I think this speaks to the power of defaults. 96% of users have not turned this on because they didn't even know that its disabled, and when an app asks you if they can track you, the response is going to be a strong no. The reality is that FB's entire business model has been predicated on the default being that tracking is allowed.
If this holds, this will be cataclysmic for FB. You can't have a huge portion of your wealthy user base just disappear and expect advertisers to keep paying what they were paying previously.
BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out.
Even more, it speaks to the power of removing choice. When app tracking is enabled by default it effectively removes choice because most users never touch settings (and may not even know they exist). Therefore users are not choosing anything. Someone else is choosing for them. "Tech" company employees will respond to criticism of their employer's behaviour with something like: "But users can choose to turn this off." That is not relevant if 96% are unaware of this "choice". The question is: why is tracking on by default. That was a choice the user did not make.
Only when faced with a screen asking the user if she chooses to be tracked do we get a chance to find out what a user would choose. And even then, developers will use "dark patterns" to manipulate the decision-making process toward a self-serving outcome.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether there should even be a setting to enable tracking. If the majority of users would choose to turn it off, if they were presented with the choice, then why even have it. This is essentially "privacy by design".
This is no different than when developers argue to HN that it is not worth catering to the preferences of privacy-conscious or minimalist users since those users comprise such a small percentage of users overall. By the same token, it should not worth catering to the small percentange of users who want to be tracked.
I don't really get how trends like this one (and IMO that's just the tip of the ice berg – this is companies preparing for the inevitable legislation that will make most forms of tracking illegal within the next 10 years) don't affect facebook or google stock.
This IMO makes two scenarios likely:
1) The market is currently just dragging along, hoping this will all go away and we're really in a major ad-bubble that's about to pop.
2) Tracking... isn't that profitable after all. All the personalized tracking shit can be replaced with a simple "users who clicked on canon printer also clicked on cheap ink refill kits" type of model that gets the same results or better. Which also puts into question a lot of what FB and Google are actually doing.
I'll give my perspective which I think is very different than the rest of the HN crowd here in the comments. I think this mainly stems from the fact that I'm probably much younger than a lot of the folks here. I do a lot of random shopping online...
I opted into the FB tracking when I got the popup yesterday because I do FB/IG a lot and I click on interesting ads. Honestly, I tend to buy quite a bit from the ads that I see because they genuinely interest me, and a lot of them are from smaller businesses that I want to try out. If I see ads on FB/IG, at least I want them to be relevant to me rather than be generic.
Im not sure why this is cataclysmic for FB - they’re mostly a first party advertiser. App tracking transparency doesn’t prevent Facebook from running ads on their own apps and using SkAdNetwork to track conversions (which works even if the user opts out).
Granted the fidelity and latency of SkAdNetwork is a concern but hardly enough to materially impact the bottom line.
While Apple and it's ad business will be the biggest beneficiaries, it will not be a surprise if Google and FB also partially benefit. The clear losers will be all the smaller players.
> BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out.
Absolutely not. Using defaults because you know most people wont' change them to achieve a specific outcome that you, the default setter want, is exactly the same evil. Just because you're doing it for "good" doesn't justify it.
How is going to be 'cataclysmic' for FB? They can still serve up ads. The ads won't be as targeted as before, but they still have billions of users. Advertisers will spend money on the platform. Perhaps they'll have to spend more since they can't fine-tune the ads as much.
I don’t understand being strongly against one type of default tracking but strongly for another. Tracking is tracking as far as I’m concerned and I’m against all of it.
In the old Internet Explorer monopoly situation, Microsoft was forced to prompt the user which browser to use on first startup.
It was not an option of choosing an alternative from the default, the order was random. Same for the default search engine.
If this was setup in the same way i wonder what the ratio would be. With that i mean a fair yes/no choice, not the GDPR-joke where accept is a big green button and reject is hidden in confusing fine print 3 sub-pages deep.
Based on Apple’s job postings I’m beginning to suspect their stance on ads and tracking was nothing more than a clever ruse to weaken competitors while they build their own a personalized ad business for iOS:
They also just hired Facebook’s first ads targeting product manager to work for their ad platform. I don’t think Apple ads won’t be limited to the App Store within a couple years.
