iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from links you click on
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While as a consumer I do objectively like the privacy measures Apple is adding, at end of the day they're simply consolidating all tracking power to themselves.
https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...
I thought that mostly boiled down to “IE/Netscape/Chrome/…” implements it, and if enough browsers implement it, we’ll document it as standard”
More recently, though (especially, the last couple of years), browser vendors work very closely with standards groups, contributing there, and looking for feedback from other browser vendors. At least in the CSS and JS space, the extensions to those standards have proceeded largely as a group effort rather than as you described.
The browsers have started to first ship things behind feature flags, and in Chrome's case also behind "Origin trials". We just have less need now for one browser to go off and define their own way for borders to be drawn as rounded rectangles.
I suspect we'll see some funky CSS extensions ship pre-standardization for VR headsets, though. Things like controlling the z-axis height of <dialog> and other elements.
https://www.w3.org/2021/Process-20211102/#implementation-exp....
This is somewhere between anti-consumer and stealing.
I can't quite figure out who or what in particular you are talking about.
If the original topic, Apple/Safari do not charge for private click measurement, and Apple does not have any significant advertising platform for the web.
There are other more controversial uses of the technique - mobile game SDKs used tracking identifiers and other techniques to try to measure conversion and associate it to a persona, which Apple shut down with ATT. Apple added a PCM-like technology at about the same time so that advertisers could get broad metrics on advertising programs and conversion.
This is different/separate from more controversial uses, such as blocking in-app advertising/install conversion metrics and persona building. There, Apple _does_ have some competing interest in terms of the App Store ad platform.
That's how we ended up in the situation where Google shipped U2F, sites implemented their implementation and then when the standard WebAuthN was built it was not compatible so sites had to be updated to be standards compliant, and it took a while to do so.
Or when Google added WebP without clear consensus. Or when they added FLoC or Topics API, or whatever else they have cooked up. Or things like WebUSB, WebMIDI and others?
There's a glut of Chrome only sites out there, and it continues to grow as web developers test just on Chrome but not the other browser engines. It's turning into the next IE 6, I remember the time there were a lot of "Made for IE 6" logos and graphics on sites and they did not render well or at all in Netscape.
No one is forcing a Chrome hegemony on us. Developers are choosing it.
Firefox and mobile Safari, so I guess I should experience it…
I regularly see small/medium websites which state they only work with Chrome, but I feel they do so at their peril.
I see some of those sites push people to install a "desktop app" if you do not use Chrome, which is of course an Electron-based app.
I also regularly see services that just fail for long runs of time on non-Chrome browsers due to complete lack of regression testing, or (slightly more generously) because they aren't testing their services against current releases of Firefox/Safari. Safari is more sensitive to this, both because of a much more active development tick compared to Firefox, and because it is leveraging system frameworks rather than a relatively static compatibility layer 'buffer'.
If Safari was as bad as so many claim it would have next to no desktop market share. But despite Google pushing Chrome at every opportunity tons of people like my self prefer Safari.
Apple has different priorities for Safari than Google does for Chrome. That’s fine. My priorities match Safari far better, I’m perfectly happy with how they’re doing things.
Many forget that Microsoft was introducing many incompatible standards, and only let IE stagnate after they won over Mozzilla.
Safari isn't the one turning the Web into ChromeOS.
The vitriolic hate it gets in many threads are completely misguided and likely the result of years-old opinions on it. In the last 3 years Safari dramatically accelerated development, leapfrogged Chrome in performance to a staggering degree, and basically became close to an ideal browser.
And nearly every so-called standard people point to to "prove" Safari is lagging behind is almost always just something Chrome pushed out without any consensus.
It's funny because I think the hate comes from Webkit being forced on iOS, but it often comes out as "Safari sucks it's the new IE" which is pretty much the opposite of true and undermines the point.
These days Safari gets better indeed (through it's still a PITA in some areas), while Chrome is clearly "the new golden-days-IE" - which long-term is probably much worse than Safari could ever be.
In that case doesn’t it seem like Google took an ideological stance by choosing a non-patent-encumbered codec instead of supporting mp3? And they could do it because of their dominance? Or is that not accurate?
Choosing non-patent-encumbered codecs for open standards is as much ideological as practical.
In practice, MP3 has had support on every platform since the mid 90s. I could probably count the number of times I’ve come across an ogg file being distributed on one hand.
