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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

Isn't monetary rewards the correct incentive though? Paying people (or discounting) shares the value-add of tracking back to the tracked.

Apple trying to keep people from willingly and knowingly accept tracking seems like they're being too paternalistic.

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I don’t think it’s “pay $0.99 to remove ads” that’s the problem.

It’s more about “Share your contacts for 500 gems” or “enable location tracking and we’ll give you access to all these cool filters”.

N.B. Snapchat recently stopped doing this. You can now use filters that don’t require location when location is turned off. I wonder if Apple stepping in is the reason why.

While I agree that such thing such as “Share your contacts for 500 gems” or “enable location tracking and we’ll give you access to all these cool filters” should not be allowed in the app store, they should not require that only apps from the app store can be used; you should be allowed to freely install your own (by using special menus or whatever). However, I would also have design the system that you can easily fake these data, so even if it does say "share your contacts for 500 gems", they will not know if the data is legitimate or not. (This capability might be useful for testing purposes too, perhaps.)

>I don’t think it’s “pay $0.99 to remove ads” that’s the problem.

>It’s more about “Share your contacts for 500 gems” or “enable location tracking and we’ll give you access to all these cool filters”.

while this is definitely pro-privacy, my cynical take is that this is also better for apple. If you offer an IAP apple gets their 30% cut, but if it's some sort of ad/data broker deal they don't.

Both are banned, so it’s not clear what you are cynical about.

IAPs are banned?

For that, yes.

Making services not-free (by de-incentivizing alternative methods of profitability) is certainly good for apple.

The problem is that “reward users for accepting tracking” very easily becomes “punish users who reject it”. The reward will be getting back the stuff you had before this change so you are no better off.

Apple believes that everyone should have access to privacy.

I would prefer a solution that had revocable consent and a record of it that was transferred to all the data brokers. The only prohibition on rewards being that the reward cant be on nullifying the revocable nature of the consent.

In this model the data brokers can be sanctioned for using data they are no longer allowed to use.

I believe gating features or giving preference to tracking/not-tracking is a violation of GDPR

Does this mean if your app has rewarded video ads you can’t refuse to show them if ad tracking is turned off?

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