from companies that I don't already have an existing relationship with is far more valuable than the data shared. I want the inventor of a better mouse trap to reach out to me and let me know of their product.
We're looking at asymmetrical warfare between incredibly advanced targeting algorithms, and our monkey-brains.
It's all fun and games when you're selling moustraps, but what about when the algorithm finds out you have a predisposition towards addiction and realizes it can profit from that by showing you ads for alcohol and pharmaceuticals?
What happens when it learns that you have a gambling problem?
What happens when it learns that you're a hypochondriac?
What happens when it learns that you have a retail addiction?
What happens when your ad profile identifies you as somebody who has had an abortion in one of the states where it's illegal? Can the ad company be subpoenaed?
What happens when an insurance company goes to a data-broker and finds out that you've been googling cancer symptoms? Would their access to this information change your premiums or eligibility?
> What happens when an insurance company goes to a data-broker and finds out that you've been googling cancer symptoms? Would their access to this information change your premiums or eligibility?
I think that we as a society decided that our solution to people with addictive personalities is to let natural selection take its course. There's way too much money to to made in the misery to try to apply those brakes.
> What happens when it learns that you're a hypochondriac?
> What happens when an insurance company goes to a data-broker and finds out that you've been googling cancer symptoms?
1) We cannot solely rely on Apple's selective definition of privacy to resolve these. As an example, what if your health insurance company offers an app and you use that app to search for cancer? Should the insurance company be able to use that data? We need very strong legal protections as a more comprehensive solution that works across all types of data companies can gather to make medical decisions.
> What happens when it learns that you have a gambling problem?
> What happens when it learns that you have a retail addiction?
2) You need to consider that (1) advertisers don't need to learn this! People willingly give them this data (e.g. by signing up for a sports betting app), and (2) this also opens the door to reach people to help them. No targeted advertising does not mean that these societal issues just disappear. These are still there but just harder to see.
> What happens when your ad profile identifies you as somebody who has had an abortion in one of the states where it's illegal? Can the ad company be subpoenaed?
3) While I abhor the decision on Roe vs Wade, let's flip this to: what if the ad profile identifies you as a seller of fentanyl? Would you want the ads data to be eligible for use in prosecution? I would. Saying that banning targeted ads protects women's privacy is security through obfuscation. That is not a solution.
1) So from the jump, you're counting on legislation to work against the interest of big insurance. You might be waiting a while.
2)This position presents a pretty messed up vision of the world IMO. As if the ideal state of things is that Google/Apple/Meta holds auctions where Draft Kings, Poker Stars, and a gambling support line can bid on a gambling addict's attention.
3) Asserting that targeted ad sales are good because they identify criminals is a big stretch imo
I have seen the opposite happen way more often. I was on the market for a new wallet, specifically one made by a one-man operation in France. As soon as I started looking for reviews, targeted ads from larger brands like Fossil and Ridge started following me. The current ad landscape isn't giving the little guy a kick at the can, it's just letting them into the same extortion based ad markets the big guys compete in.
The last part of your reply is an interesting point. As one of those little guys who enjoys getting a kick at the can, I see self-feeding spiral of the present ad marketplace with disdain.
Two years ago it was different and a lot of small companies could compete. CPAs were well below anything I ever saw in the world of print advertising. Very efficient.
Now, it seems we've gone back 10 years in time. Only large brands are bringing in enough gross margin dollars to run poorly targeted campaigns. This is likely to get much, much worse as small companies exit the stage entirely.
The sad thing is that there is really no where else for a small company to go for acquisition marketing. Can't go back to print. The only outlet left is selling in large marketplaces like Amazon where the competition is apt to steal your product (not to mention the insane fees).
If you are a fan of Apple, this is pretty bad news I think, they are getting deeper into a dirty market, and will probably get hit by the ad curse as well. But, as someone who doesn't particularly care about them, it will be pretty funny to see them blatantly eat Facebook's lunch.
Yup. The advertising apocalypse has been a complete horror show for many small businesses. But super excited people have their privacy so that only the bigoted of the big can afford to show them ads.
I've seen this coming for a while, and I'm honestly not sure what the next move to make is for those of us who have done as much as we can to escape the hoards of advertisers. I have no particular love for iOS, but I switched to an iPhone years ago to escape the google ecosystem. There isn't really a plausible third option at this point. Even if Linux phones had usable hardware, more of the world is moving toward relying on apps that only run on DRMed systems with signed software from the data collecting duopoly. I can't deposit a check or order a taxi with a rooted phone, and the trend is getting worse over time- not better.
I suppose the one up-side to the situation is that there's not much point in even trying to spend the time figuring out how to root a device, or dealing with egregiously under-performing open smart phone hardware, and it might be possible to save some money going back to a dumb phone.
I've thought about going down that path, and I still might, but at the moment I'm very frustrated by the state of hardware and general support for a lot of the user and privacy respecting options to the point where it's hard to believe it'll actually be worth my time to try to get something like that set up.
I want to be able to (among other things) order cabs and deposit checks using my smartphone, though. (Well, maybe not that last one, seeing as checks don’t exist here in the Netherlands anymore.)
Going back a decade in terms of functionality is hardly an answer.
It definitely is an answer, since there haven't been any major advances in cellphones over the last 10 years, but it really depends on how much you actually hate advertising.
Just today my friend was telling me a story of the end of a night out in downtown LA, ready to go home to the west side when he realized that he was out of high speed data (he's on a legacy Verizon plan) and he might not have sufficient data speed to order an Uber. Apparently Uber worked just fine (probably a network "management" deal), but he was quite worried he wouldn't be able to get home if he couldn't order an Uber.
I did point out that it is in fact possible to order a cab using a telephone call.
I recommended recently to my wife to buy Apple mini 13 as her next phone, after both of us being forever on Android.
What a disappointment, she likes actually 1 feature - photos, and the rest is subpar experience compared to her old galaxy S10 (almost 4 year old phone). But then she likes my android photos similarly, since I have 10x zoom which is great for kids always running around or for hiking. Its not even first weeks of her use of Apple, she has it few months. I can browse on my samsung S22 ultra random internet without being swarmed with ads and tracking (firefox and ublock origin, something Apple phones will clearly never have).
And all the rest. It has fingerprint sensor for unlocking, instead of ridiculously shitty faceid which doesn't work with masks (she is a doctor so does wear them often). It often doesn't work even without masks, ie non-ideal light conditions like right now (evening and dimmer lights). Comparable S22 is much nicer phone to look at, to hold, to carry, to charge, and to work with.
I regret recommending it to her at this point, I too was convinced by Apple's effective PR. But quality is just not there, the devices are worse, bigger in size with smaller screen, uglier, heavier, software is meh, raw CPU power is useless on its own when device is so limited. I don't believe a zilch of Apple's PR about privacy, as I didn't for the ads and various other PR talk, actions are the only thing that matter.
And after reading this topic, its clear I will continue shopping in Android's non-chinese realm for a very long time. I don't consider my device secure from state actors, and neither is Apple, so we act accordingly. Thus, no added value in Apple devices, just plenty of marketing, similar to say Hermes or Louis Vuitton purses. Nobody believes those are worth 500$ or 5,000$ to manufacture, yet rich people buy them.
> I can browse on my samsung S22 ultra random internet without being swarmed with ads and tracking (firefox and ublock origin, something Apple phones will clearly never have).
If you are ok with using Safari instead of Firefox, that’s something that has been possible since 2015 on iOS [1].
> instead of ridiculously shitty faceid which doesn't work with masks
It does since iOS 15.4 (March 2022 [2]); I use it every day.
> It often doesn't work even without masks, ie non-ideal light conditions like right now (evening and dimmer lights)
Light has nothing to do with this because FaceID works with infrared: I’m able to unlock my iPhone in the dark with no issue at all. You’re probably holding it wrong [3].
> But quality is just not there, the devices are worse, bigger in size with smaller screen, […] heavier
I fail to find an iPhone 13 that’s bigger than your Samsung S22 Ultra. The Pro Max is 0.2mm wider but 2.1mm less tall and 1.2mm thiner (163.3 x 77.9 x 8.9 mm [4] vs. 160.8 x 78.1 x 7.7 mm [5]). It does have a smaller screen-to-size ratio (87.4% vs. 90.2%) and is slightly heavier (240g vs. 228g -- not sure how noticeable this is).
> the devices are worse, […], uglier, […], software is meh
That part is highly subjective. I personally find the S22 Ultra very ugly but that’s an opinion, not a fact.
iOS ad-blocking is no where near as good as you can get with (real, not iOS) Firefox. I’ve tried just about every option and they all fail to block a lot of ads, and they more frequently cause issues on pages as well.
People will come out of the woodwork with grievances (ex. crypto integrations, politics, etc) but all of that can be turned off and/or ignored and the browsing experience is quite pleasant
> Even if Linux phones had usable hardware, more of the world is moving toward relying on apps that only run on DRMed systems with signed software from the data collecting duopoly.
This is not a technical but a political problem. People owning (GNU-)Linux-phones (or just caring about the future of mobile computing) should demand from the companies that they do not force everyone into monopolies.
We need to start a social movement to punish advertisers. Ads are pernicious and pervasive thought manipulation which systemically decrease the life satisfaction of nearly every person in society. It is a cancer.
We should strive to make anyone who gets manipulated into changing their behavior based on an ad they saw feel ashamed and stupid for falling for their tricks, and angry at the advertisers for manipulating them.
