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Comment by RangerScience | Hacker News Reader

Yuuuup. It's unclear to me if this is collateral damage, but it's also wreaking havoc in directly measuring the impact of your own ads (ex: see and ad for an app, install the app, make a purchase in the app - folks want to be able to tell if that purchase is attributable to that ad).

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> Folks want to be able to tell if that purchase is attributable to that ad

Well, marketers and advertisers want to be able to tell if the purchase is attributable.

Everyday folks typically either don't care or would actively prefer not to be tracked in this way.

I think it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The new policy doesn’t seem to try to break ads attribution globally - e.g. the App Store ads attribution continues to work regardless of tracking transparency choices. They’re also not trying to prevent first-party tracking - i.e. app analytics and the like.

Apple could have thrown a bone to folks and just allowed passing url parameters or similar through the App Store links to the app after it’s installed. No third party needs to get the data and advertisers get to actually know ROI like they do with the rest of the web.

Alternatively I’d love if Apple actually took a stance against data aggregation. Take on the actual creepy corps like LexisNexis or Experian or Transunion. Interest tracking is peanuts by comparison. Not to say we shouldn’t start somewhere, but I hope tracking transparency doesn’t end here.

> Apple could have thrown a bone to folks and just allowed passing url parameters or similar through the App Store links to the app after it’s installed

I thought they already allowed this through deferred deep linking?

Hmm I’m not aware of a way to do that short of fingerprinting a browser and running the same fingerprint on app launch. Would you happen to have docs for that approach?

I thought that Universal Links supported this, but doing some more research it seems I was mistaken

> marketers and advertiser

I mean, they're certainly not robots or aliens, so what're they other than more folks? (Not that robots or aliens wouldn't also just be folks...)

it doesn't stop device fingerprinting and there'll be a bigger dash from virtually every company to fingerprint the hell out of all devices, get geolocation data, hoard up all possible IP information (wifi), identify nearby bluetooth device information and secure additional data points to link devices to users.

Apple is now rejecting apps caught using fingerprinting.

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