Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

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The context for this proposal is NOT that, in a vacuum, ad-tracking is a desirable feature of HTML.

The context for this proposal is Apple has already been rolling out privacy protections for Safari and iOS, other players (like Big G) have had complaints, and this proposal undercuts those complaints. It's a negotiating tool, effectively.

Apple's privacy protections have made life harder for Google and other folks in the advertising space. Apple has basically tried to make it hard or impossible for anyone to stitch together user activity across different sites and build a profile of that user.

Advertisers have complained about losing ad attribution, and that complaint is legitimate. But, the existing techniques that are used to measure ad attribution also allow a excessive amount of additional data to be collected. Arguably, the ad attribution angle is just a PR-friendly fig leaf over what they're really worried about, which is user profiling.

So, Apple's counter-proposal: Here is a way to get ad attribution! Also, by the way, it doesn't allow user profiling, but that's ok, right? Of course it is. And now, ideally, we get to watch advertisers squirm as they try to come up with outlandish attribution scenarios that justify the collection of profiling data, while struggling to not admit what types of profiling they actually do and what fraction of their valuation that comprises.

It also makes it easier to lobby for a privacy law with teeth (which Apple should absolutely be doing if they aren't already) when you can offer a solution to politicians who might have genuine concerns about the economic impact.

I don't think we need legislation that is overly prescriptive by saying "this is the particular feature of the current web that you need to use to be privacy compliant." That's what was wrong with the cookie law, and was one of the improvements the GDPR made - it didn't prescribe any particular solution for advertisers, just told them "you can't do this kind of thing."

That is the basis of a good law (prohibit a specific behavior, not the implementation thereof). In that lens though, Apple's proposal is a solution in search of legislation, which screams "regulatory capture" to me - another reason I'm against it.

They wouldn't mandate any specific technology, but it makes it infinitely more likely that Congress would pass a GDPR clone when they are confident that doing so wouldn't just destroy every web publisher's business. And it certainly disarms any disingenuous arguments by the ad-tech lobbyists along those lines.

I still don't understand why Apple would be compelled to offer the olive branch at all. Sure, advertisers have complained their business model is getting harder - what motivates Apple to help fix that? What possible leverage could advertisers even have? Apple doesn't need a negotiating tool if there's nothing Apple wants from the advertisers, just block the nefarious tracking and move on.

Apple wants something from advertisers. Money.

They want 2 billion in revenue from advertising by 2020.

They are testing the waters, and there's no doubt a faction within the company that believes that in the long term, getting a slice of the firehose of ad revenue is worth a small loss in revenue from opinionated anti-ads users[1] leaving their ecosystem.

The best part about the Apple walled garden is that once ads become an important part of their revenue stream, they'll be able to ban ad-blockers on their platform.

[1] What are they going to do, switch to Android? Communicate by carrier pigeon?

2B to Apple is couch change.

Rome wasn't built in a day. I'm sure there's slide decks that float much bigger future numbers to decision-makers in the firm.

So Apple is going to do a 180 and suddenly switch to being anti-privacy and pro-advertising. Disable the Safari content blockers they only recently added, end the advertising campaigns they just started using. And all for a tiny 1% of their revenue ?

Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition and personal to Tim Cook given that in many cases gay and other minorities are killed due to privacy leaks.

> Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition and personal to Tim Cook given that in many cases gay and other minorities are killed due to privacy leaks.

Is it part of an immutable corporate charter? Is Tim Cook an immortal lich-king, with absolute authority, that will preside over Apple between now, and the heat death of the universe?

Company culture changes, company priorities change, company leaders change, and shareholders always want more money. If advertising will get Apple more money, it's just a matter of when, not if.

Company culture isn't going to change much at Apple.

They have programs like Apple University and the memory of Steve Jobs will always loom large over the company.

And Apple could've focused primarily on advertising decades ago. But they didn't because it's just not in their DNA. They are and will forever be a widgets company.

20 years ago, they were an overpriced-computer vendor on their deathbed, with not a widget in sight, burdened with a trailing-edge OS, while Microsoft was an unstoppable behemoth that was eating the world (While convinced that this internet thing was just a fad.)

You have no idea what they will be 20 years from now.

> Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition and personal to Tim Cook given that in many cases gay and other minorities are killed due to privacy leaks.

I love the privacy aspect, but is privacy really part of Apple's core strategy or are we just seeing them make use of the good position they were always in? Is there enough drive at Apple (Cook or otherwise) to keep privacy a focus, or is the topic just going to fall by the wayside when it suits the business?

Look at the implementation of Secure Enclave, FaceID, Apple Pay and ML models.

They build these very carefully to keep your data secure, on-device and inaccessible to third parties. They definitely could've implemented these much quicker and arguably better (e.g. ML models) if they had a device-cloud hybrid.