Why would you enable it? What possible benefit is there in doing so?
The ads won't get better regardless of the data they have on you. They aren't exactly using ML or AI to help you get better ads. Its really just boring data queries in SQL or some graph language. That's the sum total of most advertising intelligence. Its not 21st century high tech. Its mostly relational databases with some NoSQL to make that table linking faster and cached. In cases where they do actually bring out that NoSQL it is to reimplement all the relational smarts just with extra steps. Then its at least shiny and cool.
The whole thing is really just about storing and gathering a profile on you as part of them building an asset they can later resell. Creepy technology for creepy uses. An asset full of subtle errors about you that can likely never be seen or fixed. Much later they will invariably then leave all or some of it on a usb stick or some poorly protected cloud server. After that your details will end up in the hands of some scammer or other miscreant to enable them to send you endless emails full of typos, lies, emojis and if you're exceptionally average like the rest of us: an interesting tale about long lost nigerian princes just needing a bank account. If you're lucky.
So, yeah, leave it disabled. There's really no point in doing otherwise.
It turns off the ask, so the way it works is you need to ask and then you need to wait for a response and if that response is "Yes" they can then begin tracking. In any other case/situation you are not able to.
So if you don't want this asking you everytime you open any app (based on my experience it happens frequently) you can turn it off.
From a Wall Street Journal interview with Apple's Craig Federighi:
WSJ: "Why the verbiage 'Ask Not to Track'? Why not just 'Do Not Track'?"
Federighi: "There are other techniques that developers over time have developed, like fingerprinting, which is a bit of a cat and mouse game around other ways that an app might scheme to create a tracking identifier. And it's a policy issue for us to say 'you must not do that'. And so, we can't ensure at the system level that they're not tracking, [but] we can do so at a policy level."
Agree that it seems weird, and that it doesn't align with their other permissions wording: "always allow without prompting", "allow each app to ask once", "always deny without prompting".
I'm very curious how this works, so this is from a report [0] from Flurry Analytics, "owned by Verizon Media, is used in over 1 million mobile applications, providing aggregated insights across 2 billion mobile devices per month"
How is Flurry Analytics measuring app tracking on iOS devices? Are they just reporting how much they themselves are being disabled?
I'm curious about the 4% of users who enabled it. Did they get tricked into doing so? Was it an accident? Or do some people out there really genuinely want to be tracked?
Another thing to keep in mind is how often these will be seen. Right now ~10K apps ask (or, try to ask).
So the odds of seeing the prompt in the wild aren’t too high unless you’re a Facebook user.
But as more apps show the prompt and it’ll become very common all you need is to agree once and you’ll then be more likely to opt in more than opt out, in my opinion.
I expect that 10k to 10x before the end of the year. Even then, 100k apps out of ~2M isn’t all that many, so it might take a long time for advertisers to regain the kind of access they had pre ATT.
I've seen a lot of people confused by this, so I figured I'd clear it up:
"App tracking" here means reading your device ID, called the 'Identity For Advertisers' (IDFA for short). They do this so that they can cross reference that IDFA with data that other apps have collected on that same IDFA, allowing them to connect the dots that it's the same user.
This app tracking transparency feature makes it so that they can't access your IDFA, and can only show you ads based on info you provide within their own app, not from the other apps you use. It keeps your data silo-ed to each app.
This is where the whole "I looked up nike shoes on Amazon and now I'm getting nike shoe ads on Facebook" comes from. Without the IDFA, Facebook has no way of knowing what you looked up on Amazon, only what you look up on Facebook.
Facebook and Amazon can both track you individually and correlate accounts because you need an account under your real name to use the service. They can just choose to share this information with each other. This only prevents services from using IDFA to correlate pseudonymous accounts or across services that don't require accounts at all.
I especially don't understand the complaint from Facebook with reference to the four plus apps they have where users may very well just use the same account. As it stands, they've been wildly inconsistent about this. Here is Mark Zuckerberg only six weeks ago claiming this change would be good for Facebook: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/as-apple-app-trackin...
