> When Apple first announced the limitations to cross-website tracking in June, the company said the changes are meant to improve trust with users, explaining that “users feel that trust is broken when they are being tracked and privacy-sensitive data about their web activity is acquired for purposes that they never agreed to.”
This!
I switched from Windows+Android to the Apple ecosystem in 2015. Because I love so many things about Apple products. But this alone (Apple taking measures to protect its customers' privacy concerns) is a huge huuuge selling point and a competitive advantage for them.
I've been PC since DOS, and I've switched too. Who the hell wants to be treated like a cross between a product to be monetized, and an enemy to be spied on?!
Firefox (w/ ublock origin), Firefox Focus, and the various on device VPN-style ad/tracking blockers (I use DNS66, there are others) make Android much improved over system defaults if you are concerned about tracking or ads. None of them require root or other non-stock-OS modifications.
If they really wanted to protect the privacy of it's customers, FaceID would be really different... I think that they just don't want 3rd parties selling your information.
This is nothing but a feel good PR spin on a replay of their not supporting Flash on the iPhone-- they want to force everyone into their evolving advertising ecosystem.
Is everyone going to pay 3$ / month every website? Apple should have fixed that first, but is now blocking everyone because their own iAd failed. I think a lot is going to blow up, eg. Apple users requiring membership for websites + a subscription.
What if those companies suddenly require an email to read more content, then their backend syncs all the required data. ( yes, we will submit a fake email, but a lot of people won't)
Also, i see >1/2 of the frontpage from these "ad supported companies" that "everyone" hates, i don't want more paywalled articles appearing here...
I can understand blocking the ever cookie. But this is probably a bridge too far, i don't want to see more paywalled articles on HN.
And yeah, this will not be a popular opinion here... I'd appreciate responding with arguments instead of down voting :)
Privacy is important, but breaking the functionality of cookies is the wrong way to address it. Not all cookies are used for tracking. Be prepared to start losing your settings in web apps or being logged out after 24 hours if you use Safari.
What's more, the claim that Apple is doing this for the sake of user trust is a lie. The real reason they're breaking the functionality of cookies is the same reason they refuse to implement progressive web apps, and the same reason they've become the slowest browser to adopt new standards, and the same reason you see "Safari is the new IE" all over the place. They're deliberately trying to hold back web technology so that people will be forced to create and use native apps instead. They're desperately trying to cling to the annual developer license fees and app commissions.
I say this as a die-hard MacBook user. I prefer Apple to Microsoft, but I hope Google wins in the web-vs-native holy war.
Were there a publicly-traded company that manufactures small violins (preferably the one that makes "world's smallest"), I'd go long on their stock right now.
I mean, who do they expect to persuade with this? Is there anyone not tied to the adtech industry shouting, "Damn you, Apple, and your assault on open web standards!" 'cuz me, I'm thinking, "without even reading the article, if the ad industry is upset about it, it must be good."
"We routinely send you malware without an iota of shame or responsibility, but how dare you not store for us the tools we need to track, productize, and sell you like livestock!"
Is there any reasonable response to this besides, "yeah, go fuck yourself"?
This is bullies crying that their victim didn't show up by the flagpole at 3pm for his beating.
I sincerely hope they go out of business -- these companies are toxic and canerous. But that's a rant long enough to fill a book.
The end result for the customer is that the ad industry will switch to cross-device tracking for everyone.
Right now, you had an option to opt-out, by setting cookies to block. You were relatively safe.
Now the default will become a net of machine learning algorithms which can track you cross-device without requiring cookies. It is not possible to safeguard against that, unless you completely randomize your online browsing behavior.
I work on a checkout product that is implemented as a third-party iframe. We set a cookie so that a user can have their information remembered for the next time, so that if you've shopped at merchant A, you won't have to fill out your information again when you want to shop at merchant B or C. We don't use it to track you or profile you, it's literally just to make it easier for you to check out (which makes our merchants happy because they see less drop-off). We have a very simple and obvious way of opting out of this, directly in the checkout itself, if you for whatever reason don't want to be remembered.
Unfortunately, because most people don't visit us in a first-party context, we are classified as a tracker, so we can't read our cookie anymore. The result being that our customers have a worse experience. If they want to get prefilled, they'll now have to go through this weird redirect song and dance so that we can interact with them in a first-party context.