> We should strive to make anyone who gets manipulated into changing their behavior based on an ad they saw feel ashamed and stupid for falling for their tricks,
This sounds great, but:
A) how do you know/can you prove that you've been manipulated?
B) How do we know that we haven't all been manipulated? (After all, millions of people bought into this ecosystem to get away from ads, I think every person who's angry has a case that they've been manipulated)
and C) where is this social movement gonna take place? Social media, the bastion of internet advertising?
The answer is make tech less important in our lives. There's been a pattern going back decades that technology grows in scale and utility and eventually becomes corporatized to that point that it generates more income to work against its users. The answer is to live a lower tech life. Less time on phones and apps and more time in the real world.
That is an option but not tenable to most people in our modern world. How do you become informed about our world and people we care about far away without computer tech?. The better solution is free software we control and better ways to fund developers and journalists.
>We need to start a social movement to punish advertisers. Ads are pernicious and pervasive thought manipulation which systemically decrease the life satisfaction of nearly every person in society. It is a cancer.
Will never happen until we can dispel the notion that human are free agents. People will never give up this believe about themselves. Meanwhile, it's proven to be effective by virtue of it being a trillion dollar industry or something. Same thing with gambling.
That particular case is even more removed from push ads - it's something that you'd normally go and search for, not sit around and wait until the right ad shows up.
Do you think ads give you a good picture of the relative quality of your options?
Whether you see an ad is entirely driven by how much the seller wants to spend to acquire your purchase. Ads give no indication of the actual quality of the service or product. In fact, companies with greater ad spending tend to be lower quality because a portion of your purchase price is going towards the advertisement at the expense of quality.
Do you really not read reviews when shopping, and just type in a search term and see what comes up? I'd be surprised if you didn't, but if you don't you should try using non-commercial speech when making a purchase decision. Level of advertisement is inversely proportional to value, so I think you'll be pleased with the results.
Linux laptops are lovely at this point. Linux phones are for the more adventurous and tolerant hackers, and I love them for working out the issues. Android without any Google is the best handset option for most people. Degoogling can be accomplished in many ways such as using the universal android debloater found on github, or installing an Android fork such as Graphene, Calyx, or Lineage. Nextcloud is the most comprehensive replacement to many of the services and synchronization such as contacts, calendar, photos, files, bookmarks, passwords, phone location, news/RSS, podcasts, music, tasks, and notes. It can also host E2E chats and video calls.
> I can't deposit a check or order a taxi with a rooted phone
On GrapheneOS[0] (privacy focused AOSP-based mobile OS) you can do that stuff easily while still owning your device/having root, etc (at least according to this video[1] I saw)
We saw what happened to Apple’s Siri search initiative that was started around 2014. If that is any indicator, don’t have much hopes for this one either.
Apple is being very hypocritical here. Privacy matters until they tell you it’s ok, don’t worry about it. With Budd Trible moving on, I guess this is the state of affairs. Sad.
What makes you think Apple isn't doing the same? They were involved in PRISM as well. Honestly, I really doubt Apple could continue to do business without being at least somewhat porous to law enforcement and government snooping (maybe better than others but definitely not stiff-arming them).
Sigh, I don’t believe Apple’s ad network tracks people to the same extent as Google, Facebook, etc.
But the mere existence of it undercuts the privacy claims and creates a giant moral hazard (if AppStore search is lousy then people have to buy ads/sponsored keywords, and the clear desire for ad businesses to start invading privacy).
I wonder if Apple will also try to prevent that or will just figure it's a small enough number that allowing it will help them with the nerds. Informally, when I see something on someone else's device, ad blocking doesn't appear to be popular. I can't imagine using the web without it.
Apple has astutely observed that they don't need a bunch of tracking cookies to track you across sites and services if they already have your account on your phone and access to everything directly.
Google has something like this moat within their search engine dominance, likewise Facebook does for social, but both of them are rather limited slices in comparison with the OS itself.
So, we arrive at this junction - Apple lobbies, for the consumer of course, to prevent tracking across the web, and conveniently limits their number of competitors to one, that being Microsoft which seems rather inept at this advertising thing anyway.
It's hard to root for Google or Facebook here, but it's also pretty obvious that our friends in Cupertino don't have our best interests in mind.
That’s a good observation, but Google really doesn’t control things the same way Apple does since they aren’t directly distributing Android for the most part. It would be hard to pull off that kind of synchronization with the handset ecosystem.
Google has very direct control over Google Play internal services which are effectively system-level services on android, and collects at least as much data on those users as Apple does on theirs.
The 1% of users running some custom Android build aren't really relevant here, Google scrapes up plenty.
> That is, almost two order of magnitude is uploaded by Android (3.6MB) than by iOS at startup, while Android downloads around a third (952MB) of the data of iOS (2.6GB).
The paper goes on into a lot more detail of tracking what identifiers are sent when and how often.
One of the reasons I pay a premium to use Apple's products is to not be part of an advertising ecosystem. I am disappointed that this seems to be changing. Ads in the App Store are one thing—ads in Maps, Books, and Podcasts as the article suggests may be coming in the future—will drive me to use premium (even if they're paid) alternatives. At a minimum, people who pay for an Apple monthly iCloud subscription should be able to opt-out (not just of tracking, which already exists, but seeing ads all together).
> At a minimum, people who pay for an Apple monthly iCloud subscription should be able to opt-out (not just of tracking, which already exists, but seeing ads all together).
The premium is just an opt-out of the ads (on the specific app) .... the tracking is where the value will be in the future
I feel the same way. I thought the price premiums we pay on hardware and services is supposed to support profit margins that allow Apple to not show advertisements to me.
If the prior profits were not enough, how much higher do the prices need to be to not do this?
In general I trust the company to make choices about computing experiences, much more so than any other products company. So, I am going to try and hold judgement and see how this pans out.
That said, I'd like the company to get out ahead of these decisions and explain reasoning for these changes.
Regardless of how much the hardware and services already cost, the company can always make more by showing ads too? Meaning, no profits or prices are high enough.
(Unless they show far too many so people start leaving ... That threshold might be high though; Linux is too cumbersome for almost everyone?)
I think being the richest company in the world makes it pretty cleat that there’s no need to increase prices to support no ads. It’s pure greed and you can’t reason with it.
While a bit weird, I can understand that you can do ads without tracking (perhaps without profiling as well) and this doesn't always mean that Apple becoming one with the capitalistic singularity of advertising business requires them to also be tracking people.
The same goes for plenty of forms of telemetry; it doesn't equal individual tracking or tracking at all (before someone comes in with a cohort theory).
Some things like predictive text entry (Microsoft did/does that? And grammarly and Gboard) have an easy implementation where you ignore privacy and simply dump all user entry onto a server and do the heavy lifting there. Apple's version of that might be Siri recordings when recognition fails to improve that, but I haven't seen it with ads or text entry (yet?).
At some point no company should be doing any of this without homomorphic encryption or a good level of sanitisation. All of Apple's telemetry that you can inspect (either locally or simply by adding a proxy) is well-anonymised. It doesn't hide what specific binaries are causing errors as that would defeat the point of measuring reliability, and when you connect to someone, they will know what IP connected to them, but other than that, it's not as bad as people tend to make it out to be.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 371 ms ] threadAnyone confirm or deny?
They track everything about the device - and the user has almost no control over it.
Sure, they aren't tracking what you're doing INSIDE the FB app. But they track every time you use it, where you use it, the context that led to that usage, etc.
So does Facebook (as much as they're able and allowed to), being fair.
Apple can and does.
And, to be fair, while I don't want Apple tracking that data (however useful/useless it may be), I wouldn't want Facebook tracking it either.
Apple doesn't limit anyone from advertising; they just limit third-party tracking, no?
Gee, I wonder why...
If I use an application then I am clearly using their product and I have a relationship with the application developers.
If that application embeds third-party tracking, I am not clearly doing anything with the third party and I don’t have a relationship with that third party. Therefore Apple requires that the application developers ask for my consent first.
Only one of these needs the user’s consent, and it’s clear why. Apple can act fairly and still hold third-party tracking to a different standard.
Non Apple ads: Opt In for scary third party tracking
Apple Ads: Opt Out for a "less personalized" experience
Which I'm fine with.
Is there any evidence that Apple themselves are tracking across 3rd party application advertisements (this is me assuming that they do track across 1st party apps, which is not fair).
They don’t limit third-party tracking either. They limit third-party tracking without the user’s consent. The only thing advertisers need to do is ask the user for permission to track them.
You can compare the pop-up language Apple shows for an app like FB and the one they show for their own personalized ads to see what I'm talking about. They've also run misleading ads and have made comments that confuse people about what's actually going on.
I'm no apologist for ads, but Ben Thompson is right to point out that this hurts small companies that rely on these targeted ads in order to exist a lot more than it hurts large players like FB.
For example - a grocery store doesn't want to manage 'first party' user data to track what you purchase (and you probably don't want them to), they're bad at that and more likely to do it poorly. They'd rather rely on an ad company they can use instead. This applies to most small businesses that rely on targeted advertising to get their business in front of users that would want it. In Apple's model Amazon doesn't need to say they track you because all purchase data happens on Amazon, but FB does because others use FB to target third party ads. The data doesn't leave FB though so a reasonable person could argue why is this worse?
My personal opinion is that we'd be better off in an equilibrium where these ad driven models are not viable because the models that would replace them would be better on net with incentives more aligned between user and product.