Pretty much everyone who implemented HTML5 audio for a few years, while MP3 support in the browser was initially barely heard of? Mozilla, Google, Opera, KHTML, WebKit... Safari and IE were the only outliers, and had tiny minority of market share for a while (not counting versions that didn't support HTML5 audio at all). Today only mobile Safari is still an outlier.
You couldn't use MP3 without Vorbis fallback on the Web for about a decade. Whenever you played audio in the browser without using Flash on anything else than iPhone, chances that it was Vorbis were very high for a good while. YouTube used it in WebM before switching to Opus. In fact, even AAC gained reasonable support on the Web earlier than MP3 did.
In practice, although very popular, MP3 was nowhere near universally supported until just a few years ago. I know that pretty well - I have posted patches to some projects that enabled MP3 support once its patents expired myself; I've also used to maintain websites based on HTML5 audio since 2009.
This is for maintainability/security surface reasons as well as patent risks, as open/closed and standardized/bespoke axes have nothing to do with whether or not something is patent encumbered.
Most likely not for same reasons ad blockers were freaked about Chrome's Manifest v3 push - browsers are trying to optimize away the latency from a massive synchronous javascript-based list check on page load, and the privacy risk that comes from these extensions having exposure to every page (and injecting their code into every page). Conversely, the web extension authors don't see the set of limitations as feasible.
But it is odd that uBlock Origin doesn't seem to have even issued a public-facing statement of even evaluating the functionality that is there in Safari.
Apple lets plugins provide lists of elements/css/IPs/etc to block. Safari processes them and is able to block stuff based on that extremely fast and power efficiently.
There is flexibility lost. Plug-ins can’t see which rules are/aren’t hitting. You can’t filter based on the content of a request.
So there are ad blockers, and they work well. But uBlock, as it works elsewhere (I know it’s considered the best), isn’t possible due to the trade offs Apple chose.
“New IE” seems to mean “browser I don’t want to bother with”, not “browser with an iron grip over web standards”.
Back before flagship prices inflated (due to Apple) people buying a $1k iPhone couldn't do something as simple as use a different keyboard. And of course the product is advertised as advanced tech, yadda yadda.
There's been a spate of things, custom keyboards, wallpapers, multi-tasking, installing apps from a store rather than built-in, home/lock screen widgets, default apps for certain files, PiP, app drawer, and so much more.
I don't consider companies being inspired by/adding features from the other, it's not theft when it's a good idea (unless it's Apple's, then you get sued). But for them to market the way they do while taking so long to add basic things like these, it's just ugh.
Keeping in mind, of course, there are plenty of people who won't turn off the TV because there's nothing on that they want to watch; they'll just pick the channel that is the least bad.
Also, more privacy by default seems like a good thing, not everyone understands URLs.
Or, e.g. you can set a flag when building Firefox that will store the secrets necessary to decrypt those packets, and the client sends the secrets to the router which sniffs and decrypts on the fly.
This might be something a web extension could do, though.
https://github.com/WICG/turtledove
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attri...
To my knowledge, Mozilla's design is the only one where someone other than the browser collects & reports on click activity, and with a fairly trustless anonymizing double blind strategy for those intermediaries.
Opinions may differ, but to me being an advocate for it is no better than being "in" the advertising business.
(Not to suggest Mozilla is worthless. Far from it. I use Firefox on mobile, although I use a browser sparingly.)
But I'm sure W3C will bend over as usual
> Websites should not be able to attribute data of an ad click and a conversion to a single user as part of large scale tracking
I'm curious, do people generally care about this specifically, or is it the sharing of this information with third parties that's the problem?
I run Firefox with in-built privacy protection enabled and uBlock Origin. However, I'm not doing so because I want to stop the websites I frequent knowing which email of theirs I clicked. My concern is when they share my data with other parties whose services I'm not explicitly engaging with.
I doubt people are educated enough to care about this specifically, but the tech industry should care.
Without those sources of revenue, well, Apple would turn to data and whatnot too. Was only a while ago that Apple first switched on to the "private and secure" as a selling point, because much of their competition relies on it.
I think we can maybe expect other large tech companies to follow suit, not make money from data/advertising and instead raise their prices, wall their ecosystems as much as possible. Advertise tablets as "not computers". Come up with buzzy marketing stuff like "retina" for every little detail of their products.
Apple's position on privacy is somewhat of an illusion and could disappear whenever they decide. Remember the CSAM debacle? https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-commun...
I still think Apple is doing the best in the marketplace with respect to security and privacy, but if we're being honest they're playing the role of benevolent dictator.