> This is where the whole "I looked up nike shoes on Amazon and now I'm getting nike shoe ads on Facebook" comes from. Without the IDFA, Facebook has no way of knowing what you looked up on Amazon, only what you look up on Facebook.
That's not really true, as far as I know. FB provide a feature called custom audiences, which can take a set of emails and match them to FB users. Amazon could easily upload this list and use it to target on FB.
Apple can't really prevent advertisers/platforms from sharing information from other sources. What they can stop is apps using IDFA as a primary key for a particular Apple user, and that's what they appear to have done.
>This is where the whole "I looked up nike shoes on Amazon and now I'm getting nike shoe ads on Facebook" comes from. Without the IDFA, Facebook has no way of knowing what you looked up on Amazon, only what you look up on Facebook.
Can this really be true? Wouldn't the conclusion be "Facebook can no longer rely on the IDFA for this information, but can probably gather it by a different ID shared between both Amazon and Facebook?"
I expected the number to be something astonishingly high based on FB's PR blitz over the past nine months. With their limitless resources, I'm sure they focus grouped and user tested this scenario to death before concluding that apocalypse was nigh. Rock on, Apple.
What a surprise. If I tell people going to the store that they choose to pay for the products, or not, a lot of people will choose not to. Who would guess that people like free stuff?
Apple is disrupting whole economy for apps. It’s a very broken economy, with lots of questionable practices, that’s for sure. But we’ll see if it’ll be net benefit for customers. For sure for Apple, as more apps will have to move to be paid, and give Apple their 30% cut.
I loth Apple. I am a Apple developer and it is painful. After thirty years sticking to Unix like systems, Apple is not!
That said I am very impressed that they turn off apps access to the UUID for the device by default. Bless them. There is more money to be made, I would have thought, by going down the well trodden path of avarice, duplicity, and self deception that Google has trodden. Well done Apple.
(Perhaps I am wrong and there is some nefarious plan for world domination behind their moves - just because I cannot see it does not mean it is not there!)
I'm actually quite surprised it's that high -- I've seen one prompt so far, and I was kind of running on autopilot so I accidentally clicked "Accept" before my brain even processed what it was asking me (and then I didn't bother to track down the setting to manually opt-out afterwards). I guess I'm in the top 5% of absent-minded users!
Don't you need to explicitly find the setting and enable it to be part of the 4%? I wonder if 4% are just curious which apps will ask... seems high though.
[+] [-] woeirua|4 years ago|reply
If this holds, this will be cataclysmic for FB. You can't have a huge portion of your wealthy user base just disappear and expect advertisers to keep paying what they were paying previously.
BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|4 years ago|reply
Even more, it speaks to the power of removing choice. When app tracking is enabled by default it effectively removes choice because most users never touch settings (and may not even know they exist). Therefore users are not choosing anything. Someone else is choosing for them. "Tech" company employees will respond to criticism of their employer's behaviour with something like: "But users can choose to turn this off." That is not relevant if 96% are unaware of this "choice". The question is: why is tracking on by default. That was a choice the user did not make.
Only when faced with a screen asking the user if she chooses to be tracked do we get a chance to find out what a user would choose. And even then, developers will use "dark patterns" to manipulate the decision-making process toward a self-serving outcome.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether there should even be a setting to enable tracking. If the majority of users would choose to turn it off, if they were presented with the choice, then why even have it. This is essentially "privacy by design".
This is no different than when developers argue to HN that it is not worth catering to the preferences of privacy-conscious or minimalist users since those users comprise such a small percentage of users overall. By the same token, it should not worth catering to the small percentange of users who want to be tracked.
[+] [-] hparadiz|4 years ago|reply
If Google or Apple remotely installed a hastily built tracker controlled by a government agency on my device I'd be pretty miffed about it.
[+] [-] shmatt|4 years ago|reply
What happened next was people stopped going out with their phones, because any exposure would result in a Police enforced 14 day quarantine
[+] [-] nothis|4 years ago|reply
This IMO makes two scenarios likely:
1) The market is currently just dragging along, hoping this will all go away and we're really in a major ad-bubble that's about to pop.
