Hacker News Reader

Comment by librish | Hacker News Reader

One thing that removes a lot of credibility from Apple's "for the good of the user" communication on this is that they broke out the personalization for their own ad network as an option, put it in a different location, and made it opt-out instead of opt-in.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...

View on HN

Yeah, this is crazy: Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> (ALL the way to the bottom of the list, past all apps) System Services -> Location-Based Apple Ads. Oh, and if you have text size increased by any amount, “Ads” doesn’t even appear and it’s just “Location-Based Apple...” (on or off).

The harder something is to find and disable, the shadier it seems.

Gross! Just to feed App Store and Apple News? Apple should kill that immediately, it's hypocritical.

Unfortunately, most large corporations are relatively immune to hypocrisy.

It's not hypocrisy they're immune from, it's consequences.

I don't see "Location-Based Apple Ads" on my iPhone running iOS 14.

It's there for me on iOS 13.7: https://imgur.com/gJyId5P

It was on by default - I toggled it off.

It is off by default.

It was on by default for me as well

It's not off by default. I just reset an iPhone to check on 13.7. It's on by default.

Users have to manually "Opt out" as per Apple's own documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074

or https://web.archive.org/web/20200903215036/https://support.a...

On for me too.

Nobody in their right mind would turn this on.

Settings -> Privacy -> Apple Advertising (all the way down) > Personalized Ads

Holy hell that's shady as fuck. I would have never found that and I've gone out of my way to disable as much of this type of shit on my phone as possible. There's no way in hell the average user is ever going to stumble upon that setting.

I don’t have such a problem providing targeting data to Apple as I have to third parties. Frankly I can’t see myself letting an ecosystem become an integral part of my life if I do not trust the company behind it.

Apple definitely does shady stuff. Sure on privacy they are the better option, usually. But don't forget it recently came out that Siri was sending recordings to be analysed without the users knowledge. They also will only very begrudgingly fix design faults in their products. I recently was a victim of their flexgate issue and because I have the 15" MacBook Pro it isn't automatically covered. Other users with this issue are fighting Apple in a class action over it. You would hope that a company that makes as much money as Apple would stand behind their products better but unfortunately that's not the case.

That Siri sends recordings to humans for analysis without user consent is a myth. I went through a screen pointing out this is exactly what will happen, and buttons to opt in or out, during initial OS setup. This was a while ago, before iOS 14. The myth is likely perpetuated by people who do not use Apple devices.

That change was mode after the whole thing blew up last year. It used to be that this feature was enabled by default, with no way to opt-out and was not clearly disclosed to the user.

I don’t remember that time, for as long as Siri existed I always recall there being a way to prevent my phone from auto-reacting to words (which I hate) during OS setup. Maybe I am mistaken.

I was going off this article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/14/apple-...

A former contractor who worked for Apple in Ireland told EU regulators that he heard highly personal conversations as part of a project that transcribed portions of Siri recordings to improve the feature’s voice recognition. Apple apologized after the infractions were revealed and said it had suspended the project while it implemented better practices.

I know of that case.

My point is that Apple disclosed to users that this will happen, so I am confused as to who would consider this an “infraction”.

I had to set up iOS multiple times (broke phone screens, got an iPad and so on), and as far as Siri was around I remember being informed.

During initial setup you have options to turn Siri on with continuous listening, on via button only (my preference), or off entirely. One tap and a short bit of text informs you of privacy implications, including that your voice recordings may be sent to and heard by humans in order to improve QoS.

I did not have to dig through a wall of ToS, it was a clear and concise paragraph set in large enough type that took single-digit seconds to read.

I wonder whether (1) I am missing some circumstances or a period of time where this was not the case, and therefore I should be offended as well, or (2) people are misinformed and piling on Apple for, as far as I’m concerned, little to no reason.

Fixed in iOS 14, at least.

Sounds like this might also be the reason for this delay.

If Apple is indeed favouring their own ad services they might indeed be the target of very well funded antitrust-based legal campaigns. I assume the adtech companies would have at least threatened them with this.

So they are probably going to retune their own ad service to comply with the same before they go live with this change.

If Apple is indeed rolling out their own ad program and giving themselves preferential access, it would be thermonuclear valley war.

Nobody cares about individual users in the end, once in 50 years you might get a politician who rises to a populist challenge.

But when you take 1/2 of some major adjacent-competitors money away, then it's war. The stakes are 10's of billions and every lobbyist, lawyer, marketer, PR person is going to be engaged.

I wouldn't quite speculate on Apple's motivations here, but it's a very real and big issue. They can screw you and I, and even Fornite, but Facebook? An then 'self deal' with their own ads? Even that is a risk.

Was thinking the same. If the reason is to give Apple's ad services team time to make the adjustments, then that seems another strike on antitrust grounds. Timing not great to say the least.

Apple’s own ad service is long gone and won’t come back (if some sanity is still left in Apple’s board). They’re just playing nice with some core partners.

Apple has an ad service: https://searchads.apple.com/

Ads to install apps, shown in App Store and News apps.

App install ads are also Facebook’s main mobile ad market. This crackdown specifically block’s Facebook’s ability to show attribution of app purchases for their ads, while preserving that ability for Apple by default.

> while preserving that ability for Apple by default.

I think you mean by design. Ads above search results can be tracked because they're shown within the App Store, so they don't require looking at "who is this user" from within the downloaded app, they can just differentiate based on where it was placed, like Google Ads. The only case I can see here is "why does apple get to be the only ones with ads on search results" but then you're arguing the same point you'd use against Google, so it all comes down to what the potential Google antitrust lawsuit says and if the DOJ cares about this enough to later file suit against Apple.