Google and Microsoft on the other hand blatantly say "yeah, we look over your shoulder at everything you do on the Internet...you know, to "help" you find what you're looking for or to feed more of it to you. And also, our advertisers would be very interested too". I mean, read THEIR TOS and marvel at it.
It's obvious, but I want to make clear, that this doesn't make Google less scary or more trustworty. Avoiding Google is still advised imo.
edit: replace "private" with "to themselves"
They are primarily an information marketplace, and offer people free services so that they'll participate in that market.
Their secondary interest is in things like Adsense and in products like Doubleclick, which are where you worry about tracking and them building a behavioral persona of what you do across the entire internet.
However, Google doesn't need to even see this persona themselves - they just want to get the best ads in front of you to make marketing departments happy. Ideas like "privacy sandbox" are partially driven by this desire - give Google the value of gathering and correlating existing data and more, without the brand impact or risks of holding that data themselves.
The thing they give up is the ability to do cluster analysis across people/demographics to understand where and why an ad is performing. Targeting of advertisements remains a manual process and not a machine learning driven one.
For advertising to remain a viable way to support portions of the web, advertisers need to understand the effectiveness of their programs and marketplaces need to understand the exposure.
Specifications like PCM are competing mostly around how to provide that, although there are also efforts to sandbox local personas to make ad presentation decisions on-device. Personally I'm not so much against those efforts, as it doesn't seem like a betrayal for my web browser to try to select information it thinks I'd more likely care about - as long as I can also choose how/if it does so.
I'd rather advertising NOT remain a viable way to support portions of the web
> Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history; product interaction; crash data, performance and other diagnostic data; and other usage data.
> Health Information. Data relating to the health status of an individual, including data related to one’s physical or mental health or condition.
> Financial Information. Details including salary, income, and assets information where collected, and information related to Apple-branded financial offerings
Also, Siri hadn't been sued for breaking TOS AFAIK, but they were sued for leaking health records which they couldn't even after getting permission from the user. Also google selling user data is largely a myth.
Indeed. Apple's concerns are about "third-party" tracking, e.g. multiple parties sharing information about you and building a persona without your awareness or consent.
They fully _expect_ users to build first-party relationships, such as having Apple understand, save, and perhaps provide insights or fraud detection around the transaction log of your usage of your Apple Card.
This is why Google's reaction to App Tracking Transparency was to effectively say "we'll be fine, we have lots of services, and we might push people to log in for features." This is also why Facebook's reaction was to freak out - because they had no legitimate relationships on which to base their web surveillance advertising product on, especially when it was being used to select advertisements for non-Facebook-users.
For first party relationships, the App Store has "privacy labels", to document the data you collect, save and share with processors. Behavioral information is around sharing correlating factors that would be used for third-party tracking.
It allows advertisers to bid on you.
Apple will do the same thing.
What's your point?
Even if you enable the e2ee features rolled out in the last 12 months, your iMessages are still not e2ee unless all of your conversation partners have as well.
Also there is no US law demanding scanning of user data, your opening assertion refers to nonexistent requirements.
* iCloud Photo Library was not scanned for CSAM content at the time of the announcement, which Apple confirmed at the time.
* iMessage E2E encryption is not opt-in. There isn't even an opt-out.
* The "E2EE features" you might be referring to is Advanced Data Protection for iCloud Backups, which is not related to the iMessage protocol at all. You don't have any guarantees about what your recipients are doing with the data you send them, ever.
There is US law which is ambiguous about the requirement on data providers to check content for CSAM material, which many have interpreted to require a check. This is why every other major cloud provider does scan for the content.
This is incorrect. iCloud Backup escrows endpoint keys for "Messages in iCloud" to Apple every night in a non-e2ee fashion, which means that a non-endpoint has the keys, which means that iMessage is not e2ee.
Apple has real-time access to plaintext of almost every single iMessage that transits their service. The only case in which they don't is where both users either don't have iCloud Backup enabled or both users have enabled e2ee iCloud Backup.
Can we please keep this nonsense to lower quality sites like reddit? I like to pretend hacker news hasn't degraded this far yet.
At the very least Google and FB got punished for doing that already in the past
If that’s not “selling your data”, we need to be more specific about what we are talking about.
This was the same attitude that led Google where it is now. "Don't be evil" was really believed and accepted by huge part of their users, and compared to the sheer evil of Microsoft they sure looked like the better alternative.
> I hope Apple shuts down the entire industry.
On Apple's relationship with the ad industry, I have bad news for you.
1. I'm still learning about 'private click measurement'. Does it reveal extra information to Apple? I would hope it is designed as a truthworthy protocol where cheating, even by Apple, is hard.
