
Google-backed groups criticize Apple's new warnings on user tracking - scarface74
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-google-apple/google-backed-groups-criticize-apples-new-warnings-on-user-tracking-idUKKBN2440VG
======
crazygringo
> _Apple last week disclosed features in its forthcoming operating system for
> iPhones and iPads that will require apps to show a pop-up screen before they
> enable a form of tracking commonly needed to show personalized ads._

Christ almighty I don't think I can take more pop-ups.

They're just cancer. Cookies, newsletters, forced logins, individual folder
permissions... how many bullshit popups do I have to deal with per day? It's
just popup _fatigue_.

Pretty much the _only_ popups I _ever_ want to deal with are when apps need
access to my private hardware (webcam etc.) or info (location, photos,
contacts, etc.). You know, the actually important ones.

Things like cookies, tracking, etc. should be a browser- or OS-wide setting.
Asking me individually for _every_ site, for _every_ app, is the absolute
_worst user experience ever_. Sorry but this pattern just has to DIE.

My only hope is that the more that popups proliferate, the likelier there will
be legislation against them, requiring system-wide settings instead. Kind of
like legislation against unsolicited robocalls.

~~~
swebs
>Things like cookies, tracking, etc. should be a browser- or OS-wide setting.
Asking me individually for every site, for every app, is the absolute worst
user experience ever. Sorry but this pattern just has to DIE.

We already have that, the Do Not Track header. Advertising companies ignore it
because they're not legally obliged to honor it. Reminder that these companies
do not care about you or your user experience and will do anything they can to
skirt the law to make an extra buck off you. And we can't rely on the
competence of legislators because their answer is always more popups.

However, you do have weapons to defend yourself. My favorite is uMatrix. You
can set it up to automatically block cookies from any site you don't have
whitelisted. And you can make it only accept first party cookies. You can also
have it block javascript, cross origin requests, frames by default. If a site
doesn't work without scripts, you can easily enable them temporarily.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/umatrix/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/umatrix/)

~~~
just-ok
> _Advertising companies ignore it because they 're not legally obliged to
> honor it._

Ironically enough, they don't ignore it. They instead just use it as another
bit of entropy to differentiate you from everyone else who doesn't include the
DNT header.

------
spacephysics
I see a resurgence in marketing similar to Mad Men: where firms don’t have
access to highly personalized data, and eventually, will actually have to be
creative, instead of just using algorithms parameterized with user
tracking/profile data

~~~
notatoad
i can't imagine how somebody could see the creative process in Mad Men and
think that's something to be emulated. It's a bunch of privileged rich people
(ad execs) coming up with ideas that they think are clever, and the only
criteria for whether or not those ideas are good is if other privileged rich
people (client company execs) agree.

There's no objective measures of success, just a bunch of people patting each
other on the back because they all see the world the same way.

~~~
hn_check
I'm pretty sure there is an "objective measure of success" in the most plainly
obvious way possible -- sales. Versus the bullshitty stats like impressions or
accidental click-throughs that dominate online advertising.

~~~
notatoad
If you're only running one campaign in one channel, and your product hasn't
improved, and the competition's product and marketing hasn't changed, and
there are no external events that will trigger a change in demand, then i
suppose you could take sales as a measure of success.

~~~
shkkmo
The only true metric that motivates marketing companies is ad sales. As
another commenter mentions, the creative department in Mad Men existed mostly
to help sell ads rather than the the products in the ads. I think advertising
metrics and targeting serve a similar role today.

~~~
fmajid
Marketing departments want metrics that justify ad budgets and thus the
Marketing department's budget. Ad metrics that show ads are ineffective, while
valuable to the business, run counter to the Marketing department's
incentives, and are thus suppressed.

In a rational company, ad attribution, or aggregate-level analysis using
techniques like Vector Autoregression (VAR) should be owned by the CFO to
avoid that conflict of interest, as shown in this article:

[https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-
is-h...](https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-
called-online-advertising)

------
ummonk
> The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the
> limited ability to customize it still carries “a high risk of user refusal.”

Good. Sounds like the warning will work.

~~~
thiagocsf
My thoughts exactly: refusal is the whole point.

------
baryphonic
> Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc
> (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, faulted Apple for not adhering
> to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy
> rules. Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk
> users will refuse, the associations argued.

I was taken aback when I read that sixteen(!) agencies had banded together,
including collusion from Google and Facebook.