So yeah, while I'm generally for enhanced privacy, I think this specific implementation is harmful. I think that all it achieves is that it consolidates the ability to track users to a small number of giants that you routinely interact with in a first-party context on a daily basis (Facebook, Google, etc).
What's especially infuriating about the advertisers' spin here is that Apple appears to have gone to a lot of effort to not destroy their business model. They're not simply blocking third-party tracking cookies, they're expiring or partitioning them more rapidly based on how infrequently the user interacts with a given website.
Conveniently, some parties like mostly Google but also Facebook and Twitter have both a big presence in the tracker space and also a site users often visit directly. Their information is going to get much more valuable.
> In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as “opaque and arbitrary,”
Funny, "opaque and arbitrary" is exactly how I'd describe the web of 3rd party tracking of consumers these companies engage in. When all of these groups agree to openly disclose everything they do to track users, see the databases they maintain on us and allow easy opt outs like agreeing to follow the wishes of users who enable Do Not Track ... then I'll consider reenabling 3rd party cookies, etc.
If the ad networks actually honored "DNT", Apple wouldn't need to implement this mitigation. For that matter, what are they smoking to make them believe I'll purchase $PRODUCT any second now when I still haven't clicked the 123489th retargeted ad?
Sometimes you can judge the merit and effectiveness of an action based on who is complaining about it. It seems that what Apple is doing is effective in limiting tracking. Kudos to Apple!
I really hope advertisers are unrelenting in their attack on Apple over this, at least until Streisand hears about it. How dare Apple give users the tools to staunch the flow of their data?
We all know that newspapers could never have existed without all that tracking of which ads readers saw. And broadcast TV was a universal failure in reaching consumers with advertising. The idea of advertising without tracking is just unprecedented.
The advertisers arrogance and tone deafness here is just unfathomable.
From the outside, it appears tracking benefits aggregators more than these ad agencies. Without tracking, it makes a good agency even more important as they keep track of which sites generally have which audiences and target ads based on those trends instead of relying solely on doubleclick's data. Google and FB have a lot to lose here, not advertisers nor ad agencies, imo.
I think the end of pervasive tracking would not kill internet advertising, it would just make value-add middlemen more valuable. I know I'm ignoring re-targeting, but gawd the reason I didn't buy your widget while I was on your site is not because I forgot to put in my CC info. Re-targeting is not something humanity should be proud of (even though it's hard to run certain internet businesses and be competitive without it as long your competition is using it).
It almost feels like a luxury that when you examine an item at Best Buy and decide against purchasing that a store clerk doesn't jump in front of your car asking you to reconsider as you're trying to pull out of the parking lot. Or follow you home...
> Uh, it's the ads that are hurting the user experience
Amen to that. Not only do they slow down page loads by several orders of magnitude, they also frequently slow down the website after page loads. The shenanigans some of them try is really infuriating and blatantly disrespectful to the end user. Embedded cryptocoin mining, firing off HTTP requests rapidly and endlessly, changing the page's scrolling behavior, loading right in the middle of the page's main content, etc.
Any change to a web browser that interferes with or defeats online advertising is one that I welcome. Until online advertising becomes unobtrusive and malware-free again, I, along with millions of others, will keep the adblocker enabled.
Of course it will hurt campaign performance and targeting, which is exactly why they need to block those cookies.
I have never seen such a group so spoiled as marketing peeps. These guys and gals demand blood from stones to justify their "spend", and have been single-handedly responsible for so much of the web's dark patterns and annoyances.
Anything to cast these louts back to the stone age is a good innovation. Once advertising goes back to products selling you on themselves, and not this emotional "lifestyle" BS, we can throw the marketeers a bone. Until then, piss off!
Honestly, it tickles me pink to see ad companies having a public sook about a company standing up for the end-user.
What is amazing is the level of arrogance these ad companies have to accuse apple of damaging the "infrastructure of the modern internet", and speaking as though they care at all about the consumer when if it meant that these ad companies could make even a single dollar more or could track people even a little bit more they would burn the internet to the ground to achieve that goal.
This is coming. Chrome is implementing a built in ad blocker.
Advertisers and content providers can either start getting used to the idea now and get ahead of the trend. Or they can watch their business model suffer and scramble to catch up later.
Of course Google's ads will be deemed as "acceptable" with their own ad blocker. What are the chances that Google will add the capability to allow for third party "content blockers" that block ads in Chrome for Android?
Apple has allowed third party content blockers for iOS for years.