2. Welcome to another arms race: detecting and removing identifiers versus hiding them or using alternative mechanisms.
If Apple is taking on this challenge, do they have theoretical reasons to be optimistic? Practically, how well are they doing?
Update: this thread has a lot of comments on the "cat and mouse" game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36244899
Privacy and security is the most scalable, reliable way to locking users in and stifling competition behind a lot of marketing about "protecting" users.
Maybe it's because I think Apple is slowly building a parallel advertising ecosystem that is slightly less intrusive for users but massively more lucrative for themselves.
A company that makes a 30% cut on apps using customers as a pawn to make a worse browser experience pushing people into using app store apps?
Nothing is "less intrusive"... it's simply Apple making sure they get a larger cut of a larger market.
It's also why they enforce a shitty Safari unto their customers instead of allowing real browser choice. They are the new MS bundling shitty software to harm competitors and limit consumer choice.
And while Apple does require Google and Microsoft to use WebKit for their iOS browser apps, it's a rendering engine. And you can set Chrome/Edge as defaults on both iOS and macOS.
Tell me how this limits real browser choice.
How does Mozilla implement extensions on iOS >_<? It is much more than the rendering engine they are forced to use.
So iOS allows extensions only for Safari from the App Store. Android Chrome doesn't allow extensions at all. Android Firefox allows some extensions that were made for Firefox on Android.
Chrome on iOS is a skinned Safari. It's not real Chrome. Same for Edge.
How is forcing a shitty and limited "rendering engine" not limiting choice?
At risk of regulators forcing the issue, rumor says it may be changing but you are being disengenous if you don't think this isn't the same level of BS as IE bundling with Windows. "But we can skin IE to look like chrome" isn't choice
https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/07/new-iphone-browsers/
> "For example, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that:
> Apple bans alternatives to its own browser engine on its mobile devices; a restriction that is unique to Apple. The CMA is concerned this severely limits the potential for rival browsers to differentiate themselves from Safari (for example, on features such as speed and functionality) and limits Apple’s incentives to invest in its browser engine.
> This restriction also seriously inhibits the capability of web apps – apps that run on a browser rather than having to be individually downloaded – depriving consumers and businesses of the full benefits of this innovative technology."
edit: and I've ignored Mac OS because the conversation is clearly about iOS. If Mac OS had the same restrictions as the iOS (IE: you can install apps outside of the app store on your laptop) then we'd have the same conversation there.
Also many other companies follow a similar pattern, if not worse.
Then most other apps that could just be websites don’t monetize through the App Store.
If companies can install stuff outside of the app store to save a 30% a LARGE number of companies would absolutely do so. To say hamstringing the browser on iOS isn't a calculated choice to say "but you can install webapps* (* with shitty safari)" and then completely cock block web browser choice isn't a 100% calculated choice to limit consumer choice is a disingenuous lie.
"80%"
You think that Apple isn't going to hold onto the 20% come hook or crook? in any means necessary - including locking you to the App Store and the 30% cut - despite the fact that alternative payment methods are completely reasonable? and how much of that 80% is through games on the app store that REQUIRES a cut through their ham fisted and unreasonable restrictions? That's even more reason to give consumers and companies options outside of the app store and the mafia requirement for a cut.
Again your banking app and even apps like Facebook and Reddit and most of the other apps that are not games, don’t monetize through the App Store. Even the large subscription streaming services like Netflix and Spotify don’t allow in-app purchases of subscriptions and haven’t for years.
> payment methods are completely reasonable? and how much of that 80% is through games on the app store that REQUIRES a cut through their ham fisted and unreasonable restrictions?
Your rant has absolutely nothing to do with whether if Safari was “better” would most of the revenue from the App Store - ie games - would move to the web.
That same 30% is what Google charges and around the same as what console maker charges.
Epic tried to move out of the Google Play store. It was an abject failure. Why do you think that Android app makers try to monetize outside of the Play Store?
it absolutely has to do with Safari as the alternative - webapps. aka installing apps on the iOS outside of the app store - is absolutely hamstrung by requiring a bloated and dated "webkit".
100% on point to Apple holding back alternatives to lock people into their store.
"why"
30% cut of millions that isn't needed for large developers. You know? that 80% that you say because games are locked into the app store and the 30% cut.
The entire idea that makes games so popular is that it’s easy to capture whales because of the easy payments. Are you really complaining that poor little Candy Crush and their ilk have to pay 30% to sell loot boxes and gems?