This starkly reminded me of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (book I
chapter X):

> People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and
> diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or
> in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible, indeed, to prevent
> such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be
> consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people
> of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing
> to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary. > > A
> regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to
> enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such
> assemblies. It connects individuals who might never otherwise be known to
> one another, and gives every man of the trade a direction where to find
> every other man of it. > > A regulation which enables those of the same
> trade to tax themselves, in order to provide for their poor, their sick,
> their widows and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage,
> renders such assemblies necessary.

In other words, legal rules meant to restrain corporations' behavior instead
often facilitate their collusion, which almost always results in a "conspiracy
against the public."

Apple is a bit unique in this regard, as their current brand positioning
entirely removes their incentive for collusion. But only as long as the
benefits to employing a pro-privacy-and-security brand posture are greater
than the benefits it might enjoy from hoovering up as much data as it's rivals
in Mountain View and Menlo Park.

~~~
humaniania
Do you seriously think that all business decisions are based on economic
greed? Some people do have values and morality and integrity.

~~~
kilburn
I do think they are on any company that is not majority-owned by someone that
cares.

Morality and integrity are acceptable in large companies so long as they can
bring some benefit. Otherwise they somehow always seem to find a way to
justify doing even the most immorally-seeming stuff (like exploiting workers
in third-world-country mines, selling weapons to dictators and so on).

What's more important: why wouldn't it be like this? Why would a top-level
exec leave money on the table for moral reasons? How would they sell that to
their stakeholders?

------
js2
I wish the Safari content blocking API allowed cookies to be blocked. I'd
block cookies for 99% of sites I visit, allowing them only for the handful of
sites to which I login.

I'd suggest Safari could even make cookies require getting user permission,
the same way location access needs to be granted. "Allow, allow for 24 hours,
deny." It could default deny except for sites to which it has a saved password
which could default allow.

~~~
GeekyBear
Safari started blocking third party cookies by default earlier this year.

[https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-24-safari-blocks-all-
third-...](https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-24-safari-blocks-all-third-party-
cookies-by-default.html)

Previously, you had to flip a switch in the settings.

~~~
js2
I want to block even first-party cookies. And the third-party cookie logic
prevents Fidelity's Full View from working correctly, so I have to disable it
to use that feature of their site.

------
csmattryder
It's cool to conciously see the death of an industry and watch as marketing
firms fail to migrate away from traditional ads.

You can whinge and whine, but progress stops for nobody.

It's also great to see Apple building this into iOS, definitely a highlight of
WWDC, for me. I often see the location indicator come on and wonder what else
I'm _not_ seeing.

~~~
papeda
There seem to be two conflicting lines of thought about the future of
advertising.

1) Companies are learning that non-online advertising is not very worthwhile
and so are reducing the resources allocated to, say, network TV ads. This has
already happened to a large extent to print and radio advertising. This
suggests that the future of online advertising is bright.

2) Companies are learning that online advertising is not very worthwhile. They
are learning that clicks are a bad metric, that online ads target people
poorly, and that customers dislike online ads. This suggests that the future
of online advertising is dim.

I'm curious as to what people make of these two positions. Are companies just
going to spend less on ads in general?

~~~
koheripbal
3) Companies are learning that Ads that don't appear to be Ads, which also
happen to reinforce customers' existing belief system, is a great way to lower
their emotional guard and inject a positive product injection. The future of
Native Advertising [1] is bright. So many examples already... [2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising)

[2]
[https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/top/?sort=top&t=year](https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/top/?sort=top&t=year)

~~~
nicbou
Add to that all kinds of affiliate marketing being passed off as legitimate
recommendations.

This comment was sponsored by Skillshare

------
longtimegoogler
I found it a bit ironic that Apple didn't require users to grant permission to
its own measurement tool, "because it is engineered to not track users".

I don't know the details but I am guess it is still accesses the same numeric
id and "trusting" that Apple is doing the right thing behind the scenes, i.e.,
only storing aggregate information is still required.