There is a problem here with how user data is handled in some cases, but Apple is also being at best misleading about the issue in a way that benefits themselves and reasonable people could think they're doing the wrong thing.
Because the user has a relationship with the grocery store application and as far as they are aware, only interacting with the grocery store application. They aren’t given the knowledge or opportunity to decide whether to send their data to Facebook or not. All Apple are requiring is that the user be given that knowledge and opportunity.
Apple limits third party tracking without user's consent by both calling it as third party tracking and having it opt in, while Apple's tracking is "personalization" that is opt out.
It's absolutely a dark pattern meant to destroy non apple advertising while making the owners of the OS the only real way to advertise on it. It should be clamped down hard.
For about a year this is no longer true.
You just seem to be skipping over the fact that Apple is not a third-party here. The user has a direct relationship with them.
> the only real way to advertise on it.
The advertising industry has existed for over a hundred years without pervasive third-party tracking. Pervasive third-party tracking is not “the only real way to advertise on it”.
Also cable companies can’t limit others from carrying channels.
Do you think advertisers on Facebook, Google or Amazon get access to all of the data that the platform vendor has?
Do you also want everyone to get access to Google’s search algorithm?
If I had a dollar every time someone on HN yelled “anti trust” about anything no matter how little legal sense it made, I could be my own VC.
Using your dominance in one industry like that could fall afoul of anti monopoly laws.
People make a lot of to-do about it, but, that's not really an unusual thing in the market anymore. Sony has exclusive control of their store, does not permit sideloading, and no, the hardware isn't subsidized.
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-turns...
Regardless of whether you feel that's also bad, it goes to establish that this is not unusual or particularly noteworthy behavior.
Apple hasn't stopped anybody from advertising, they've only stopped them from doing overly-intrusive cross-app personal tracking. They don't seem to intend to do over-intrusive cross-app personal tracking themselves, so it seems to be a level playing field. So far, at least.
It's important to remember, they aren't stopping them from doing the overly-intrusive cross-app tracking, they just make you actively consent to an app allowing that tracking.
Apple is doing the classic "we don't share with third parties, we just collect a shit ton of data from everywhere and then make people buy our data indirectly via our ad sale services" like google and facebook do today. So it's not shared with third parties, but because of their scale it might as well be in effect size .
It's called App Tracking Transparency and there is a scary prompt when Facebook/others do it. It's called Personalization and a friendly prompt when Apple does it.
It doesn't say that in the article and that's patently false. Apple does not have access to Amazon's data about your activity in the Kindle app. Can they potentially track you in the Apple Books app? Perhaps, but if you trust what they're saying, you're presented first with an opt-out dialog about ad personalization.
They've required consent for cross-organizational tracking. For a single organization, they have only required disclosure in apps (via the privacy nutrition labels).
For instance, Google can still push you to sign into a Google account so they can add all your interactions across services/devices to your profile. They also can still share information between Google native apps for unauthenticated users. This would include if they start to move over apps from other acquired companies under the Google umbrella.
The difference is that I can make an opt-in choice (if possibly a difficult one) on whether I want to interact with Facebook services directly, but I couldn't make a such a choice before on what information Facebook was gathering about me without my consent or knowledge via tracking.
Apple have all of this data (in fact, it's automatically collected and much better quality) because they own the platform on which the data is collected. Therefore, Apple can supply the same services as FB (on iOS only, obvs).
Microsoft did not prevent other browsers from being installed; it just shipped IE by default and made it annoying af to uninstall.
... and entered partnerships with ISPs to have pre-installed listings in IE if the ISP didn't mention a competing browser (p29)
... and entered into arrangements with companies to switch browsers being used (p17)
... and attempted to get Netscape to agree to not compete with Microsoft for Windows browsers (Netscape would be Unix and Mac only if that was done) (p14)
https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-us-v-microsoft-corp
There's quite a bit more to DOJ vs Microsoft than just "shipping IE by default".
That a single corporate entity is capable of collecting data does not necessarily mean that said entity is collecting and using that data. Maybe they do! But so far I've seen no evidence of it anywhere from anyone ever.
What I don’t expect is that when I shop on Amazon I get ads showing me what I searched for and bought on Amazon to show up on Facebook (which of course does happen).
What would be the consumer friendly thing for the government to do? Allow more cross app data sharing? Refuse to let any company use the history of what a consumer does at that company for targeting?
Or a company like Facebook can once again encourage users to install a VPN that allows them to track all of the traffic to and from your phone.
https://mashable.com/article/facebook-used-onavo-vpn-data-to...
It turns out that people (or at least Android users) aren't as dumb as Apple users think they are. (Or maybe it says something about Apple users that Apple and other Apple users think that Apple users are too dumb to be able to make this decision for themselves?)
And yes there has been security vulnerabilities caused by bypassing the Google Play Store by a little company I am sure you have heard of.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/fo...
But Google or Android is not exactly a model of protecting users privacy.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18204064/apple-google-mon...
Every Chinese phone company...
But Google or Android is not exactly a model of protecting users privacy.
And neither is Apple.
it is.
Amazon also created its own line of devices and its own fork of Android and replaces Google Play Services APIs with its own. But how many applications are successful distributing only on Amazon’s Android store? How many western developers are going to bypass Google Play Store?
- Company F was doing ads using X mechanism on Company A's devices.
- Company A banned X mechanism under the false claim of "privacy."
- Now Company A is going to use X mechanism to launch their own competitor to Company F's platform (because X is what makes the ad platform a worthwhile expense for advertisers; Company A already uses X mechanism to market its own products and services to its customers, and they simply banned Company F and third parties so they could eliminate existing and potential competition.)
Or in other words, almost as textbook an example of anticompetitive behavior as you can get.
It’s the sane thing in this case with Apple.
Besides, Apple isn’t banning third parties from sharing information. They just have to ask permission. What’s the government suppose to do? Say Apple isn’t allowed to ask consumers whether they want to be tracked across parties?
This situation would not be a conflict of interest because Apple has no duty to third party advertisers
Advertising is cancer.
[1] https://hypebeast.com/2022/3/apple-made-6-5-billion-usd-by-r...
I get that work is probably paying for most people's but it's not really usable out of the box without a pricey add-on. You can literally buy an entire monitor (with stand and VESA mount) for $200.
How are they supposed to make more money from phones if not taking a cut of FB's advertising money?
I would prefer it if we weren't a consumer society, if our entire way of life wasn't powered by selling things, with advertising being the biggest underlying aspect. If Apple is smart they will retain their brand image of quality and elite lifestyle, because that's how they advertise their products. But they certainly aren't going to abandon ads.
To be clear: I have adhd. Ads are intentionally designed to catch the attention of your average person with reasonable control of their attention. I have no chance in hell of keeping my attention on the article when I have to blast past 6-7 unblockable ads per article.
Not entirely true: Apple’s iAd platform ran for a few years in the 2010s before being canned in 2016.
It still exists, was just renamed to Ad Platforms (worked there).
When people say "ad tech" now, they mean DSP -- selling their party ads unrelated to the boat company. Apple Store ads are Apple ripping off iOS devs for product placement in its own store, not generic interest-based ads.
https://ksmmedia.com/intel/the-apple-dsp/
Every blogger with an axe to grind has been re-spinning this same point with more and more hyperbole since because "Apple bad" = click click click click.
Nothing new to see here.
What I hadn't seen until this was a marketing campaign that actually proselytized so many into proclaiming the message for free. On HackerNews, Reddit and in public places you're likely to find someone vouching for Apple's privacy practices sometimes with the same verbiage that's on the billboards! Maybe that's a testament to Steve Jobs's lasting marketing impact.
I personally see the incentive structure which makes Apple more privacy-friendly than say Google. But I'm deeply suspicious of such a convenient message that the largest corporation in the world puts its resources behind. Also, being more privacy-friendly than Google and being privacy friendly are two different things.
But now that they are getting into the ad space that incentive structure benefit pretty much crumbles away.
It's also clear at this point, the most profitable ads in the industry are the ones that most take advantage of personal data - this isn't a secret. The difference in profitability can be stark too, which is why I worry so much about the incentive structure.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd [1]: https://searchads.apple.com/
Part of it just comes with the territory. Apple is a computer company that prides itself on not only having a sense of taste, but being able to impose that sense of taste on its business partners. This is contrary to the goals of advertisers - tastelessness kind of comes with the territory and advertising inherently messes with the user experience.
PS: Still use a MBP, iPhone and an Apple Watch. :(
Rather disappointed that Apple didn't take this route. They do do something similar with their virus database (XProtect).
That type of capability is core to most general purpose OS’s today. Any significant company is running EDR, etc that’s even more intrusive
in theory, that's ok, if we have healthy, functioning markets that are free from undue influence of any individual participant. the "invisible hand" of the market would drive it iteratively toward more privacy (assuming this is valued by more than minor segment, greater than ~15% of the market). the market would (and should) be an ongoing conversation between suppliers and consumers to reach all the profitable corners of supply and demand, rather than a couple behemoths with megaphones telling us how great they are, rather than showing it through their products and practices.
p.s. - has anyone else noticed adguard doing port-scans on your gateway from their dns service IPs? i haven't dug into it yet, so i don't know whether it's spoofed or whatnot.
The market is for advertisers, and advertisers - whether they are small or large businesses - value tracking and measurability of their advertising investments.
in any case, my point was about the consumer electronics market, which is apple's core industry, and which, in a healthy and well-functioning market, also has a key stake in this conversation (driving it toward non-distorted, optimally efficient outcomes).
