Apple is a company, and it’s interested in making profits. Right now, its methods of making profits are slightly more aligned with what privacy conscious users desire than some other companies’, and that’s good.
Apple absolutely needs to be checked in other ways—-the fact that it’s selling advertising while setting policies that hurt other advertisers stinks to high heaven. Let antitrust rake them over the coals for that.
Apple sets a restrictive and privacy-centric set of rules for advertisers, which it then follows. The fact that this is a problem for other advertising companies is an indictment of those companies and their bleak surveillance-enabling business model.
Contrast this with the "use WebKit or go home" rule, which, like it or not, is favoring Apple's product over others. It's not like these advertising policies are "be headquartered in Cupertino", it's "if you want to track our users you must ask them first".
Exactly. This is the popup for app store personalized ads[0], which is a full-screen popup that forces you to choose one or the other before you can access the app. It's super transparent and easy to decline the personalization.
The entire iOS operating system works that way now.
I dislike it. I think buttons should be buttons. But this isn't a special case, so unless you consider every instance of two buttons looking this way a dark pattern, this one isn't either.
> unless you consider every instance of two buttons looking this way a dark pattern
The entire point of this pattern is to guide the user into a "default" option so using it for anything where the user is suppposed to provide informed consent is a dark pattern. The only places where it is not a dark pattern is where default choice actually aligns with the interest of the average user and I think that is hard to argue for a choice whose purpose is primarily to be allowed to better manipulate the user into spending more.
That pattern may be reasonable for "Are you sure" kind of requests for actions that the user explicitly wanted - because then there really is a sane default; we expect the user didn't click on some button by accident. But it's not reasonable to portray questions that are asking the user to agree to something they did not explicitly want; that's just trying to trick the user to make the annoying popup go away by clicking the big button. There's no sane default here, so none should be preselected (and ideally, the layout of confirmation dialogs and agreement dialogs would not be identical in the first place).
It's a dark pattern, and I really doubt it's accidental.
That's a reasonable perspective that I hadn't considered, and probably makes even more sense to people who barely used/use desktops in the first place.
I still don't like it! But I also never had any trouble using it. Except Apple Music. Don't get me started.
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.
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.
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.
The linked article lists a bunch of those. Most of that bullet-point list of required or conversely prohibited behaviors apply to Apple. And all of those are justified only by self-interest.
Incidentally, that doesn't mean the alternative has to be the wild west - that's a false dichotomy. Controlling access is fine; it's simply not fine that it's the platform that holds exclusive sway, especially if the answer is "only if we're the ones providing that app."
This thread is about Apple’s privacy rules for App Store developers, and it’s not plainly obvious which items in the EU proposal enhance those protections at all, but the person I was responding to was insinuating that those protections have self-serving flaws.
Is that distinction really helpful? The App Store has _rules_ some of which relate to user privacy, and some of which are in a grey area, and some of which don't relate to user privacy. Is needing to use Apple's payment provider a privacy protection? If you squint just right it might be.
I'm sure there are some subset of app-store rules that taken by themselves, without the context of the other app-store rules are not self-serving. But that doesn't mean the rules overall are - and that's the reality that competitors need to deal with. Unlike apple, they can't change the restrictions they need to comply with. Both in actually immediate sense, and in a more meta process sense Apple has an unfair advantage they can and do exploit to extract tolls from the interactions between users and third-party providers.
The fact that some of those protections also protect user privacy to the extent the user stays in Apple's walled garden is almost akin to blackmail: rather than trying to protect the user's privacy regardless, they've tied the user's privacy to the Apple ecosystem. It's all or nothing. Would be a shame if anything happened to that privacy of yours - are you sure you want to leave our walled garden? There aren't any other curated gardens (we made sure of that!), and your device unfortunately has no way to safely and conveniently opt in to risks worth taking, so it's our way, or the wild west out there... oh, and if you really want the wild west, we'll take your hardware too, you'll need to use android, and we use obvious UI patents to ensure it's inconvenient to switch a lot.
It doesn't take an evil, machiavellian plan to end up in a situation in which the rules are so slanted in Apple's favor. All it takes are lots of tiny by themselves reasonable features - but steps that are always tested against Apple's interests, since those get a voice in the decision-making process, and rarely tested against third-party interests. It may well be that Apple was well intentioned in its privacy rules, and that those rules truly do protect the user - yet still have those rules stifle competition in a way that also harms the user down the line.
Apple absolutely needs to be checked in other ways—-the fact that it’s selling advertising while setting policies that hurt other advertisers stinks to high heaven. Let antitrust rake them over the coals for that.