An Analysis of Privacy on the App Store | Hacker News Reader

An Analysis of Privacy on the App Store

hugotunius.se

36 pointswallflower20 comments

The more we learn about Facebook, the worse the story gets. To consider what people get out of Facebook vs what it gets out of them... I actually cannot come up with a suitable analogy.

Are Facebook engineers willfully ignorant, or do they not care? At least we hear about a measurable percent of Googlers caring about the bad things G does.

I'm not suggesting Facebook engineers are bad, but I do wonder how they feel about what their great efforts ultimately result in.

Considering Facebook are the main reason millions of people won’t take COVID vaccines when they become available, this is the least of their sins, and these are pretty big sins. Same for YouTube.

It's not Facebook's nor YouTube's fault per-se but the fault of this bullshit business model based on "engagement". You eliminate that and suddenly there's no incentive for any company to host, let alone use algorithms to promote crap content even if it's nefarious to society.

It’s their business model and their monopoly behavior is designed to crush alternatives.

And their system is entirely designed to create echo chambers amongst users. Those groups are easier to manipulate with ads, and naturally there are corps and PACs with motives and money ready to pay to manipulate.

My point is that you won't solve the problem by merely breaking up/shutting down Facebook or Google - something else will immediately take its place.

If you want to solve the problem you have to eradicate the underlying disease with regulation and then Facebook and Google will fix themselves (by adapting or going out of business).

100% agree

I think generally the way this works is that management finds the most positive spin on this (based on their public ads, this appears to be "small businesses everywhere would be going under without this valuable data!") and people repeat it to convince themselves and everyone around them. Or, they believe being there as part of the system helps to keep it from being even worse somehow.

The alternative is telling yourself that what you and your team have been working on is pretty questionable and maybe you should go take a massive paycut and work somewhere else for a while. I think most people have a pretty strong internal resistance to coming to that kind of conclusion.

I've met bankers. They want money, and for the most part, have no moral center nor do they consider second order effects (ie beyond them or their primary client).

This is how a lot of people live. They're not evil, just indifferent.

No surprise who the top collector is (Free & FB) but I am surprised the whole Gaming category was omitted. Lots of trackers and tracking in games, especially ad supported

[Edit] Author update to capture gaming, leaving the comment up for context

Hey, author here. Good point, I did look at it some initially but because it's now separate from the rest of the categories on the App Store I must've glossed over it in the end. I'll make sure to include it in the follow up post that I am planning.

EDIT: You we're spot on. I added the Games(Free) data and it dethroned Shopping(Free) as the worst chart with a mean number of data types collect of ~13.7 vs ~11.9. There's also only a single game(out of 169 with data) that doesn't collect any data in Games(Free). In third party tracking Games(Free) stands out even more with a mean of ~6.1 and median of 6, the closest other chart is News(Free) with a mean of ~2.7 and median of 3. "Scrabble® GO - New Word Game" is the 13th worse app in the data set(in terms of data linked to the user) after Facebook's apps and LinkedIn. There are also several games in the top 20 third party trackers

Awesome - good to see a full accounting! I know mobile gaming well, and there’s a bit arms race around tracking for targeting efficiency to increase ltv/roas. It’s such a high volume business, there’s a lot of data needed to maximize returns. It will be interesting to see how the IDFA deprecation affects the industry, as their silver bullet is being taken away

This shows that about half of paid apps from the sample collect data unnecessarily. This is intolerable for every user and every app vendor that does not want to collect data and wants their users to trust them. Wasn’t the AppStore’s walled garden principle supposed to protect against these developments?

Author here, I fetched the data set for the US app store and from a cursory look it does look worse than the original data set from the UK store. I'll write a follow up blog post, so if you are interested follow me on Twitter or use my blog's feed to get notified when it drops.

Please DM me if there are questions you are curious about exploring with this data set

Suggestion: Keep an eye out for Google iOS updates. It will be interesting to see where they fall in comparison with FB and others.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/05/google-privacy-details-app-st...

I was chatting to someone on Twitter about just that and I had previously noticed the absence of Google in the data set so it's on my radar already. I'm curious to see what shakes out from their submission.

My theory is that every casual game is just a cover to collect data. Its actually worse in App stores outside of the US and Europe.

You might be on to something(see my edit here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25651884)

Insofar as they're tied into the online advertising markets, yes. You need to collect the data for good ad revenue, and in-app purchases don't typically pay the bills on their own, so there's an incentive to collect data. Since the actual collection tends to be via libraries, it's relatively easy to ignore what your app is actually doing.

It’s all about identifying the ultra whales willing to spend thousands a day. There’s an infamous story of a machine zone employee being stopped on the tarmac by the FBI trying to flee with a thumb drive full of IDFA’s. GOW had people dropping millions, and you could eat their lunch quickly with a fast follow and best customer list. Not sure it was ever publicized, but I’ve heard that story a few times

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