~~~
jackjeff
Sounds perfectly reasonable. Apple only cares about the data in aggregate.
They don’t need to track individual users. An advertiser, on the other hand,
wants to know your age, sex, location and what you hard for breakfast.

~~~
longtimegoogler
This is an advertiser tool. It is used by app developers to track their
advertising campaigns that lead to app installs.

I wouldn't be surprised if they still break down information by age, sex, and
location as long as there are enough anonymous people in each group.

I would argue that this is only "perfectly reasonable" if you think anonymous
aggregate logging solutions is a reasonable way to track user behavior, _or_
if you have such _trust_ in Apple to do the right thing, that you are willing
to grant them an exception.

------
justapassenger
> Apple engineers also said last week the company will bolster a free Apple-
> made tool that uses anonymous, aggregated data to measure whether
> advertising campaigns are working and that will not trigger the pop-up. >
> “Because it’s engineered to not track users, there’s no need to request
> permission to track,” Brandon Van Ryswyk, an Apple privacy engineer, said in
> a video session explaining the measurement tool to developers.

There it is. Unless there’s a process that other companies can follow to
certify that their solutions don’t track users and get same treatment, then in
the end it’s about Apple trying to force themselves as player in the ads
business.

It’s well known playbook as they’re similarly forcing themselves into identity
business, with new logging requirements.

~~~
fairenough42
Are they moving into ads as the hardware business dries up for them? In my
personal experience, many people don't replace their phones as often as they
did, say, 10 years ago. A similar story played out earlier with laptops.
There's no obvious new hardware category for Apple to pivot into so maybe
software is their next play.

~~~
yellow_postit
They tried before from 2010-2016 [1]. I do think this is their long term play
— getting credit card transaction data and shutting others out.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd)

~~~
scarface74
They don’t have any way to access credit card data unless you have an Apple
credit card. Even then, I don’t think Goldman Sachs share the data with them.

------
izacus
> Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc
> (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, faulted Apple for not adhering
> to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy
> rules.

How did this turn into "Google-backed groups"?! Where's Facebook in the title?
Is there no attempt at unbiased reporting anymore?

~~~
falcolas
The reporting is just fine, since it discloses both groups. The title is
click-bait, but that’s the reality of the news/youtube/etc. industry if you
want views. It would have been equally click-baity if the title had said
“Facebook-backed groups”, yet equally false (and true).

There’s also ad agencies not backed by Facebook or Google, but they’re not in
the title either.

~~~
izacus
> There’s also ad agencies not backed by Facebook or Google, but they’re not
> in the title either.

Yes, and this is why the reporting is dishonest - it's feels like it's there
to smear one company in the title instead of actually disclosing to us who the
people are.

~~~
jjcon
I don’t think it is dishonest - it is more interesting that Google is anti-
privacy, everyone already knows this about facebook. Additionally Google is
nearly 2x the size of facebook so it takes precedence. You can’t disclose
everything in a headline so you lead with what you can.

~~~
wolco
It is very dishonest. Trying to make this into Apple vs Google creates this
false reality that only movies get away with.

Nearly two times the size so we can make up a story of selected truths?

~~~
jjcon
Should the headline have disclosed every single tie every person associated
with each organization has? No that would be absurd - you can’t disclose the
nuance of a story in a headline so you disclose the most interesting thing.
Nothing in the headline was false or misleading - just because the groups have
other ties too doesn’t mean the headline has to list every one of them.

------
fmakunbound
Sounds like a lovely feature. Who are these groups going to complain to and
how on earth how are they going to frame it lol.

~~~
Zenst
Given the tobacco industry fought to have warnings and packaging restrictions
upon their products, I'm sure they created a whole play-book of things to try,
though note that they eventually failed. Whilst applications are not going to
give you cancer, you could fairly equate the analogy within the digital World
and your personal details and digital persona being eroded away via cancerous
applications.

Gets down to giving the consumer a fair and informed choice, so however they
frame this - I'm sure it will only serve Apple well. Indeed, any EU
investigations into Apple would probably see this move in good light and with
the competition contrasting it in a different light, I don't think Apple could
of asked for anything better to stash into any legal war chest with the EU
when it comes to showing they are good guys and looking after consumers better
than others - least that is how they can frame it.

------
kergonath
“Foxes complain about Apple improving hen house security”. As a user, Google
and their advertiser puppets can go whistle.

~~~
frostwhale
The only caveat i'll add is Apple is providing ad software that doesn't
trigger the double verification. This can be seen either as a push to force
people to respect privacy(as their software does), or a push to control a
larger share of the ad market (as the foxes here i'm sure believe)

~~~
kergonath
It does not pass the smell test though: Apple has nothing to gain from its
non-existent advertising arm, whilst advertisers have a lot to lose if random
users can opt out. I have no doubt Apple's solution needs improving and will
be circumvented, but I am not going to lament that better is not perfect.

------
sudhirj
> The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the
> limited ability to customize it still carries “a high risk of user refusal.”