Yes and web apps and Electron apps are so great on other platforms. Especially seeing the piss poor hardware that most Android phones are running.
BTW, iOS/Safari wins every single web browsing benchmark out there.
"are you complaining" are you defending mafia tactics to take a house cut that's way beyond reasonable? doesn't matter if it's "poor little candy crush" or not... I'm arguing against unreasonable market force - just like I'll argue against MS's IE/Edge bundling and Google forcing their platform.
Your deflections just show that you know I'm making a point - androids "piss poor hardware" has nothing to do with Apple using mafia tactics to gouge their customers.
Web Apps and Electron shouldn't be needed - companies should be able to use alternative payment methods. They also shouldn't be tied to shitty webkit with it's outdated, insecure and lackluster implementation.
and "safari wins benchmarks" is a lie - unless you're talking about the furthest behind and most insecure.
https://www.wired.com/story/safari-flaws-webcam-online-accou...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2531350/apple-s-safari...
But don't let facts get in the way of the stock in Apple you own...
Do you really want to die on the hill of how far back Apple supports devices with security updates compared to Google? (Hint: Apple released a patch for the iPhone 5s that was released in 2013 earlier this year)
The “mafia tactics” is the same percentage that Google takes and the same percentage the same game makers pay on Google.
Again, the article is about “web browsers”. Even if the Firefox engine or a third party engine were allowed on iOS - it would have no effect on the vast majority of App Store revenue since it comes from games.
"support" more support of an insecure, antiquated and unsafe browser is still support of a bad browser.
"same % as google" google does it because Apple did it and didn't get blocked. AKA: price fixing and market collusion. both should be blocked from it.
"it would have no effect" you are saying that alternatives wouldn't affect the price? You're full of...
competition would absolutely affect prices and alternatives would absolutely give real competition.
just because Apple supports the 5s with a shitty and limited browser that's faster but still hamstrung (your attempted points about Saint Apple and the Holy Safari) ... that doesn't change the fact that competition would lower prices as that 80% would absolutely be cut into by a massive number of companies that don't want to give the mafia a 30% cut.
Watch how those numbers change as Apple is FORCED to allow alternatives to their shitty options and their mafia tactics are countered.
https://mashable.com/article/apple-allow-third-party-app-sto...
"Apple will allow third-party app stores, because the EU is playing hardball Is this the end of the 30-percent App Store commission?"
So it’s the “most insecure” because you found two security issues that were patched? Other browsers never had security issues?
But you’re going back on your original statement that it isn’t the fastest.
> support" more support of an insecure, antiquated and unsafe browser is still support of a bad browser.
And it’s “bad” even though the competing browser on Android - Chrome - is slower, doesn’t support plug ins, and is by definition less secure since Google drops support for old phones?
> same % as google" google does it because Apple did it and didn't get blocked. AKA: price fixing and market collusion. both should be blocked from it.
Now it’s Apple’s fault that Google also charges 30% as well as the console makers?
> it would have no effect" you are saying that alternatives wouldn't affect the price? You're full of...
How would alternative browsers affect the price of apps that would never be in the browser? Another point is that there are alternatives on Android and Google still charges 30%. How did going outside of the Google Play Store workout for Epic?
> just because Apple supports the 5s with a shitty and limited browser that's faster but still hamstrung (your attempted points about Saint Apple and the Holy Safari) ... that doesn't change the fact that competition would lower prices as that 80% would absolutely be cut into by a massive number of companies that don't want to give the mafia a 30% cut.
Yet it doesn’t cause lower prices on Android…
> Apple will allow third-party app stores, because the EU is playing hardball Is this the end of the 30-percent App Store commission?"
And yet Apple didn’t announce anything at WWDC….
That's the problem. This is too complicated/too much trouble for the end user who just uses his iPhone via Safari. Do they the privacy and all that? Yes, will they go out of their way with all that trouble? No.
While you're not wrong that it's a company A fighting company B with users as pawns, it still is a win for the normal end user.
No. It's probably just because Apple is slowly building a parallel advertising ecosystem that is slightly less intrusive for users but massively more lucrative for themselves.
Woah, do not do this. Don't you remember the Butterfly keyboard denials, the 'holding the phone wrong', etc...?
The only reason you have trust is because they are the best company at marketing of all time. You were manipulated into trusting them. That is a huge red flag.
And in the end they are manipulating links. While no advocate for ads, this has implications on the freedom of the internet.