I disagree. Incrementality studies (which measure ROI) as advertisers want them are basically impossible with ATT. You need to be able to pass an ID between apps.
but the kicker is, is it better than just doing studies without the more invasive attribution data, especially in relation to the higher price and market consolidation? very unlikely. ad monopolization means more of the value in the value chain goes to the monopolist regardless of the proportion of value they provide in the chain.
Absolutely, as the controlled incrementality study is impossible without either attribution or some group-based approximation of attribution (ie. federated cohorts, etc.)
So the idea is that you run the experiment, and this can then help you understand where you should attribute value, as you know that the only difference between the two groups was the exposure to FB ads.
Now, to be fair, unless FB is most of your spend, you still have a bunch of problems, but they'll wash out equally across conditions (theoretically, at least) so the estimate should be good.
I think modern incrementality studies give solid proof of the value of an ad on the basis of a good model of how the world works. Of course, models can be wrong - it could turn out that solipsism is true, physics is false, and the world outside of your own mind is a figment of your imagination!
That the world is complex and models are inherently wrong does not mean that nothing of value to businesses was lost with ATT.
I agree but where do we see this? Everywhere I look it’s mega corps. Food, fuel, power, electronics, clothes. I can’t think of a good example of the ideal relationship.
(I think they've since delayed the rollout of that system indefinitely, after public outcry.)
Does it matter in practice? No. But it makes me feel very different about it. That's important too.
Sounds like you’re taking exception with the explicit parental notification, where a parent with a child enrolled in their iCloud “family” can request to be alerted when their minor child takes an action on the phone owned by the parent.
The EFF wrote an awful blog that deliberately confused the already confusing release from Apple. Your privacy is almost certainly weaker as a result, as various entities can use a subpoena or warrant to access your files.
And once you're scanning files with one flag set, nothing technologically prevents the scanning of files without that flag being set. And to quote myself from the Google Stadia brouhaha - "companies lie in PR statements" - so I have no reason to trust Apple's statement that they would never scan other files.
You need to read up on how the system worked, because they picked a design that made absolutely no sense if they wanted to do that. They’d have to redesign it to work in a different way if they wanted to do that.
The material that they scan for is illegal to possess. You should assume that anyone that accepts cleartext uploads of binary data is scanning for that and other material.
At the end of the day, you don’t have the juice to negotiate contractual protections, so corporate self-interest is really your only real protection.
Do you know what else is illegal to possess? Proof of abortions in some states. Proof of being gay in many countries. Winne the Pooh in at least one country.
> You should assume that anyone that accepts cleartext uploads of binary data is scanning for that and other material.
Again, since this seems to be lost every time, this isn't being checked post upload. That matters.
From a technical standpoint, at least you are protected from future policy changes if your files in the cloud are encrypted.
Understand, I am playing the devils advocate role more than anything else.
The key point I'm trying to make is that where the data is located matters for whether Apple (or Microsoft or Redhat or whichever company) has the ability or right to read and report on that data.
> at least you are protected from future policy changes if your files in the cloud are encrypted.
If, and only if, that data is never synced back to your phone (which Apples does currently).
The phone would be literally incapable of determining if there were any matches. Please read up on how it was designed to work.
But I think that's pretty thin gruel, since now you're just a feature-flag (or even a bug) away from all content being scanned. More broadly, the entire endeavor is very much at odds w/ the sentiment expressed in their public advertising.
They want to scan on device so they do not have to scan it in the cloud.
Because people are in full FUD mode on this, we're stuck storing photos without full end-to-end encryption because Apple has do the scanning on their side.
> Well, there is another option: Apple could actually respect your privacy, support end-to-end encryption, and not scan your content at all.
This is not an option you, or Apple, think there is to choose.
Peoples FUD and misrepresentation over what was happening and your snark over "yes but their advertising campaign says things stay on the phone" (which is literally true) is IMO likely actually accelerating the privacy degradation. When they are compelled by law to scan this all centrally in one place in the cloud, I guess you will be happier that it's more invasive but just happening "elsewhere"?
If you don't want them to check for unwanted content, don't put your content on their machines.
That’s not true. The system didn’t work the way you are assuming. The device had no knowledge of any matches. The “scanning” was a coöperation of client-side and server-side code, each with an extremely limited knowledge of the data involved.
Apple says this would only be used on iCloud synced photos, but I don't see any technical reason the process could not be performed for any photo.
Am I mistaken?
> The device had no knowledge of any matches.
True, but how is it relevant?
[0] https://youtu.be/kV2HDM86XgI?t=1072
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hayden_(general)
Also the scanning was calculating hashes based on content, not just metadata.
It’s not. The device has no idea if there are any matches. Everybody is assuming how it works without actually reading how it works.
On-device scanning like that would be pointless, though. IIRC, stuff uploaded to their cloud is already accessible to Apple for server-side scanning. The controversial thing was the on-device scans would trigger some kind of upload of un-uploaded stuff to Apple for further investigation.
No, a load of people assumed it would do that, but it’s not possible with the proposed scheme because the device had no knowledge of any matches.
No, the stated behaviour was that it would be uploaded to the cloud at the same time as the encrypted image. Uploaded data was still "encrypted" "at rest" (but possible for them to decrypt, just not done routinely). The whole point of the client-side scanning was that scanning was done locally on the phone and uploaded with it, as an explicit alternative to them regularly decrypting and scanning all user data on their servers. The stated operation was; if the phone fingerprint matched a public CSAM fingerprint list, then it would be automatically decrypted and scanned with a second, private fingerprinting algorithm on the server - only if this second, private fingerprint matched would the data be flagged up for potential violation (and inspected).
The alternative to this was them just regularly scanning all data in their cloud anyway. Apparently people are happier with that option.
That means the alternative would be to send the photos to Apple and Apple scans the photo. Either way you send the photo to Apple and meta data gets generated about CSAM. It’s just a matter of where the data gets generated.
I’m also uneasy about it happening on the phone. But honestly, by it being processed on the phone, that means it can be encrypted before it gets to Apple’s servers.
I’m basically working under the assumption that scanning for CSAM is legally required.
It is explicitly not legally required in the US [1]. Providers are required to report "apparent CSAM" that they find on their own, but they are not compelled to search their servers or private devices for its presence.
And this is the case for a very good reason: if it was mandated by US law, then prosecutions would be subject to much stronger 4th amendment review under the "state action doctrine" (i.e., the companies are searching your files without probable cause as compelled representatives of the government.) The current arrangement evades this review under the very thin fig-leaf that US providers are doing the searching on their own.
[1] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10713
Which would be unfortunate. At that point, you won't be able maintain digital privacy from the govt w/o de-facto becoming a criminal.
CSAM is, I think, simply the initial justification for these systems, since it's widely reviled. But the system itself is not CSAM-specific, and the temptation to expand its scope will likely be irresistible.
If your goal was to become an authoritarian tyrant, you would be very happy to have this in place. :-)
Results about matches aren’t ever on the phone in the first place. Only the server can determine if there are any matches.
That particular issue was the privacy advocacy people run amok.
Even MEGA, which signals the virtues of privacy/security through the prominence of decryption keys on its UI flows, will still report illegal content to authorities and display a message saying so if content was removed for that reason.
Any publicly traded company that touts perfect privacy cannot deliver what they are claiming, or they'd become the service of choice for every type of disenfranchised person - including child abusers.
Apple has received much more flak than the average corporation over this issue because this fundamental impossibility of perfect privacy clashed with its own privacy signaling in a loud way, and the flurry of debate over the technical merits of the novel, widely shared on-device scanning solution caused much more scrutiny than the boring server-side scanning that has been ubiquitous for decades.
But the fact is that no matter how Apple tries to approach the CSAM problem, it will ultimately have to weed out child abusers from its servers or be publicly and legally lambasted. That is what society has decided is best for the welfare of children, and as a result we will have to live with an imperfect level of privacy as provided by such entities.
FYI loath means "unwilling", so it doesn't make sense here. "Loath to X" is like "I would loathe doing X". The word you're looking for is "likely".
From there, it seems to have developed as an American slang to describe "infestations" of other kinds.
And I remember that "Apple is not in the Ad Business" before 2018 was the most cited defence and reason on HN. That was before the war on tracking, the submarine articles on ads, and the attack on Facebook.
Because you know what? Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right. And because iPhone is the only smartphone that values your privacy, banning iPhone sales in your country is also against Human Right.
>But I'm deeply suspicious of such a convenient message.
I was probably the only few who was deeply deeply suspicious of the "Dont be Evil" Google in the early 00s, in an era of "Dont be Evil", when everyone in Tech thought they were Saint. The self righteousness of Google, I thought nothing could be worse than Google's hypocrisy. I mean how can something be worse than "Dont be Evil"?
Well here we are. The era of "Fundamental Human Right". A company that worked with CCP, invested $275B to build and improve the whole CE supply chain in China. Helping those companies to compete in area where CCP has a strategic interest, Continue to invest and help those companies to set up operation in India or Vietnam in the name of "Diversification from China" as PR headlines.
I don't think that's accurate or fair, and I think (as I often see) it misses a lot of context around where "Don't Be Evil" came from, and what it really meant.
