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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

When I watch Netflix, I have no reason to be surprised or shocked that Netflix is using that information to target movies I want to watch. It’s the same with Amazon and Facebook.

What I don’t expect is that when I shop on Amazon I get ads showing me what I searched for and bought on Amazon to show up on Facebook (which of course does happen).

What would be the consumer friendly thing for the government to do? Allow more cross app data sharing? Refuse to let any company use the history of what a consumer does at that company for targeting?

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Regulators could kill several birds with one stone and allow alternative app markets on iOS devices.

I can see the marketing aspect now “if you install this third party App Store, the apps you can install can ignore the privacy guards and advertise and track you better!”

Or a company like Facebook can once again encourage users to install a VPN that allows them to track all of the traffic to and from your phone.

https://mashable.com/article/facebook-used-onavo-vpn-data-to...

This has been possible for many years now on Android and that has yet to been an issue, even though it's been brought up for years as a potential concern.

It turns out that people (or at least Android users) aren't as dumb as Apple users think they are. (Or maybe it says something about Apple users that Apple and other Apple users think that Apple users are too dumb to be able to make this decision for themselves?)

Name one successful profitable company that has bypassed the Google Play Store on mobile?

And yes there has been security vulnerabilities caused by bypassing the Google Play Store by a little company I am sure you have heard of.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/fo...

But Google or Android is not exactly a model of protecting users privacy.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18204064/apple-google-mon...

Amazon...

Every Chinese phone company...

But Google or Android is not exactly a model of protecting users privacy.

And neither is Apple.

In the era of anti tracking, Amazon doesn’t need to worry about it. It’s knows what consumer preferences based on “revealed preferences” - what people buy. It’s a “strategy credit”.

Amazon also created its own line of devices and its own fork of Android and replaces Google Play Services APIs with its own. But how many applications are successful distributing only on Amazon’s Android store? How many western developers are going to bypass Google Play Store?

> neither is Apple

it is.

This is what we're talking about:

- Company F was doing ads using X mechanism on Company A's devices.

- Company A banned X mechanism under the false claim of "privacy."

- Now Company A is going to use X mechanism to launch their own competitor to Company F's platform (because X is what makes the ad platform a worthwhile expense for advertisers; Company A already uses X mechanism to market its own products and services to its customers, and they simply banned Company F and third parties so they could eliminate existing and potential competition.)

Or in other words, almost as textbook an example of anticompetitive behavior as you can get.

You don’t see the difference between Amazon selling ads based on what I do on Amazon’s platform and Facebook selling ads based on what I do on Amazon?

It’s the sane thing in this case with Apple.

Besides, Apple isn’t banning third parties from sharing information. They just have to ask permission. What’s the government suppose to do? Say Apple isn’t allowed to ask consumers whether they want to be tracked across parties?

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