If I understood the workings of the intelligent tracking prevention correctly ( https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention... ) then this looks painful for ad networks which don't serve their ads from a domain with lots of organic traffic. Google and facebook should be fine given that lots of users go there at least once a month.
Actually though it blocks all the targeting. So, for example (and you can try it yourself now -- it's live in the High Sierra beta that you can download right now), when you go to Facebook, you will no longer see ads that are targeted to your interests/sites you've visited. Facebook makes it's money off of ads that are personalized -- generic ads don't sell. Same with Google's Ad network -- it's targeting you based on demos that it will no longer be able to track. Yes, Apple may be protecting its users but this is a direct hit at Google and Facebook's ad revenues, particularly on mobile, where Safari has a much higher browser share. Download it yourself and try it out; it really is fascinating to see the difference.
A translation of the open letter from advertising companies to Apple:
September 14, 2017
We're just now realizing what this means.
An Open Letter from the Digital Advertising Community
"Community" means we're down to earth and neighborly.
The undersigned organizations are leading trade associations
for the digital advertising and marketing industries,
collectively representing thousands of companies that
responsibly participate in and shape today’s digital
landscape for the millions of consumers they serve.
We sell ads. Lots of ads. So much money. We're "responsible" for certain definitions of responsible. Like your teenager is "responsible" for crashing your new Porsche into a ravine. Speaking of Porsches, have we mentioned how much money we make selling ads?
We are deeply concerned about the Safari 11 browser update
that Apple plans to release, as it overrides and replaces
existing user-controlled cookie preferences with Apple’s own
set of opaque and arbitrary standards for cookie handling.
That 99% of users think a cookie is a type of desert is neither here nor there. And by "user-controlled", we mean "defaults that benefit us".
We're also annoyed they didn't ask us. We're a bit hit at parties.
Safari’s new “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” would change
the rules by which cookies are set and recognized by
browsers. In addition to blocking all third-party cookies
(i.e. those set by a domain other than the one being
visited), as the current version of Safari does, this new
functionality would create a set of haphazard rules over the
use of first-party cookies (i.e. those set by a domain the
user has chosen to visit) that block their functionality or
purge them from users’ browsers without notice or choice.
"Haphazard" meaning "we disagree". Also, we 100% agree with user notice or choice, unless the user chooses to block ads or desires notice on how we're using their data. That's, uh... proprietary.
The infrastructure of the modern Internet depends on
consistent and generally applicable standards for cookies,
so digital companies can innovate to build content,
services, and advertising that are personalized for users
and remember their visits. Apple’s Safari move breaks those
standards and replaces them with an amorphous set of
shifting rules that will hurt the user experience and
sabotage the economic model for the Internet.
Can we talk about innovative advertising for a minute? We're piloting this pop-up that completely replaces boring content and downloads an awesome new app automatically. That app then opens with videos on housewife inventions.
We've put a lot of hard work into sandwiching ourselves as the economic model for the internet, and it really grinds our gears that anyone would suggest there are other ways to make money besides working with us.
Apple’s unilateral and heavy-handed approach is bad for
consumer choice and bad for the ad-supported online content
and services consumers love. Blocking cookies in this manner
will drive a wedge between brands and their customers, and
it will make advertising more generic and less timely and
useful. Put simply, machine-driven cookie choices do not
represent user choice; they represent browser-manufacturer
choice. As organizations devoted to innovation and growth in
the consumer economy, we will actively oppose any actions
like this by companies that harm consumers by distorting the
digital advertising ecosystem and undermining its
operations.
For example, how will users know which #brand to choose without advertising? How will our customers survive without us? Might as well shut down this whole internet thing.
We strongly encourage Apple to rethink its plan to impose
its own cookie standards and risk disrupting the valuable
digital advertising ecosystem that funds much of today’s
digital content and services.
It's not like Apple's ever forged ahead with risky new business models or economic decisions before, and open letters are really effective, so we're confident this will work.
Is there really that much money in online advertising? My impression was that they're all scrambling to protect their piece of a rapidly shrinking pie.
I'm waiting to see how it plays out, because if they whitelist their ads while blacklisting third party ads for arbitrary reasons edicted by them, while being an ad company themselves I can foresee some legal challenges/complaints.
Firefox's private browsing mode has been doing this for a while now, so they've got the tech in place and tested; I get the impression that they're waiting for other browsers to start the ball rolling on turning this on by default so that ad-supported websites don't just start outright blacklisting Firefox in retaliation. Safari doesn't have to worry about that, because of Apple's platform effect. Makes one wish that FirefoxOS worked out...
