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Comment by disgruntledphd2 | Hacker News Reader

Apple have repeatedly refused to confirm that their ad system is compliant with the ATT rules.

Which ad system? Their programmatic ad inventory does not support tracking, as anyone who has access to developer ads can confirm.

Forgive my ignorance, but how do we know that Apple doesn't track more data than they provide to developers?

If you ever interview apple developers for other companies, or just inspect what is being sent to apple's servers constantly from their devices, you'll realize that apple is recording A LOT of very private info about their users.

Apple is very much a 'private from everyone but apple' company, they smartly just don't talk about it out loud. For their high level apps like TV and such, have things like privacy review. But their security, activation and map parts do record a lot of info.

Block all traffic to Apple at the router, except (e.g. use a different SSID) when you need to perform OS/app updates.

Apple kindly publishes IP exception lists so you can still receive notifications, while blocking the rest of 17/8.

Maybe that will work in practice but you have no way of knowing if it does. There is nothing really preventing Apple from sneaking tracking data through the notification channel (not to mention that centralized notifications are already a juicy opportunity to profile and track users) or retaining the data and sending it off when you do OS updates. Once a company has shown willingness to go against your interest you can't really trust them. The only real solution is to use software that respects you and increasingly that means only open source software.

All true, but less bad than competitors Google and Microsoft, which do not offer comparable segmentation of notifications and telemetry.

Since notifications are user-visible, one can audit for unexpected, non-notification traffic to Apple's advertised notification-only IPs.

Apple colluded with Google when it suited them before, I cannot see a reason to trust them any more than Google.

No large corporation should be blindly trusted.

If a large corporation officially advertises to enterprise customers a bounded, testable claim (e.g. traffic to these IP addresses is limited to notifications), then that claim can be subject to ongoing audit by the IT teams of multiple, independent, enterprises.

Verified accountability is far superior to trust. Step 1: vendor corporation makes a bounded, testable, claim.

This question is quite ambiguous about scope and definition. In the context of Apple’s tracking protections, tracking is defined as sharing identifiable information about a customer for advertising or marketing purposes. Nothing more, nothing less. Apple could collect all the information they wanted to about you from all their various products and services, and that wouldn’t be tracking. Under this definition, data they don’t make available for advertisement targeting or attribution isn’t tracking.

This is a great point. You could probably sum up Apple’s strategy as “capture the most lucrative market through initial quality/vanity, learn more about it than anyone else, then ring-fence it and protect it.”

They aren’t a monopoly as long as you don’t consider income demographics.

I think is whole platform-holder strategy is where antitrust legislation needs a significant update. We must recognize the inherent platform lock-in and the effective monopoly over the platform even if there are other platforms that the users could theoretically switch to and regulate the platform holders accordingly. Anything else would be akin to ignoring a monopoly just because alternatives are available in a different town or country.

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