"Don't Be Evil" was basically to highlight and contrast Google's desired culture from Microsoft's at the time of the late 90s/early 00s. That is, at the time, and especially early in Microsoft's existence, MS was pretty famous for "dirty tricks". E.g look at the early history/origins of DOS, anti-competitive tactics WRT DR-DOS [1], how they fought the browser wars, the full history outlined in Microsoft v United States, etc. The icon for MS in Slashdot at the time was famously the Gates "borg" icon, and that is how a lot of people viewed MS.
When it comes to Google, I think the whole idea behind "Don't Be Evil" is that they believed that you could make money withOUT dirty tricks, and up until 2010-2012 or so I think this was largely true. People flocked to Google and their products not because they were forced to, but because the products were genuinely much better than the competition at the time. Search, GMail, Maps, StreetView, Chrome - when all of these came out I remember thinking "holy shit this is amazing".
The problem, though, is that at some point all very successful companies reach a size where I believe it's only possible to respond to your economic incentives, which are to grow at any cost. I mentioned 2010-2012 (maybe a little later, 2012-2014) because that's when I feel like I really saw Google's approach change to really squeeze the pennies from their existing business, e.g. when they made ads more and more indistinguishable from organic results, or when they made it so that any remotely commercial search term has an ENTIRE page of ads above the fold. Paying "the Google tax" became a real thing, e.g. you'd have to pay Google for an add JUST on your domain name because competitors might bid higher.
Thus, if anything, I give Google props for "holding out" a good ~12-15 years before their growth and economic incentives made it "must increase revenue at all costs" and the beancounters took over.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
You mean like colluding with other big companies to suppress wages ? Your timelines don't check out since there's evidence of this going back to 2007.
Embrace. Enhance. Extinguish.
I forgot about the Borg icon. M$ for MS in the 90s was what the cool kids did
I think the doubleclick acquisition hopped this into overdrive and also allowed Google to start screwing both sides by extracting larger and larger rents from advertisers with its near monopoly power and ad cartel with Facebook. We saw the Google tracking cookie spread like a plague shaking down users for data even if they did not use a Google service, as sites effectively needed to install googles tracking cookie on its customers computers to take full advantage of the Google ad monopoly, obliterating the pretence of consent you had with a service like gmail where you were at least consciously agreeing to data scraping.
I honestly think it took them almost no time at all to go from pagerank and spiders to leap towards building their panopticon and the modern surveillance economy. I think the reason people didn’t consider them evil is that what they were doing was so innovative and groundbreaking that people didn’t fully understand the implications. The way their business operates shouldn’t even be legal with them playing both sides of the ad market and their relentless spying being opt-out at best if you have sufficient technical knowledge. The spying of Google and companies like that it’s undermining government privacy protections at this point as the government can acquire spy data it couldn’t gather itself legally (for good reason) from private companies.
I’ve seen this happen before. But not with a big corporation.
There is a short clip of his speech at the event which was reported by NBC News, in which he states the boundaries of their advertisement program at the time.[2]
EDIT: There is also this story from the Verge in 2014 which includes a lengthy quote about the advertisement program.[3]
[0] https://archive.epic.org/2015/06/tim-cook-backs-privacy-cryp...
[1] https://archive.epic.org/june1/
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/apple/its-wrong-apple-ceo-tim-c...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/17/6368669/tim-cook-talks-up...
Yes, he said that after Apple failed in the ads business, just as it was focussing on leveraging its platform control against the firms that had beat it to reshape the field for the next try.
The first sentence of the actual article links to when Tim Cook said that.
Privacy is very different for most of the ads Apple are currently showing too. Search ads work without the need for tracking because when people are searching for something you show them ads for things they are searching for now, not from some model of their interests created from their tracked internet history.
This is why Apple can have an ad business and also destroy Facebooks (and others) ad business based on tracking - they don't need to squeeze every dollar from targeted ads.
But the writing was on the wall for anyone who knew what to look for. And it's the same with the likes of Paypal. I refuse to use these services because they're not banks and are not beholden to the same rules (they're getting more regulated, and my find themselves to be a bank equivalent eventually).
I wasn't very suspicious at the time, but learned to be. My take on this is different though. I don't think it was a case of self-righteousness as much as extreme naivete of some postdocs that were just entering the business world. naivete in thinking a statement such as that couldn't be twisted to the point it meant less that it already does ("evil" is not well defined), and naivete to think they wouldn't be the ones twisting it, whether on purpose or subconsciously, as business needs slowly changed and they had to justify keeping their business afloat and profitable, and people in jobs, and shareholders happy.
You either set up your business such that it's incentivized to align with your morals, or your business (the market) will incentivize you to change your morals to align with it.
If nothing else, we've learned that practices that seem mostly benign one decade at low scale can become very troubling the next decade when done at a much larger scale and/or when additional consequences of the practice become known. Choices made that align with your morals at one time may have consequences that mean you were wrong, even if you couldn't really have known it, but now your business relies on this prior decision.
Running a business is hard, making overreaching statements you can't live up to later is easy.
As a counter example of marketing gone wrong, Amazon has very steadfastly never sold their customer data to anyone. No one ever thought for a second that they did this because they were interested in privacy.
Apple usually designs their experiences around things they control end to end.
Alliances of mutual benefit are still good.
If you do good, people will talk about it, and you get to talk about it.
EDIT: Forgot when writing this down (been thinking about this for a while), but this would only apply to Publicly traded companies.
Would be very profitable for tv stations, though! And we'd see a ton more billboards covering everything.
That would cover all the Apples, Samsungs, Rokus, and so forth of the world which is what we care about most, I think.
Ethical marketing is a hard problem to solve, I don't think the best solution is focusing on where it happens, instead it should be focused on how it's happening (targeting) and what the content is.
Because if we do it based on what the FOUNDING FATHERS believed, unless you can find a quote where they said the first amendment would apply to advertisements, then we can conclude that the first amendment doesn't apply at all.
A dangerous line of thinking. If we're just going to keep what the Founding Fathers said as the only standard for the First Amendment, then only the Federal government would be bound by it. States could could still pass their own laws that punish the exercise of individual rights, free speech included.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughter-House_Cases
Curiously, conservatives say this is more democratic since people will get to vote on anything they want without judges getting in the way, even though there's no right to vote in the constitution.
That's an unreasonable view. The First Amendment says nothing about text on computers or lyrics in music being protected speech, yet we accept that they are and the Supreme Court agrees.
The second problem is, this is probably not going to fly against freedom of speech, because it's effectively censorship of a certain kind. And if it does pass, what could be the next flavor of communication to be outlawed? Maybe it's not something you're going to like.
I much prefer blocking ads (which I've come to be incredibly effective at), and still have the law allow people to advertise. And I hate ads with a passion! But the alternative could be worse.
Banning ads right now seems like a sensible thing to do if we want to reach climate goals.
I mean, we did it for prostitution, so it could work?
I think that relying on adtech is poisonous in the long run.
Turn personalized ads on or off Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising, then turn Personalized Ads on or off. Note: Turning off personalized ads limits Apple’s ability to deliver relevant ads to you. It may not reduce the number of ads you receive.
The reason for my no is that if there are ad agencies committed to building a profile of you, that's far to easy for that profile to get sold/stolen by bad actors. For example, if I was a trans man, and I was buying feminine hygiene products, I could be targeted for harassment by a leaked advertising profile.
If there's no money in building profiles it makes it less likely that one will be built, not that it can't. But that's a reasonable tradeoff to me.
If advertisers figure out a way to target ads without profiling, I'm all for it. In fact, it's not that uncommon for me to watch "sponsors" on YouTube. It's targeted because people who are watching a video on mechanical principles, might be interested in.. Say "brilliant".
That said. VPN services and ear pods can gf themselves.
We're seeing that targeted (political) ads are a powerful way to hack a democracy.
If everyone is seeing the same shitty advertisement, at least they have something to complain about together - even that much common ground is better in my opinion than everyone with their own version of reality.
Why should I care about the "efficiency" of the ads I'm being served? It's not my job to help them exploit me.
Advertisements on TV are tolerated because it's not targeted and just a random broadcast to everyone who might be interested.
Anxiety that certain things may be used against you in the form of advertising is a very real problem people face. A teenager who is researching transgender topics would be potentially frightened if the TV station the family usually watches that never shows any ads about transgender health suddenly started pushing those kinds of ads and the parents disapproved.
The problem lies in the tracking technology. In order to make informed decisions about what people might potentially be looking to buy includes learning that individual's preferences and the rather unfortunate part of everything being online is that includes everything you could possibly imagine. Everything from the type of job you have right down to your porn preferences and other proclivities are potentially up for grabs and I'm sure the vast majority of people would feel greatly unnerved if Google, Facebook or whoever showed them just what kind of person the algorithms have determined them to be just by the data they've already collected.
Untargetted ads tend to be big companies promoting their brand.
There is also the concept of identity, and specifically, who owns your identity. If you are the owner of your own identity, including interests, wants and needs, then no company should be allowed to create a profile of your identity ("shadow profile") without your permission. However, the big ad corporations like Google and Facebook (and recently TikTok) all create shadow profiles for you, like it or not, with or without your consent. Why are they allowed to do this? Should I not be paid if my unique identity is being used and monetized?
Making inferences about you doesn't mean you "own" your identity less.
I would consider consenting to being tracked and offered personalized ads if I got paid to see these ads. If I am the owner of my identity, I should be the one monetizing it. Why would I agree some corporation should make money off of my very being? I resent that. Either don't profile me (especially against my will) or compensate me.
Getting paid for your thoughts is not something new. People are constantly being paid to take part in focus groups, AB testing, polls and surveys. So why not pay you for the right to use this information in advertising?