If it is a switch somewhere with the user actually getting a choice, then it is the user choosing it and Apple is just providing a mean to do it. Exactly like when the user chooses to install an extension, except that this is much easier, and therefore much more likely to be used because users hate tracking. This is well documented.
If it were UBlock Origin doing this, sites could just say "Sorry, we don't support this, your addin is breaking everything, please turn it off."
But when Apple does something, there's no room for conversation. Sites can't say "Sorry, we don't work on iPhones." For better or worse, what Apple decides becomes acceptable. In this case for better.
Absolutely. There was no shortage of Windows-centric corporate IT departments that swore that they'd never support Apple products.
Then iPhones started showing up in boardrooms, and they quickly changed their tune.
I brought my iPhone to work shortly after launch and showed it to curious coworkers. The head of IT for that particular multinational corp said it was garbage and would never be allowed on his network. "Apple is crapple" was his favorite phrase.
A few months later he got to peddle his anti-Apple mantra on the unemployment line.
If he wants a job where fanboy-ism can be helpful in climbing the ladder, he should try politics or something like that. Where all the money on the line belongs to other people. So no one really works to protect any of it.
In my experience it’s also extremely one sided. I work with Windows, Android and Apple colleagues and the amount of times I hear “Xcode is crap haha”, “How can they live with such a shitty OS” etc. makes me wonder if all this is rooted in deep insecurity or something? Some Windows-centric people in senior management places I have worked will use me taking my iPhone out of my pocket as an opportunity to criticise the platform, my choice, and so on
I’m sure that some Apple users are quick to do the same, but in my experience they just tend to get on with their lives
I'm sure somebody will figure out a way to use multiple seemingly-legitimate parameters to get the same result. Why use ?click_id=aqNERjsdfyqe when you can use ?category=10612550&subcategory=5929127&page=4257344 and transfer the same data without arousing suspicion?
Maybe some services will accept it, but others will not. When I tried to sign in to Microsoft Teams from Safari yesterday it presented a screen that said that Teams will only load on Safari if I disable tracking prevention for the Teams site. So unless users put additional pressures on services to offer support for Apple those services may just force users to accept tracking one way or another: either by disabling Safari's mitigations or using an alternative client that does not use such mitigations.
Your choices are 1) download the native application (with much more access to your system) 2) follow the instructions 3) open Chrome because realistically you probably already have it anyway or 4) lose your job to prove a point.
e.g. Your Facebook page url appears to be facebookdotcom/1234 for me when I click it from the home page, facebookdotcom/5678 when I click it from a thumbnail and facebookdotcom/0987 when someone else clicks it
Normally clicks have a "gclid" query param. Google is introducing 2 new query params to somehow attribute clicks using modeling + machine learning (somehow).
Edit: here's a detailed description of how Google is attempting to track conversions using machine learning. I have no idea how this could possibly work without some kind of fingerprinting or user profiling or IP address. Almost feels like "modeled conversions" powered by ML is a way to do fingerprinting without explicitly having an algorithm that blatantly uses fingerprinting.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10710245?sjid=85...
Edit 2: The new query params are "gbraid" and "wbraid". Googling those turns up more details.
What Google tells them that if they use Analytics 4, they can use modelling to give attribution of convertion. In this case, attribution means not fingerprinting but percentage of people that was converted thanks to Ads. For other analytic engines they set the fields as 'not set'.
They day that in their models they aggregate data as geo, IP, and others and they won't give the fingerprinting data. The only problem is that they don't give details on the privacy preservation of their ML models. This means that if they fuck it up and give to much information, someone could try to reverse the aggregation (like doing a deconvolution) and do some fingerprinting.
I don't get it.
What's the alternative? Most people with a phone are going to be using iOS or Android. Those are the two options. Apple has the chance to improve data privacy, and they've done it. Android (essentially, Google) is certainly _not_ going to take such action.
Apple could always use this to their advantage, or double-back on it. Who cares? They've moved the needle in a positive direction, that's all that should matter.
It’s Apple. There is nothing else to understand. Just because of who they are, some people will claim it will change the world and some people will claim it’s bullshit or not working or evil. There are many more of the latter and they are quite annoying, but the best that can be done is ignore them.
> They've moved the needle in a positive direction, that's all that should matter.
Some people cannot seem to understand that a company whose interests align with those of the consumers, however imperfectly, is better than a company whose policy relies only on ideology. Then you have the contrarians who will claim that they are lying and black is white anyway.
We should remain skeptical and scrutinize and shape their actions through consumer feedback.