Yeah but they still sell you out to Google as soon as you open safari. Apple cares more about $ than privacy

> Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition

From earlier today :

"Note: Though we cannot bring an official Tor Browser to iOS due to restrictions by Apple"

(https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-85)

Money is the only part of Apple's selling proposition. It's nice they cater to the privacy conscious for the time being, for the time being.

Here's the whole quote

> Note: Though we cannot bring an official Tor Browser to iOS due to restrictions by Apple, the only app we recommend is Onion Browser, developed by Mike Tigas with help from the Guardian Project.

Your truncated quote makes it sound like Apple doesn't allow private Tor browsing. There are other Tor browsers on the App store. What Apple doesn't allow is third-party HTML renderers and JavaScript engines (Tor Browser is based on Firefox)

Advertisers are not complaining - they can vote with their money. It's the publishers that are hit by making ads harder. Without allowing publishers to monetize, content will move behind paywalls or closed ecosystems (as opposed to open web) that do make ads easier. Also, over time, browsers that make it impossible to monetize will likely to be banned by publishers - this already started to happen, with some publishers not allowing incognito mode, etc.

Not everyone believes that advertising is inherently bad, or that being able to track the effectiveness of particular advertising campaigns is bad – as opposed to tracking individual users.

Ad attribution is not inherently bad. The means by which people do ad attribution are typically evil, and due to the ease by which this data is collected, lead advertising companies down the dark path of becoming user data brokers.

But the simple act of "I placed an ad on this site, is that ad driving sales?" is perfectly benign, and if we can enable that use-case without enabling any privacy leakage, that's unambiguously a good thing because making the privacy-conscious approach easy and reliable means people will use it and won't resort to the more privacy-invasive techniques.

This is the same underlying justification as the "ping" attribute, which is basically, it enables in a privacy-conscious manner the basic functionality people want, and which they already have other less-privacy-conscious means to get, so let's make the most user-positive option the simplest and most reliable.

Also by standardizing how this works it enables content blockers to block these requests. This ad click attribute proposal even explicitly listed this as a feature. If you don't want ad click attribution, use a content blocker that blocks /.well-known/ad-click-attribution/ and you're done.

I disagree, all advertising levies a cost on the advertisee, you are assuming an inherent right to attention that the person has not granted. I understand and agree that this is a graduated scale but the most benign on that scale is "only a minor annoyance" not "perfectly benign".

Advertising is the cost of access to the content. The content provider has the user's attention, and the advertiser is paying the content provider for a small slice of that attention. But that's all the cost should be, just a moment of attention. The cost should not be giving up your privacy.

The cost shouldn't even be attention, we have little enough control over the silence of our minds in the modern world - we should fight against all those sources that feel falsely entitled to get a slice of our brains and time for themselves.

There is no implicit link between "stuff on the internet" and advertising, this "free service" isn't free, we're all paying a gateway fee to get into the internet to begin with, then many content providers have judged their content valuable enough to justify asking for payment, with others relying on soft/burst funding sources like crowdsourcing. The internet and most people's sites really aren't so expensive to maintain that we need this level of crazy marketing.

> we should fight against all those sources that feel falsely entitled to get a slice of our brains and time for themselves.

Why are they falsely entitled? You're choosing to give your attention to a site in exchange for its content. That was your choice. The site turns around and sells a tiny slice of your attention to an ad provider in order to actually make money. But make no mistake, this was the attention that you chose to give to the site in exchange for its content, and that site can spend your attention how it wishes. If you don't like how it spends your attention, don't patronize that site anymore.

I reject this analogy, it's like saying "You walked into a supermarket to buy an apple for a dollar, it ended up costing you eight dollars because of taxes and fees and unfortunately those seven extra dollars were spent before you ever got the apple, so I guess the apple still costs a dollar but when you walk out of the store you'll be eight dollars poorer."

Advertising isn't voluntarily entered into by us, it's forced on the consumer. Personally I try to avoid patronizing sites that use heavy advertising (except interesting articles forwarded to me) but I am more speaking on the harm to us all. I suppose I could reword my comment above a bit more accurately to "I reject the normalization of advertising in society."

Apple may want this so that they can have attribution for ad placements in their own products such as Apple News while still being to able market themselves as a corporation who cares about privacy.

>Advertisers have complained about losing ad attribution, and that complaint is legitimate.

Ummm, no it’s not. My browser is my user agent, and I couldn’t care less about advertisers’ woes.

You know what makes attribution even harder? Ad blockers.

> Advertisers have complained about losing ad attribution, and that complaint is legitimate.

It's not legitimate at all.

No more legit than a ransomware author complaining that a Windows patch destroyed their revenue source.

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