Badgering you for personal information? You are freely choosing to go on their site and interact with it how you want. The comparison with "harassment" seems extremely hyperbolic.
> So why not pay you for the right to use this information in advertising?
You're being compensated by using their free product, which you are free to not use.
Only that the entire effort of collecting your data and profiling you happens without you being able to notice, stop or interfere (unless using some extension or sometimes a specific browser). It's more akin to you visiting public places (the visible websites) while a creepy stalker follows your every move and tries to profile you. This might be a form of harassment, but even if it isn't, I rather avoid this situation.
> You're being compensated by using their free product, which you are free to not use.
You might not be awere of how some of this works then. TikTok can seemingly track users visiting WebMD and Weight Watchers [1]. You can visit the webpage of your church, a clinic or even some municipal authorities and still get shadow profiled. And TikTok is new to this. Imagine the data collected by Google and Facebook.
We're not talking about visiting websites like YouTube where you enjoy a "free product". We're talking about virtually any website you visit including some essential services.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/privac...
The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings. Targeted advertising means you have even more data specific to an individual making it easier to manipulate the individual. More generic advertising (for example, TV ads) means all you have is the general area they live in, or the general interest of the individual (magazine ads). You cannot manipulate people based on their personal traits anymore.
The focus of the advertising shifts immediately from the consumer of the ad to the product and/or message of the ad, because you simply do not have enough information about the consumer.
The entire point of your comment is manipulating human beings.
Advertising often just seeks to make a consumer aware of a certain product. If that is manipulation, so is pretty much any content that seeks to change what people know.
The difference is in the intention for said manipulation. His comment isn’t trying to get us to part with our hard-earned income for ultimately frivolous goods.
Sure, if the good or service is actually frivolous, but what about the case where the human is actively searching for some good or service that offer some actual value?
Or is the default mode of operation always the consumer losing and the business winning?
As an example, a couple of months ago I was searching for some new summer outfits. Went through Google, Reddit, various clothing blogs, catalogs, etc. but didn't find a lot that I liked. After a week more of targeted ads on Instagram, I was finally able to discover brands that fit my tastes.
Unless I'm buying something well-defined like a TV or Airpods, passive exposure via targeted ads has been one of the best ways for me to find something worth purchasing.
You may want a THING, but you don't know about a particular brand or style of said THING. Just by making you aware of them can be a win win.
Say you've been researching "THINGS" for a couple weeks and narrowed it down to 2 brands. An Ad pops for a brand you'd never heard of. Naturally you check it out, only to find out its better than either of the options you were previously considering.
I'm not arguing we don't need to buy anything ever. I'm arguing most ads are either pushing stuff you don't really need 99% of the time or selling outright junk. And let's not get into how close some ads are to plainly false advertising (I'm looking at you, wellness / nutrition)
Question. If your ads were perfectly targeted in that 100% of advertised products were something that you're interested in, is that not ideal? Isn't that what companies like Google and Facebook are trying to do? Wouldn't you be happier if you didn't get the Wellness / Nutrition / Viagra ads?
It wants to get me to buy. Any stated aim less than this is a waste of their money.
His comment is trying to manipulate the reader into believing something that he believes is better for mankind. He doesn't materially benefit, and the reader doesn't lose anything.
Ads and advertisers are not trying to manipulate the viewers into buying a product. They are manipulating viewers into becoming the type of person that buys products impulsively and with little research. The product of the advertiser is not an ad; the product of the advertiser is you. This is not to your benefit.
So, trying to reduce gp's comment and ads in general to equivalence is misguided imo.
As a shoemaker, you might think your shoe is the best shoe on the market. Google doesn't care which is the best shoe. Google simply sells a product, namely, a credulous audience, to the shoemakers, who want buyers. And their ecosystem is bent toward improving that product. The shoemakers' noble ends don't justify the evil means of the advertisers.
This is kinda what I take the old adage to mean, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." You might think that Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. are free services because they don't cost you money. But that's like saying that a stay at the butcher's is free for the cow. They're not free at all; advertisers have to pay good money for access to their product, which is you.
Or so my view goes :) I could be wrong though.
Selling snake oil becomes no more socially good when the salesman deludes themself into believing the pitch.
The vast majority of products people buy help them solve problems of all kinds. An economic transaction is a win-win for both buyers and sellers. Look at products like the computer, the car, the telephone, etc. I think the world is becoming a better place as a result.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso
That's what advertising used to do before tracking was a thing. When this was introduced the industry realized that targeting and manipulation is far more profitable and this made ad campaigns that don't do this unviable. Because nobody ever wants to go back to a lower profit margin.
They're so addicted to tracking, and 'retargeting' (meaning repeat ads) that they're just not paying for untracked anymore. Not nearly enough to make an ad-supported website work anyway.
Due to GDPR and the cookie ban, things are turning in Europe though. Because now they no longer have the choice.
And this is why shiny new product is often placed along a half naked beatiful women or alike? Sex sells?
Some marketing indeed exists, that just tries to make a consumer aware of a product. But most marketing campaigns try to associate a certain product with certain attractive person/livestyle/object.
The Malboro Man, the Taste of freedom. Etc.
It is highly manipulative to its core. And with targeted ads, you can play with the target persons fears and desires in a automated way. So far this likely not happening (very well), but the potential is very real and dark.
If anything, this was more common in the pre-internet advertising age. Can't remember the last time I saw an ad like this.
That's quite cynical. No the point is to connect products to interested consumers. Case in point: we recently had a baby so I've been googling for baby stuff. Now I get some ads for more baby stuff. It's relevant to my life far more than Viagra ads or whatever other generic ads could be shown to me. It's not exactly manipulation because I do need lots of baby stuff.
For instance installing publicly accessible cameras in all rooms in all homes would help reduce domestic abuse, however that obviously does not mean it's a net social good. In the same vein helpful target ads do not make up for all of the other shenanigans in manipulating people politically.
(ie we also buy baby stuff but sure as hell the best products are not ie 'pampers' which are in every freaking ad block on TV I ever saw, probably... same for thousand other household products, advertised ones are very rarely proper high quality within their category, since so much is spent on pushing them down everybody's throat).
I can't comprehend how otherwise smart folks can't grok this basic principle of advertising, its pure logic and simple follow-the-money principle. Its fight for your wallet, and your brain controls the wallet. Maybe it doesn't insult your intelligence to be manipulated like a sheep, but it sure does mine.
I guess we could raise him in a cardboard box, bathe him in the sink and not have half this shit that's really for our convenience, but it is all convenient. We're definitely not going that crazy compared to the typical American/Canadian parent...
Connecting products to interested customers often involve manipulating the customer into being interested. Think about sugary cereals targeted at kids with songs and colors.
The human condition has been improved now that we all spend $3/mo on deodorant.
If you want the full story, look elsewhere.
For instance, I have no interest in receiving snail-mail ads for credit cards. I am happy with the ones that I have right now, and regularly research on my own via trusted third parties to see if any are available which would be of interest to me. Still, I am unable to stop receiving mail advertising credit cards to me. There is not even recourse I can take because states have fallen for the same “connecting producers to consumers” argument as above, in the most broad sense, where every human is a potentially interested consumer for every single product.
The business is worse off (because they pay to advertise to me, and I will not get one of their credit cards), I am worse off (because I am upset I receive this mail), the planet is worse off (deforestation), others are worse off (perhaps the time spent by postal workers delivering me junk mail could improve service to others or reduce costs).
So while I agree that advertising is not inherently manipulative, when the audience is captive and uninterested, it becomes manipulation.
- Billboards. You cannot possibly keep these out of your peripheral (or center of) vision while driving without endangering everyone else on the road. - Mailed advertisements. You have to check your mail, for example, for legal summons, that you are required by law to respond to. - Public transit (lest I be auto-shamed). You cannot, where I am, even look toward where a train arrives, without seeing ads.
To remediate just these three advertising venues, you have to drive and board public transit with your eyes closed and not check your mail. These aren’t even activities I’d consider voluntary - people need to get to work to support themselves, and check their mail for legal purposes. Unless your argument is that we all make choices to participate in our sovereign nation’s legal structure and to have jobs that require leaving the home (not everyone can work in a cushy remote role).
Research shows contextual advertising (the way it was done for ever before retargeting became a thing) beats retargeting for both purchases per dollar of ad spend and consumer appreciation / satisfaction (versus annoyance).
But, yes, you are right. Even this was infinitely better than the current situation with ads.
> No the point is to connect products to interested consumers.
You're both right in identifying points of advertising, and they're not in conflict.
Advertising has _two_ points, which I phrase as:
1. Increasing consumer awareness
2. Increasing consumer demand
Increasing consumer awareness generally feels useful: that's finding out what baby products exist, or showing people a new invention or service.
Increasing consumer demand generally feels manipulative: that's showing sugary cereals and crap toys to children, or associating vaping with success, etc.
The two goals usually are working together — but I find it useful to separate which parts of the advertisement are doing what.
You would be better served by talking to other parents, by reading information from consumer organizations, by reading reviews, even by talking to shop personnel (where multiple brands are sold).
Ads attempt to persuade. They can be implemented in manipulative ways, but ads aren't inherently that IMO.
Killing targeted ads will just mean the incumbents will dominate and without competition, consumer prices will rise. Gillette did their first price reduction because of dollar shave club is an example.