Because all of business history has told us that the market dominant company strong-arming its opposition has never worked out for the consumer.
They've moved the needle towards building their ads business. As hardware refresh cycles become longer, Apple is moving towards other sources of revenue, including ads.
These changes, while positioned as Privacy, give them a huge moat and in the end, harm consumers.
Before these changes, if an app wanted to drive installs on iOS, they could choose FB or Google. Now, Apple is the only game in town and their cost-per-install are already exceeding FB's last published cost-per-install.
The Apple consumers pay for this additional revenue to Apple.
This is a MITM attack where Apple plays the good guy(or control freak, depending on how you feel about it) but MITM attacks are nothing new.
They're probably hoping that advertisers will retreat to PCM instead of continuing the cat and mouse game.
PCM is an in-progress standard that, at a high level, allows measuring ad campaign success without tracking individual users. No such restrictions apply to query parameters, of course - so PCM is inherently more private.
Or is this feature more advanced than just stripping known tracking parameter keys?
CF functions are cheap, but at scale it's more than an irritant.
If a user chooses to do this, more power to them. If my OS does this by default, it's an insane invasion of my use.
My genuine opinion:
All advertising is evil, with one singular exception: Shoe ads for shoes inside your own shoe store.
All tracking is evil, with one exception: a simple integer counter that counts how many people enter your store. And, no, I don’t mean an integer for every possible metric, justifying it by claiming each particular metric is like a unique store counter.
Everything else, and I do mean everything, is your responsibility to count on the back end. “I put out 7 shoes and only sold 1. Try something else.”
Anything more than this is simply greed and laziness.
I prefer advertisements because they can be obvious and labeled as such. Apple's changes here are moves by one advertising company (Apple) to control the flow of other advertising companies' information. It's a monopolistic move that gives them an unfair advantage in advertising, just like their SKAN solution did in mobile, leading to a huge increase in advertising revenue for Apple.
Consumer's are told by Apple that this is to 'protect their privacy' when in fact, it does not protect privacy. This is a targeted move by Apple to consolidate their position in the advertising ecosystem.
However, could become an arms race where we start putting correlation IDs in params named page= or video=.
Safari is planning to use ML to detect click_id type of query parameters and strip that from URLs. That's just poor execution and business destroying. PCM restrictions are horrible too.. we have to design the link so it stays within safari's specs:
> With an ad-click, an 8-bit ID can be transmitted (a number between 0 and 255, i.e. 256 possible values / campaigns) - per domain > For a conversion, a 4-bit ID is transmitted (a number between 00 and 15, i.e. 16 different types of conversion) - per domain
Not to mention Chrome and Firefox has other ideas, each different on how their PCM will be integrated. Other than the mega corps, noone is benefitting from this privacy enhancement. Just more work to adapt.
Is there no other way to measure?
And if that won't work, just encode the entire url as amazon.de/2ec1a277-0c96-40d3-8fe1-e418fd82986d
Puts the information and power back in the users hands.
Stopping tracking by the way of more invasive tracking like extracting content from emails is not a good thing.
But I have to be honest that I can't quite wrap my head around how this is supposed to work.
1. https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...
One time I was talking to a real estate agent, shortly after some of the post-'08-meltdown regulations had gone into effect. She said something like:
"It makes it so appraisers can't fudge the numbers a little higher to make sure people get their loans, now. Which I know wasn't what they intended, but it's what they've done, and it's hurting people."
She thought one of the things the regulation was definitely supposed to do, entirely on purpose, was some accident, and that this thing happening before that was not OK and was, over many iterations, partially responsible for the housing bubble happening in the first place, was in fact fine. She was totally unable to grasp that this behavior was bad and that the regulation was supposed to stop it, and that that was definitely a good thing—but it was making it harder for her and her banker(!) husband to close deals and sell loans, that is, to make money, so surely it can't actually be a good idea and overall beneficial to lots and lots of people.
It's a start but I'm not this optimistic yet.
Good. The world does not owe you a “business model.” Find some positive way to contribute to society instead.
mysite.com/aZdi
instead of mysite.com/invitation/?uid=1234
It's extra work, but it's not hard.
EDIT: They could also do something similar to what they've done with Content Blocking Extensions, maybe call them "URL Cleaning Extensions", which allow third parties to maintain tracking URL pattern lists which Safari can then follow to do its unwrapping.
When the web server gets a request, it can validate & decrypt, update any tracking values, and redirect to the real URL.
They can't just blanket remove all GET parameters (because it would break legitimate non-tracking links), plus advertisers could use subpaths instead of GET params for writing the tracking data.