The way I see it, this is not a particularly surprising move by Apple. There’s a clear financial gain from taking this ad revenue. The discussion should be focused on whether they should get away with it from an antitrust/market dominance perspective. Not giving them great PR because they found a way to spin it as good for privacy.

No apple is actually leaving their IDFA use on by default while turning other app’s idfa to default off.

That's perfect, I don't want my data to go somewhere I don't control and Apple already knows enough that it makes literally no difference but helps support indie developers as I'll be more likely to buy someone's app from a well-targeted add shown in App Store.

Those complaining it’s on by default are forgetting that exposing ad tracking as a setting that can be turned off is already a leap forward compared to shady practices across advertisement industry.

It’s a numbers game.

On by default -> financially the same as always on

Off by default -> financially doesn’t exist

You're forgetting

Not even exposed in the UI -> no one would ever complain about it

You’re right. Then is Apple going to use IDFA without asking while the others will have to ask?

Perhaps Apple will use the Apple ID to join your ad engagements with your App Store activity.

It looks like Apple's advertising targeting isn't using the same info that they're trying to withhold from third parties though. I actually have it off on my device so I can't see what the "View Ad Targeting Information" says (if I turn it back on, it says I have to wait 24 hours before it has the info to show me), but from the description it does show, it sounds like the ad target uses "account information and interactions with Apple services" for serving ads. Which is to say, this is information Apple already has, and all you're saying is "please don't use that info for serving ads". It does not sound like it reduces the information Apple has (which makes sense, any PII not necessary for running Apple's services is not sent to Apple except after undergoing differential privacy).

Compare this with third-party advertising, where the use of IDFA does explicitly hand information to third parties that they otherwise wouldn't have. For example, the Facebook SDK is integrated into a bazillion different apps, so Facebook can track a single user across all of these different apps even if the user doesn't use Facebook login (or if they use Facebook login for a single one of these apps, Facebook can then associate the usage of all the other apps with that same login too).

The two are not remotely equivalent.

They seem pretty equivalent to me. You have a site or service send usage information to an ad network and the ad network returns an ad to show. The only difference here is that in the case of Apple they own both the service and the ad network.

Facebook’s big ad business on mobile is advertising to install apps. That’s also Apple’s ad business on mobile (ads shown on Apple News, and in the App Store itself). For Facebook to show attribution of ad conversions, they must do tracking “across apps” (from their app where the ad was clicked, to the advertiser’s app). For Apple to do the same attribution, they can call it “interactions with Apple services”, because the purchase is done through the App Store. In that sense, both are going after the same user actions but different language can be used to describe them.

What's crazy is that these are supposed to be complementary effects. The more apps that are installed on Apple's platform the more money that Apple makes, but apparently that's not enough for them.

Once way to think of this is as an effort get a greater than 30% cut on the App Store. One of the things I’m supposed to be purchasing with that cut as a developer is discoverability. If users search for my app by name and somebody else’s app comes up first, it starts to feel like 30% isn’t getting me the full offering.

Now, I might go buy some ads from Facebook, because they provide a good value there. In the future, my only choice will be Apple, who won’t have to compete on price anymore because they cornered the market.

Yes that's correct. Apple is basically reducing the fidelity of the rest of the ad ecosystem to the level they're already at themselves.

One could argue that the initial policy was anti competitive because it artificially inflated Apple's offering over its competitors...

Probably was.

What's "Apple's offering"?

their own ad network, as described in top of this comment chain.

I don't even know what "Apple Advertising" is. Is it app store ads?

Except Apple shut down their ad network years ago, so that's not what these options are for.

I believe you're referring to iAd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd

You're being downvoted because they still make money off of advertising:

"The iAd App Network was discontinued as of June 30, 2016.[8] Since then the technology lives on in both Apple News Advertising and App Store Search Ads.[9]"

Right, but they have no ad network, only ads on their own properties. That's why the settings are different, they're describing totally different things.

I think the settings should be combined, but Apple is in no way tracking users across sites, because they're not tracking users like that at all. Refusing to track users is the entire reason their "iAd" ad network failed!

> they broke out the personalization for their own ad network as an option, put it in a different location, and made it opt-out instead of opt-in.

If that is true, it absolutely contradicts Apple's claim that "Privacy is built in from the beginning":

https://www.apple.com/privacy/features/

Certainly seems to open the door for some creative PR campaigns by impacted apps.

I'd personally prefer not to have any of the ad tracking stuff, especially at the OS level.

Ad campaigns nothing, that seems like a legal risk to me.

Like it or hate it, app install ads often pay the best and are how a lot of free-to-the-user apps earn money.

Before the wave of whinging I'm not pro ads. I'm just pointing out this is a big disruption to the financial models of many free apps.

The biggest misconception is how and why ad IDs are used, what precisely the value of ad targeting is, how it impacts the user, the ad buyer, etc. People don't really seem to know anything about this stuff. If you spent even 1 minute articulating a falsifiable hypothesis about the impact of something like IDFA, you would have a much more interesting conversation that the typical Apple versus the world way this goes on HN.

Just curious... how does that remove credibility? Seems logical to put that option in one global place for the OS. Individual apps from the App Store don't have access at that level so there's no way they could give it the same priority. The only alternative I can see is if iOS has some way to set options per developer and that seems like a silly thing.

They do that because they don’t sell any of your info, unlike Facebook which should be opt in. The whole issue Apple has with FB is privacy and selling of your data. If apple was selling data and they needed opt out then you may have a point

Any source that Apple doesn’t/didn’t sell customers info?

I was actually considering a apple phone if they came through. This just put the nails in that coffin. I'll just stick with Android where I can install whatever I want for the most part.

> One thing that removes a lot of credibility from Apple's "for the good of the user" communication

I feel like taking billions from Google to be the default search engine on iOS also did that

Reply on news.ycombinator.com