Targeted ads gave us none of the things you mentioned, it merely gave them highly-effective ad targeting. But a company can still buy TV ad spots, they can still spread via word-of-mouth or grassroots campaigns, they can still hire people to canvas and pitch, nowadays they can still go viral.
I agree with GP that ads are manipulation, and that we cannot give ad people (or any people, really) tools that are too good in this area.
Literally every big company in existence today started small, disrupting or innovating or just effectively competing at something. Yet somehow they managed to become what they are without targeted advertising?
User tracking is absolutely despicable and must be killed.
Okay, I'm sure they used some of them as well, but that was not their primary advertising mechanic to get the first 1,000,000 signups.
This is no worse than suffering through "Raid Shadow Legends" ads because I have a "gamer" bit flipped somewhere in Google's profile of me. 99% (or even 100%) of stuff advertised to me is hot garbage, even if I'm in the right demographic for the product.
The problem is that targeting is only part of the equation of what you see. The other part is the advertiser's budget. And companies that spend big on marketing are often either selling digital crack (e.g. gacha games, scams, gambling) or simply have the most capital investment (startup of the week, manscaped, Nord VPN, etc.). Neither scenario is a good signal of quality. As a result, the safest approach as a consumer is to ignore all ads.
Non-targeted ads do not mean viagra ads. Non-targeted ads still have the context of the website/app I'm using.
Non-targeted ads mean that I can get ads about specific hardware when I browse my hobby forums; I can get ads about some interesting SaaS when I browse my work related news sites. I don't get anything that's targeting some calculated personality quirks of mine to the highest ad bidder.
No matter how “relevant” an ad may be, you’re still breaking context to insert yourself, and distract me from, the thing I’m actually interested in.
I also think targeted ads are really bad for society in general. They have incentivized the building of companies that have created massive surveillance and manipulation systems on a scale nobody would have dreamt of some decades ago. Think about Stalin or Hitler having the datasets Google or Facebook have built up and how they could have used them. I can't see anything good about targeted advertising unless you buy into the vision that people's only purpose in life is to buy things.
Further, lots of smart people are working on the project of ads. Talented programmers and data scientists. Hopefully less efficient ads will result in a less lucrative ad sector, and more of these folks can be convinced to do something productive with their talents.
Targeted ads usually aren't trying to trick me, they're telling me about products and services I genuinely don't know about. Maybe this will shock people, but I have actually bought things linked straight from ads a handful of times. (Only a handful, but that's more than zero.)
I infinitely prefer targeted advertising rather than the horrible lowest-common-denominator generic non-targeted "grow your dick" and "one weird trick" and "millionth website visitor" garbage. (I just wish there were a button for "don't show me ads for humidifiers anymore because I already bought one after researching, I'm not gonna buy another". So that the targeting worked even better.)
Better by what measure? Not at the expense of privacy. Where is the data going? Who is it being sold to?
Sure, American TV ads are annoying, but they're predictable and sometimes entertaining. American TV ads are so inefficient that they need to work for your attention.
One issue with targeting is receiving antidepressant ads, knowing the algorithm knows that you're depressed. Or receiving baby ads when the algorithm knows you were expecting, but doesn't know you had a miscarriage. There are countless examples of targeting being a danger to the public as well, being used for very effective misinformation campaigns.
The most obvious approach is content based targeting. If someone is reading an article about baby names, put ads for baby clothes next to it. If there’re reading an article about cloud infrastructure, put an AWS ad next to it.
People managed to make and sell perfectly good adverts long before Facebook and Google came along. Have you never noticed that every advert in a trade magazine targets people in that trade?
What they can't do w/o consent is collect data from third party apps and use that to target users in other apps.
1.) It's one of the main reason why surveillance capitalism is so widespread. Some of the worst things that came out of tech in past 20 years are directly or indirectly connected to "targeting ads".
2. ) Better name for targeted adds would be Machine driven adds. And with it comes the counter part of machine driven re-posters re-blogers, ai generated spam content etc. If you didn't have all those "targeted" machine driven networks there would be a lot less reason to build such sites. Since most advertisers would not want to advertise on such sites if they had a choice in it.
3.) With all the crap they bring, they still suck at targeting. They either focus on one search you did a while ago to the exclusion of everything else, they to sell you same expensive stuff for months after you already bought it, or completely irrelevant most of the time.
4.) They make pages load slower, sometimes a lot slower.
There’s a lot of people disagreeing with you, but it’s missing the point, I think.
Everybody can get the experience they want; both you and they can. You can get targeted ads by accepting when an advertiser asks to track you. They can get non-targeted ads by rejecting when an advertiser asks to track them.
The key thing here is that everybody is given the choice. And that’s Apple’s only requirement – they haven’t banned tracking, they have banned tracking without asking the user for their consent first.
Reference: Leith, D. J. (2021). Mobile Handset Privacy: Measuring The Data iOS and Android Send to Apple And Google. URL: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
It is a nuanced, yet extremely important distinction.
Lack of ads IS the killer feature for me. What I use an iPhone for could just as easily be done by Android.
If Apple is enthusiastically running towards the ads hellscape then it might be time to get one of those Linux phones and start developing some apps for it. I need less than 10 apps for it to be a viable replacement, or if it get's really bad then I could make do with even less.
The part that is unfair is that no one but Apple gets to have an App Store or process IAPs, which has always been the problem with iOS. Trying to make it about ATT just seems like a red herring.
This nothing to do with advertising.
You can see a lot of the tracking and correlating that apple does within their own legal documents, which I commend them for at least writing them out clearly : https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...
Apple also uploads a lot of logs, etc from their devices to their servers, and opting out of apple level tracking at some basic level is often just not an option. Ex, they upload battery behavior info and use it to improve the battery perf of their devices, or upload people's locations and other location adjacent data like wifi networks with location services and so on.
Apple cares about privacy from third parties, not privacy from apple itself. Which is very apple of apple. Apple also does not let you turn it off in some key parts. And they know they work with security services & authoritarian governments that force them to hand over any data that they have access to, in secret, which gets thousands of innocent people killed, tortured and jailed every day at their scale. Yet they still collect it.
Key parts of apple doesn't really like the existence of third parties in many ways, and if they could, they would rather have full locked down control, from what I can observe from external actions over the decades.
Any large group of people will of course have different actions and motives, and I do commend part of the company for caring, and funding efforts like lockdown mode and keeping %95 of the company thinking and caring about privacy at some level. But that key %5 that does not basically ruins it for many. The best we can hope for is to slowly change that last %5, although with this Services & Ads push, I feel like that bad part is only going to grow worse.
Long game, a successful Apple ad business creates bad incentives and is likely bad for customers. As evidenced by the AppStore really being a front door for the worst kind of skinner-box gaming, Apple will choose cash over any overriding principle.
Think of this: 1.Fb shows an ad for angry birds 2. user installs the app 3. user opens the app and makes a ping to fb to tell user with idfa xyz opened the app.
The problem is not that only apple gets (2), but it is that because it gets (2), it thinks it should be able to dictate how (3) happens. Since apple is the only one doing (2), it puts everyone else at a disadvantage.
And since apple doesn't have web ads business, it sees no problem killing that altogether through att as well.
There are policy restrictions that you won't be able to get around which is what att is.
the only way to do cross app tracking in ios without the user opting in and without violating apple policy is via explicitly associating accounts across apps either via oauth or some kind of account linking
Imagine if you are less monetizable user, in theory, app should be able to restrict what you can do in the app. It's a business transaction after all
But apple gets a say in this too.
Also apple uses it's app store moat to restrict tracking on websites too, similarly.
To be fair, so does the GDPR which Apple is subject to
Matching the ad to the user is just more difficult as it requires more in the way of user signups, as opposed to e.g. cookie-based tracking which is more ubiquitous and requires less integration.
As Ben Thompson has been shouting, it's because Apple has a very convenient definition of "tracking".
What do I get in exchange for what I share. To me, learning about new products and services from companies that I don't already have an existing relationship with is far more valuable than the data shared. I want the inventor of a better mouse trap to reach out to me and let me know of their product.
What happens when it learns that you have a gambling problem?
What happens when it learns that you're a hypochondriac?
What happens when it learns that you have a retail addiction?
What happens when your ad profile identifies you as somebody who has had an abortion in one of the states where it's illegal? Can the ad company be subpoenaed?
What happens when an insurance company goes to a data-broker and finds out that you've been googling cancer symptoms? Would their access to this information change your premiums or eligibility?
Gattaca happens
1) We cannot solely rely on Apple's selective definition of privacy to resolve these. As an example, what if your health insurance company offers an app and you use that app to search for cancer? Should the insurance company be able to use that data? We need very strong legal protections as a more comprehensive solution that works across all types of data companies can gather to make medical decisions.
> What happens when it learns that you have a gambling problem? > What happens when it learns that you have a retail addiction?
2) You need to consider that (1) advertisers don't need to learn this! People willingly give them this data (e.g. by signing up for a sports betting app), and (2) this also opens the door to reach people to help them. No targeted advertising does not mean that these societal issues just disappear. These are still there but just harder to see.
> What happens when your ad profile identifies you as somebody who has had an abortion in one of the states where it's illegal? Can the ad company be subpoenaed?
3) While I abhor the decision on Roe vs Wade, let's flip this to: what if the ad profile identifies you as a seller of fentanyl? Would you want the ads data to be eligible for use in prosecution? I would. Saying that banning targeted ads protects women's privacy is security through obfuscation. That is not a solution.