Therefore I suspect it's only going to be arms race between a blacklisted list of GET params and advertisers changing up the variable names to escape it, making it unsafe to use any GET param at all because you can't be sure a link that works today will still work tomorrow if they changed their list of banned properties.
Wow, another heuristics software by Apple that automatically does something I didn't ask for? Is there a chance it removes a parameter from the link which renders the functionality broken? On the other hand, could advertisers just use random hashes without labeling them as the tracking param to avoid this? Apple is famous for producing bad software, I hope their programming would automatically interfere with as less things as possible.
Big corporation suddenly decides to arbitrarily change links. Everyone happy? Unbelievable
And once the industry realized that users don't revolt at this privacy invasion, it has been spreading.
I use urlchecker [0] for this on my phone and have it set as my" browser" that way, every link i click on, I see a popup with the link and with one or two button presses I can remove the tracking parameters and/or unshorten it and then open it. Works like a charm. May be to much friction for some, but I like it.
[0] https://www.f-droid.org/de/packages/com.trianguloy.urlchecke...
The way this can be bypassed is:
Before: mylink.mydomain?tracking_id=abc123 After: mylink.mydomain/home/abc123/
Yeah, it might wreck SEO. But if you're really trying to track users and see who clicked on your email or whatever, it's probably the case that you don't care about SEO in this specific case.
[1] https://www.twintown.com/collections/acoustic-guitars?sort_b...
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.twintown.com/collections/acoustic-guitars"/>But I don't trust that heuristics works for every query parameter for every website on the internet.
Here's one: Imagine you run a small website and send signup confirmation emails. Suddenly, 20-30% of your users can no longer complete signups and you have no idea why. Oh yeah, our URL is:
mysite.foo/signup?uid=139191238123.
And apple filtered out the uid parameter.
》 For safari users 》 Until apple own the internet so the site is forced to adapt.
One wonders how any product launched or small business survived prior to the current millennium.
> Link Tracking Protection in Messages, Mail, and Safari Private Browsing > "Some websites add extra information to their URLs in order to track users across other websites. Now this information will be removed from the links users share in Messages and Mail, and the links will still work as expected. This information will also be removed from links in Safari Private Browsing."
Note that it says "links _users_ share". That part seems unnecessary if it's _all_ links in emails. I think it points to this feature being more about protecting a user from inadvertently forwarding their email to someone else, while not realizing it has personal identifiers in the links? Preventing others from unsubscribing them, or even auto-logging-in etc.
Though, I personally haven't seen iOS17 remove any query params from emails at all, maybe will have to wait for the next beta to find out.
Unfortunately some apps are making it harder to open links directly in Firefix. E.g. Reddit's app has removed the possibility to open links in an external browser.
I don't understand how you can have a heuristic that doesn't break things.
View the demo in normal mode at https://fingerprint.com/ and then open it again in Incognito
It has a specific blacklist of parameters to strip. In the several years I've been using it, I've only had two websites break from it, both being legit surveys that I needed to take.
The only negative I can see, is that this might long-term reduce functionality. I personally have a bad habit of passing data through URLs out of laziness/practicality.
Real quick, could you not download an addon that did this before? If you could, this seems potentially malicious, need to keep everyone on the App store and hurt the web.
Are you somehow passing the data within the tracking params? Don't worry, Apple isn't going to remove all QSPs. That would break the internet.
I send those URLs through facebook messenger, which add its 'fbclickid' nonsense to them.
I don't care for that tracking information, however it seems the URL becomes malformed after iOS "cleans" it, resulting in a redirect loop on my server.
When was iOS 17 released?
EDIT: Oh, nevermind, it's not released yet. Must be something else then... I blame facebook
So now if there is a link to, say, mysite.com/f/ajdheke and the last part is different for each user, and I choose to send this link to a friend, then the friend will get mysite.com/f ? Breaking the site?
Apple is going too far with this. Cookies is one thing, but how are people supposed to confirm email addresses now, copypaste a code?
When I click in my Gmail android app on a link from a received E-Mail, the opened Firefox browser opens a google domain for a second and only after that the domain from the link opens... any idea what that is? Tracking?
I guess its just Google collecting one more metric.
but with that solution tracking is also possible
Also, I'm sure they're doing plenty of click tracking too :)
Unless they keep an up to date list of known tracking parameters I assume this will just become a cat and mouse game or advertisers will find other ways to obfuscate the tracking.
Yay!
And especially when I copy links out of it to share with people.