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Comment by tpetry | Hacker News Reader

Are they doing? Is the books or podcast app harvesting information for better app store ads?

This is an honest question! I have not yet seen any hint for this, but that does not mean they dont do it.

I've interviewed with the iCloud/CloudKit teams and I'm reasonably certain that the way they dogfood it internally means that they use the same setup we do, where the same ID isn't persisted across applications.

People like to claim that Apple gets a free pass here but they legitimately do seem to build their apps more or less silo'd, as they should be.

If you want the soundbite: if Apple tracked you across apps, their recommendation systems (be it app store or whatever) wouldn't royally suck. But they do. ;P

> If you want the soundbite: if Apple tracked you across apps, their recommendation systems (be it app store or whatever) wouldn't royally suck. But they do. ;P

It’s honestly a breath of fresh air. There’s no sleazy salesman vibe that comes with a lot of overly personalized recommendations.

Analytics is still allowed in iOS. The problem with Facebooks approach, is that they link that data with cookie tracking, making them able to track you around on all websites and apps that integrates a login with Facebook, or a share and like button.

They can do it because the user is logged in in all those apps. It's the same apple ecosystem. The problem is really that Facebook tracks you outside their ecosystem. App developers and website marketers have been willing to sell out their users to Facebook and Google in return for some analytics.

In return for more effective ads.

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