You know who's not? B2B publishers. Because if this spreads, if you want to buy a niche market, you have to buy directly from that niche seller (for example, if you want to reach pig farmers, you'll need to buy ads on a pig farmer site -- it's the only way). So the ad networks hate it; direct sellers LOVE it.
[+] [-] submeta|8 years ago|reply
This!
I switched from Windows+Android to the Apple ecosystem in 2015. Because I love so many things about Apple products. But this alone (Apple taking measures to protect its customers' privacy concerns) is a huge huuuge selling point and a competitive advantage for them.
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ac29|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] khana|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] msla|8 years ago|reply
I really can't trust any closed-source OS, and very few closed-source applications.
[+] [-] zeep|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] appleplz|8 years ago|reply
Apple could care less about the privacy of its users. https://www.cultofmac.com/230358/everything-you-need-to-know...
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|8 years ago|reply
Is everyone going to pay 3$ / month every website? Apple should have fixed that first, but is now blocking everyone because their own iAd failed. I think a lot is going to blow up, eg. Apple users requiring membership for websites + a subscription.
What if those companies suddenly require an email to read more content, then their backend syncs all the required data. ( yes, we will submit a fake email, but a lot of people won't)
Also, i see >1/2 of the frontpage from these "ad supported companies" that "everyone" hates, i don't want more paywalled articles appearing here...
I can understand blocking the ever cookie. But this is probably a bridge too far, i don't want to see more paywalled articles on HN.
And yeah, this will not be a popular opinion here... I'd appreciate responding with arguments instead of down voting :)
Edit: Failed, downvoting begins as expected
[+] [-] mikemikemike|8 years ago|reply
What's more, the claim that Apple is doing this for the sake of user trust is a lie. The real reason they're breaking the functionality of cookies is the same reason they refuse to implement progressive web apps, and the same reason they've become the slowest browser to adopt new standards, and the same reason you see "Safari is the new IE" all over the place. They're deliberately trying to hold back web technology so that people will be forced to create and use native apps instead. They're desperately trying to cling to the annual developer license fees and app commissions.
I say this as a die-hard MacBook user. I prefer Apple to Microsoft, but I hope Google wins in the web-vs-native holy war.
[+] [-] mikestew|8 years ago|reply
I mean, who do they expect to persuade with this? Is there anyone not tied to the adtech industry shouting, "Damn you, Apple, and your assault on open web standards!" 'cuz me, I'm thinking, "without even reading the article, if the ad industry is upset about it, it must be good."
[+] [-] SomeStupidPoint|8 years ago|reply
Is there any reasonable response to this besides, "yeah, go fuck yourself"?
This is bullies crying that their victim didn't show up by the flagpole at 3pm for his beating.
I sincerely hope they go out of business -- these companies are toxic and canerous. But that's a rant long enough to fill a book.
[+] [-] proofofstake|8 years ago|reply
Right now, you had an option to opt-out, by setting cookies to block. You were relatively safe.
Now the default will become a net of machine learning algorithms which can track you cross-device without requiring cookies. It is not possible to safeguard against that, unless you completely randomize your online browsing behavior.
[+] [-] nevon|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, because most people don't visit us in a first-party context, we are classified as a tracker, so we can't read our cookie anymore. The result being that our customers have a worse experience. If they want to get prefilled, they'll now have to go through this weird redirect song and dance so that we can interact with them in a first-party context.
So yeah, while I'm generally for enhanced privacy, I think this specific implementation is harmful. I think that all it achieves is that it consolidates the ability to track users to a small number of giants that you routinely interact with in a first-party context on a daily basis (Facebook, Google, etc).
[+] [-] cfarm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outsidetheparty|8 years ago|reply
https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
[+] [-] tinus_hn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steko|8 years ago|reply
Funny, "opaque and arbitrary" is exactly how I'd describe the web of 3rd party tracking of consumers these companies engage in. When all of these groups agree to openly disclose everything they do to track users, see the databases they maintain on us and allow easy opt outs like agreeing to follow the wishes of users who enable Do Not Track ... then I'll consider reenabling 3rd party cookies, etc.
[+] [-] MrMorden|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ballenf|8 years ago|reply
We all know that newspapers could never have existed without all that tracking of which ads readers saw. And broadcast TV was a universal failure in reaching consumers with advertising. The idea of advertising without tracking is just unprecedented.