If you’re doing something and you know users are going to refuse to let you do
it if they have the choice, don’t do it. Apple will give them a choice soon
enough.

~~~
floatrock
> Apple will give them a choice soon enough.

And hopefully one not reliant on so many dark patterns.

The OneTrust opt-outs are the worst (and don't even work! which must be
against the california consumer privacy act).

On my iphone in safari: say I'm cooking dinner and go to epicurious.com.
Greeted with the now-standard opt-out banner at the bottom.

1\. Click the "Do not sell my advertising"

2\. Greeted with a giant Conde Nast wall-of-text full screen modal

3\. Scroll through it (wait, we're now reading long legalise terms-of-service
just to opt-out now?)

4\. In the middle of the wall of text, there's a toggle button for "Sell my
Personal Information". Okay, lets forget about the 2012-era debate around UI
ambiguity of toggle buttons and accept this UI dark pattern. Try to tap it.

5\. I tap it, and it doesn't do anything.

You read that right -- the Conde Nast OneTrust-powered opt-out, if you go
through all the steps to find it -- doesn't even work on mobile. They're
shipping a broken UI. Maybe you need to do something obscure like tap-and-
hold-then-drag-in-a-tiny-hitbox-that-doesn't-trigger-horizontal-page-scrolling
or something. I haven't figured it out.

I assume it's companies like OneTrust or Conde Nast that are complaining
Apple's presumably-more-straightforward opt-out carries a "high risk of user
refusal." Looking at how user-hostile what they're shipping now shows you what
they're really fighting is giving consumers an effective choice.

~~~
SheinhardtWigCo
This is the case all over the web. Many of these cookie/privacy modals just
don’t work or are deliberately engineered to be as obnoxious as possible. We
need some legal test cases where this behavior is declared to be in violation
of the spirit of GDPR and CCPA.

~~~
calvinmorrison
My favorite firefox addon after NoScript is " I don't care about cookies".

~~~
dependenttypes
You could replace both with ublock origin.

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
It is interesting. Apple is trying to position itself as more privacy friendly
suggesting that the tide may be finally turning. It is difficult for me to
believe that they would do it without customer demographic suggesting their
user base places some value on it.

~~~
jjcon
As has been said before - it is kinda hilarious to see people suggest Apple is
privacy minded for marketing purposes because 5-7 years ago when they were
privacy minded people said it would be a huge competitive disadvantage because
users didn’t care.

~~~
scarface74
And it would put Apple behind with AI/ML. They are behind, but they are
catching up. Google has to do everything on the server. Most Android devices
have slow outdated hardware so you can’t do too much on the device.

~~~
deadmutex
> Google has to do everything on the server. Most Android devices have slow
> outdated hardware so you can’t do too much on the device.

The other side of the coin is that you can bring features to more people.
People that do not have the money to buy the expensive iPhones, etc.

------
koluna
“Increase the chance of user refusal” - imagine that applied to literally any
other context, such as bank accounts, credit cards, buying cars, etc. to see
how ridiculous that statement is.

~~~
spacedcowboy
The difference being agency. You _intend_ to open a bank account, buy a car,
etc. “you“ [for the majority definition of ‘you’] had no idea that you were
being secretly tracked, and (clutches pearls) you might even _object_ to that.

This is lifting the stone that’s been lying in the grass for the last decade
or so, and watching all the creepy-crawlers scurry away out of the light,
desperate to find somewhere to hide themselves again.

~~~
bcrosby95
Yes, by now everyone knows they are being "secretly" tracked since it's been
in the news for the last decade.

And yet privacy isn't a strong selling point for most people. It sounds like
they have spoken and they don't give a damn about it.

~~~
joosters
I see it as the opposite... the ad industry are specifically worried here that
people _are_ going to be given the choice, and they believe that the peoples'
choice won't be good for them.

------
ixvvqktiwl
This is somewhat off-topic, but I'm worried about closed ecosystems, the shift
towards censorship, and the end of private ownership. Good examples of this
are walled gardens that break basic web links (Twitter for example), or DRM-
encumbered digital books.

If I buy a physical book I can lend it to someone, or sell it if I want. If I
buy a digital copy (which for some reason often costs more), not only can I
not lend it but I can't sell it to anyone either. I also need to ask
permission from the platform to read the book I rightfully purchased.

The Google/Apple app store duopoly is another example of this. Apple for
example only allows you to use Safari, and makes it very hard for you to have
any choice about what software you run on your own device.

