

Apple Continues to Stress on Importance of User Privacy - cibula2004
http://blog.lifars.com/2015/06/09/apple-continues-to-stress-on-importance-of-user-privacy/

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MichaelCrawford
If this is really the case, then Apple would forbid the use of Mobile
Analytics.

I attended a presentation on this topic at Mobile Portland a while back; all
three speakers emphasized that their SDKs were free of charge for app
developers. But one of them showed a photo of her employer's data center.

That wasn't just one server - it was thousands of servers. Data centers cost a
lot of money to outfit and to operate, yet their service is free to
developers.

That analytics must be woth quite a lot of money to someone. After quite a lot
of thought I started blocking analytics servers with my hosts file:

    
    
       127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
    

that works OK on conventional computers but requires jailbreaking on mobile
devices.

It would be helpful were Apple to enable me to opt out of analytics; even
better would be to disable it by default.

While I can see the point of mobile analytics during beta testing, for it to
be used in production systems without the end-users knowledge is IMHO much the
same as cyberstalking.

~~~
stephenr
Frankly I see this as _specifically_ why they offer iAd for App developers -
they (apple) control it so they can ensure it still respects user privacy
(i.e. not using your previous history to build a "profile" about you and while
showing you ads).

They know that without it, app developers would just use one of the "for
profit" ad networks (i.e. a network whose primary profit base is serving ads,
in comparison to iAd which possibly doesn't even break even?).

While I would love for Apple to have some kind of "block tracking sites" in
Safari, I doubt it's likely to happen as a a first-party option. Safari 9 for
OS X and iOS seems to have better support specifically for content-blocking
extensions, so hopefully something like Ghostery or similar will be available
for iOS later this year.