The advertisers arrogance and tone deafness here is just unfathomable.
From the outside, it appears tracking benefits aggregators more than these ad agencies. Without tracking, it makes a good agency even more important as they keep track of which sites generally have which audiences and target ads based on those trends instead of relying solely on doubleclick's data. Google and FB have a lot to lose here, not advertisers nor ad agencies, imo.
I think the end of pervasive tracking would not kill internet advertising, it would just make value-add middlemen more valuable. I know I'm ignoring re-targeting, but gawd the reason I didn't buy your widget while I was on your site is not because I forgot to put in my CC info. Re-targeting is not something humanity should be proud of (even though it's hard to run certain internet businesses and be competitive without it as long your competition is using it).
It almost feels like a luxury that when you examine an item at Best Buy and decide against purchasing that a store clerk doesn't jump in front of your car asking you to reconsider as you're trying to pull out of the parking lot. Or follow you home...
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|8 years ago|reply
Uh, it's the ads that are hurting the user experience. And I don't particularly care if your targeting suffers.
[+] [-] fron|8 years ago|reply
Amen to that. Not only do they slow down page loads by several orders of magnitude, they also frequently slow down the website after page loads. The shenanigans some of them try is really infuriating and blatantly disrespectful to the end user. Embedded cryptocoin mining, firing off HTTP requests rapidly and endlessly, changing the page's scrolling behavior, loading right in the middle of the page's main content, etc.
Any change to a web browser that interferes with or defeats online advertising is one that I welcome. Until online advertising becomes unobtrusive and malware-free again, I, along with millions of others, will keep the adblocker enabled.
[+] [-] DannyB2|8 years ago|reply
> “Blocking cookies in this manner will drive a wedge between brands and their customers, . . ."
How about: . . . will drive a wedge between brands the those who they want to exploit.
[+] [-] tomc1985|8 years ago|reply
I have never seen such a group so spoiled as marketing peeps. These guys and gals demand blood from stones to justify their "spend", and have been single-handedly responsible for so much of the web's dark patterns and annoyances.
Anything to cast these louts back to the stone age is a good innovation. Once advertising goes back to products selling you on themselves, and not this emotional "lifestyle" BS, we can throw the marketeers a bone. Until then, piss off!
[+] [-] shruubi|8 years ago|reply
What is amazing is the level of arrogance these ad companies have to accuse apple of damaging the "infrastructure of the modern internet", and speaking as though they care at all about the consumer when if it meant that these ad companies could make even a single dollar more or could track people even a little bit more they would burn the internet to the ground to achieve that goal.
[+] [-] deweller|8 years ago|reply
Advertisers and content providers can either start getting used to the idea now and get ahead of the trend. Or they can watch their business model suffer and scramble to catch up later.
[+] [-] scarface74|8 years ago|reply
Apple has allowed third party content blockers for iOS for years.
[+] [-] bpicolo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jerry2|8 years ago|reply
If you do, I have a slightly used bridge in NY City to sell you for cheap.
[+] [-] jcfrei|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajocky|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdibs|8 years ago|reply
Then again, I'm sure it's fairly easy for a company that doesn't rely on scraping data from their customers.
[+] [-] basseq|8 years ago|reply
We're also annoyed they didn't ask us. We're a bit hit at parties.
"Haphazard" meaning "we disagree". Also, we 100% agree with user notice or choice, unless the user chooses to block ads or desires notice on how we're using their data. That's, uh... proprietary. Can we talk about innovative advertising for a minute? We're piloting this pop-up that completely replaces boring content and downloads an awesome new app automatically. That app then opens with videos on housewife inventions.We've put a lot of hard work into sandwiching ourselves as the economic model for the internet, and it really grinds our gears that anyone would suggest there are other ways to make money besides working with us.
For example, how will users know which #brand to choose without advertising? How will our customers survive without us? Might as well shut down this whole internet thing. It's not like Apple's ever forged ahead with risky new business models or economic decisions before, and open letters are really effective, so we're confident this will work. A whole bunch of acronyms.[+] [-] vinceguidry|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Smoosh|8 years ago|reply
"Advertisers will tell you it has to be this way, but in dealing with advertisers you must remember they are professional liars."
[+] [-] Ajedi32|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doe88|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpicolo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marlokk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benologist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajocky|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeachPlum|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|8 years ago|reply
You aren't safe from tracking unless you disable javascript entirely. The only winning move is not to play.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|8 years ago|reply