It feels like there's a slow slide into a world where we no longer have any
choice about what content we consume or how we consume it. Instead, we're
spoonfed what the platform decides is good for us, and in most cases good
means most profitable for the platform.

------
gruez
> The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the
> limited ability to customize it still carries “a high risk of user refusal.”

Translation: we used to be able to use dark patterns to get users to consent,
now we can’t.

------
CodeWriter23
This ends when the origin site starts proxying requests to the ad aggregators
via the site-native domain.

~~~
jahewson
Doesn’t work for the web because without the 3rd party domain there’s no
access to 3rd party cookies so the tracker can’t identify you that way.

~~~
CodeWriter23
First party cookie storage of identifier provided by ad network; Tracking of
individuals via various fingerprinting techniques, IP address, screen size,
CSS, UserAgent etc.

------
rajansaini
Does anyone more well-informed than I know if Apple's recent pivots spells a
reduction in ad-based revenue for mobile developers?

~~~
scarface74
I hope between this and Apple Arcade, it completely kills off apps that don’t
give you a choice to turn off ads via an in app purchases.

------
corobo
Unlucky, get a better business model.

------
sigjuice
Apple needs to put their money where their mouth is and demote Google as the
default search engine in Safari.

------
varshithr
Can tracking be useful, if used correctly?

~~~
hyperman1
It isn't even usefull for advertising.

Google keeps giving me french ads even when I speak dutch, live in the dutch
half of Belgium, and have a http request header saying i speak dutch or
english. I get ads for all kinds of stuff I don't care about. In fact, I get
ads for things I can't even buy in my country or continent if I wanted it. If
google would tune their ads to the language i ask them, based on the query I
entered, the results would be a lot better.

I presume the real value of all this tracking is they can companies to buy ads
with them, even if the actual ad delivery mostly fails.

Now I bought a rubber mat on ali express, for opening all kinds of
electronics. For weeks they tried to sell me rubber ... stuff ... and latex
... stuff ... and other related ... stuff .... until my wife started mocking
me enough to stay of their site for a few months. That's another cost of
relevant advertising ;-)

~~~
unnouinceput
Why you even getting ads in the first place? Never heard of uBlock Origins?
Stop using Chrome, use Firefox. Then you can put safely Origins on both mobile
and desktop for Firefox and never see any ads.

------
Sephiroth87
I know how unlikely it would have been, but I wish Apple just dropped this out
of nowhere, because with this delay all the user tracking platforms will now
just store the id they can currently access somewhere locally (if they aren't
already) and keep using it going forward.

------
whatsmyusername
> Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc
> (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, faulted Apple for not adhering
> to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy
> rules. Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk
> users will refuse, the associations argued.

DuckerZ in the chat boys. Zero sympathy for ad networks, they're one of the
largest channels for malware. We push adblock to all our devices as corporate
policy.

The ad space needs more competitors. Currently it's Facebook for boomers,
Google for everyone else, and also-rans. I'm fine with Apple forcing their way
into this space since I trust them more than the other players.

~~~
SquareWheel
Who is "DuckerZ"?

------
franzwong
My TV doesn't track me and it can still provide me ad.

~~~
smichel17
> My TV doesn't track me

Are you sure?

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-
wat...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-watch-tv-
your-tv-watches-back/)

~~~
tomjen3
Op may, like me, have a dumb TV.

You can't buy them anymore, but you can still buy computer monitors with about
the same size so that is probably what I will be doing when it goes.

------
nojito
Everyone should regularly be reminded that Google was caught paying professors
to publish papers "friendly" to Google.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/paying-professors-inside-
google...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/paying-professors-inside-googles-
academic-influence-campaign-1499785286)

Convincing the public that they are correct is how Google normalized the idea
of sharing private information without oversight.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
They have so many levers to do this too. Their public policy team has
sponsored hundreds of educational institutions, lobbying organizations, and
think tanks.

[https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/5a1907d78237ab17...](https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/5a1907d78237ab177f4bfbbd3ee71354760419b9c69e03a2610c7ba99427e07a264d199288da7a7025846365c4a0b85ff4016bc2f6e3b9319ed1e980ff8b4cb1)

Then with journalists they use a time-honored tradition Apple has been known
for: Managing exclusive access based on positive press. Blogs which promote
Google's political positions get exclusive interviews with Sundar Pichai,
which when factoring in the ad clicks it brings in, is a multi-million dollar
payday.

TechDirt is a special bridge between the two concepts: The same guy who writes
the "news" runs a lobbying organization, Copia, which is on Google's public
policy team payroll.