2)This position presents a pretty messed up vision of the world IMO. As if the ideal state of things is that Google/Apple/Meta holds auctions where Draft Kings, Poker Stars, and a gambling support line can bid on a gambling addict's attention.
3) Asserting that targeted ad sales are good because they identify criminals is a big stretch imo
Two years ago it was different and a lot of small companies could compete. CPAs were well below anything I ever saw in the world of print advertising. Very efficient.
Now, it seems we've gone back 10 years in time. Only large brands are bringing in enough gross margin dollars to run poorly targeted campaigns. This is likely to get much, much worse as small companies exit the stage entirely.
The sad thing is that there is really no where else for a small company to go for acquisition marketing. Can't go back to print. The only outlet left is selling in large marketplaces like Amazon where the competition is apt to steal your product (not to mention the insane fees).
I suppose the one up-side to the situation is that there's not much point in even trying to spend the time figuring out how to root a device, or dealing with egregiously under-performing open smart phone hardware, and it might be possible to save some money going back to a dumb phone.
Going back a decade in terms of functionality is hardly an answer.
I did point out that it is in fact possible to order a cab using a telephone call.
What a disappointment, she likes actually 1 feature - photos, and the rest is subpar experience compared to her old galaxy S10 (almost 4 year old phone). But then she likes my android photos similarly, since I have 10x zoom which is great for kids always running around or for hiking. Its not even first weeks of her use of Apple, she has it few months. I can browse on my samsung S22 ultra random internet without being swarmed with ads and tracking (firefox and ublock origin, something Apple phones will clearly never have).
And all the rest. It has fingerprint sensor for unlocking, instead of ridiculously shitty faceid which doesn't work with masks (she is a doctor so does wear them often). It often doesn't work even without masks, ie non-ideal light conditions like right now (evening and dimmer lights). Comparable S22 is much nicer phone to look at, to hold, to carry, to charge, and to work with.
I regret recommending it to her at this point, I too was convinced by Apple's effective PR. But quality is just not there, the devices are worse, bigger in size with smaller screen, uglier, heavier, software is meh, raw CPU power is useless on its own when device is so limited. I don't believe a zilch of Apple's PR about privacy, as I didn't for the ads and various other PR talk, actions are the only thing that matter.
And after reading this topic, its clear I will continue shopping in Android's non-chinese realm for a very long time. I don't consider my device secure from state actors, and neither is Apple, so we act accordingly. Thus, no added value in Apple devices, just plenty of marketing, similar to say Hermes or Louis Vuitton purses. Nobody believes those are worth 500$ or 5,000$ to manufacture, yet rich people buy them.
If you are ok with using Safari instead of Firefox, that’s something that has been possible since 2015 on iOS [1].
> instead of ridiculously shitty faceid which doesn't work with masks
It does since iOS 15.4 (March 2022 [2]); I use it every day.
> It often doesn't work even without masks, ie non-ideal light conditions like right now (evening and dimmer lights)
Light has nothing to do with this because FaceID works with infrared: I’m able to unlock my iPhone in the dark with no issue at all. You’re probably holding it wrong [3].
> But quality is just not there, the devices are worse, bigger in size with smaller screen, […] heavier
I fail to find an iPhone 13 that’s bigger than your Samsung S22 Ultra. The Pro Max is 0.2mm wider but 2.1mm less tall and 1.2mm thiner (163.3 x 77.9 x 8.9 mm [4] vs. 160.8 x 78.1 x 7.7 mm [5]). It does have a smaller screen-to-size ratio (87.4% vs. 90.2%) and is slightly heavier (240g vs. 228g -- not sure how noticeable this is).
> the devices are worse, […], uglier, […], software is meh
That part is highly subjective. I personally find the S22 Ultra very ugly but that’s an opinion, not a fact.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34173732
[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/face-id-with-mas...
[3]: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/13/how-iphone-x-face-id-wo...
[4]: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s22_ultra_5g-11251.p...
[5]: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_13_pro_max-11089.php
People will come out of the woodwork with grievances (ex. crypto integrations, politics, etc) but all of that can be turned off and/or ignored and the browsing experience is quite pleasant
This is not a technical but a political problem. People owning (GNU-)Linux-phones (or just caring about the future of mobile computing) should demand from the companies that they do not force everyone into monopolies.
We should strive to make anyone who gets manipulated into changing their behavior based on an ad they saw feel ashamed and stupid for falling for their tricks, and angry at the advertisers for manipulating them.
This sounds great, but:
A) how do you know/can you prove that you've been manipulated?
B) How do we know that we haven't all been manipulated? (After all, millions of people bought into this ecosystem to get away from ads, I think every person who's angry has a case that they've been manipulated)
and C) where is this social movement gonna take place? Social media, the bastion of internet advertising?
The answer is make tech less important in our lives. There's been a pattern going back decades that technology grows in scale and utility and eventually becomes corporatized to that point that it generates more income to work against its users. The answer is to live a lower tech life. Less time on phones and apps and more time in the real world.
Will never happen until we can dispel the notion that human are free agents. People will never give up this believe about themselves. Meanwhile, it's proven to be effective by virtue of it being a trillion dollar industry or something. Same thing with gambling.
- I own a home that routinely needs services. Ads help me find willing businesses.
- I own a car that needs tires. Just yesterday I looked at ads for those selling them.
- I like to buy art for my house. Ads in apps like Etsy pop up things that might interest me.
- Sometimes I look for a new job. Enough said on that one.
Believe it or not ads exist because they perform a useful social function.
But then again, what percentage of ads is the kind you have to actively go and look for?
Whether you see an ad is entirely driven by how much the seller wants to spend to acquire your purchase. Ads give no indication of the actual quality of the service or product. In fact, companies with greater ad spending tend to be lower quality because a portion of your purchase price is going towards the advertisement at the expense of quality.
Do you really not read reviews when shopping, and just type in a search term and see what comes up? I'd be surprised if you didn't, but if you don't you should try using non-commercial speech when making a purchase decision. Level of advertisement is inversely proportional to value, so I think you'll be pleased with the results.
On GrapheneOS[0] (privacy focused AOSP-based mobile OS) you can do that stuff easily while still owning your device/having root, etc (at least according to this video[1] I saw)
[0]: https://grapheneos.org/
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZmUINSvQ4
Apple is being very hypocritical here. Privacy matters until they tell you it’s ok, don’t worry about it. With Budd Trible moving on, I guess this is the state of affairs. Sad.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/14/facebook-spied-on-private-mess...
At least Apple has a record of keeping their users safe from government.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/apple-refuses-barr-request-t...
But the mere existence of it undercuts the privacy claims and creates a giant moral hazard (if AppStore search is lousy then people have to buy ads/sponsored keywords, and the clear desire for ad businesses to start invading privacy).
I really wish it didn’t exist :-/
/s
I wonder if Apple will also try to prevent that or will just figure it's a small enough number that allowing it will help them with the nerds. Informally, when I see something on someone else's device, ad blocking doesn't appear to be popular. I can't imagine using the web without it.
Google has something like this moat within their search engine dominance, likewise Facebook does for social, but both of them are rather limited slices in comparison with the OS itself.
So, we arrive at this junction - Apple lobbies, for the consumer of course, to prevent tracking across the web, and conveniently limits their number of competitors to one, that being Microsoft which seems rather inept at this advertising thing anyway.
It's hard to root for Google or Facebook here, but it's also pretty obvious that our friends in Cupertino don't have our best interests in mind.
The 1% of users running some custom Android build aren't really relevant here, Google scrapes up plenty.
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
> That is, almost two order of magnitude is uploaded by Android (3.6MB) than by iOS at startup, while Android downloads around a third (952MB) of the data of iOS (2.6GB).
The paper goes on into a lot more detail of tracking what identifiers are sent when and how often.
In particular, look at figure 4 on page 6.
Which sandbox do you like to play in? Does it even matter?
The premium is just an opt-out of the ads (on the specific app) .... the tracking is where the value will be in the future
If the prior profits were not enough, how much higher do the prices need to be to not do this?
In general I trust the company to make choices about computing experiences, much more so than any other products company. So, I am going to try and hold judgement and see how this pans out.
That said, I'd like the company to get out ahead of these decisions and explain reasoning for these changes.
(Unless they show far too many so people start leaving ... That threshold might be high though; Linux is too cumbersome for almost everyone?)
Because it is fundamentally a public company rooted in capitalism, the company is vulnerable to another type of products organization.
One that is similar to a Purpose Trust and not held captive to polluting their own customer experience to reward uninvolved “capital investors.”
It is almost like the business form of RISC-V. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purpose_trust
I would have hoped Apple stayed away from this business.
This is greed, imho.
The same goes for plenty of forms of telemetry; it doesn't equal individual tracking or tracking at all (before someone comes in with a cohort theory).
Some things like predictive text entry (Microsoft did/does that? And grammarly and Gboard) have an easy implementation where you ignore privacy and simply dump all user entry onto a server and do the heavy lifting there. Apple's version of that might be Siri recordings when recognition fails to improve that, but I haven't seen it with ads or text entry (yet?).
At some point no company should be doing any of this without homomorphic encryption or a good level of sanitisation. All of Apple's telemetry that you can inspect (either locally or simply by adding a proxy) is well-anonymised. It doesn't hide what specific binaries are causing errors as that would defeat the point of measuring reliability, and when you connect to someone, they will know what IP connected to them, but other than that, it's not as bad as people tend to make it out to be.