2) Tracking... isn't that profitable after all. All the personalized tracking shit can be replaced with a simple "users who clicked on canon printer also clicked on cheap ink refill kits" type of model that gets the same results or better. Which also puts into question a lot of what FB and Google are actually doing.
[+] [-] rawrfml|4 years ago|reply
I opted into the FB tracking when I got the popup yesterday because I do FB/IG a lot and I click on interesting ads. Honestly, I tend to buy quite a bit from the ads that I see because they genuinely interest me, and a lot of them are from smaller businesses that I want to try out. If I see ads on FB/IG, at least I want them to be relevant to me rather than be generic.
[+] [-] NightMKoder|4 years ago|reply
Granted the fidelity and latency of SkAdNetwork is a concern but hardly enough to materially impact the bottom line.
[+] [-] 1cvmask|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spivak|4 years ago|reply
Absolutely not. Using defaults because you know most people wont' change them to achieve a specific outcome that you, the default setter want, is exactly the same evil. Just because you're doing it for "good" doesn't justify it.
[+] [-] tannhauser23|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lammy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HeyImAlex|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Too|4 years ago|reply
It was not an option of choosing an alternative from the default, the order was random. Same for the default search engine.
If this was setup in the same way i wonder what the ratio would be. With that i mean a fair yes/no choice, not the GDPR-joke where accept is a big green button and reject is hidden in confusing fine print 3 sub-pages deep.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Firebrand|4 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/y1s9F4J
They also just hired Facebook’s first ads targeting product manager to work for their ad platform. I don’t think Apple ads won’t be limited to the App Store within a couple years.
[+] [-] kwdc|4 years ago|reply
The ads won't get better regardless of the data they have on you. They aren't exactly using ML or AI to help you get better ads. Its really just boring data queries in SQL or some graph language. That's the sum total of most advertising intelligence. Its not 21st century high tech. Its mostly relational databases with some NoSQL to make that table linking faster and cached. In cases where they do actually bring out that NoSQL it is to reimplement all the relational smarts just with extra steps. Then its at least shiny and cool.
The whole thing is really just about storing and gathering a profile on you as part of them building an asset they can later resell. Creepy technology for creepy uses. An asset full of subtle errors about you that can likely never be seen or fixed. Much later they will invariably then leave all or some of it on a usb stick or some poorly protected cloud server. After that your details will end up in the hands of some scammer or other miscreant to enable them to send you endless emails full of typos, lies, emojis and if you're exceptionally average like the rest of us: an interesting tale about long lost nigerian princes just needing a bank account. If you're lucky.
So, yeah, leave it disabled. There's really no point in doing otherwise.
[+] [-] bradgessler|4 years ago|reply
That’s the setting in iOS under Settings > Privacy > Tracking.
What does it actually mean?
If it’s turned off, does that means that apps are tracking you since they don’t have to ask?
If it’s turned on, does that mean apps have to ask and you can disable tracking per app?
Something feels very strange about the way this setting is worded. I’d have excepted something like: “Allow Apps to Track” [ On | Off ]
[+] [-] vesh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dubcanada|4 years ago|reply
So if you don't want this asking you everytime you open any app (based on my experience it happens frequently) you can turn it off.
But yes, it could use a better wording.
[+] [-] dlivingston|4 years ago|reply
WSJ: "Why the verbiage 'Ask Not to Track'? Why not just 'Do Not Track'?"
Federighi: "There are other techniques that developers over time have developed, like fingerprinting, which is a bit of a cat and mouse game around other ways that an app might scheme to create a tracking identifier. And it's a policy issue for us to say 'you must not do that'. And so, we can't ensure at the system level that they're not tracking, [but] we can do so at a policy level."
https://youtu.be/G05nEgsXgoI?t=153
[+] [-] HumblyTossed|4 years ago|reply
It really doesn't mean anything other than that. It's a binary decision.
[+] [-] selykg|4 years ago|reply
The default in this case is to outright disallow it for any app requesting.
If the option is on then the app can ask, and the user has a choice to allow or disallow. Again, if it's off, the default is to disallow tracking.
[+] [-] jjr2527|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KoftaBob|4 years ago|reply
If it's turned off: I want to opt out of all app tracking automatically
[+] [-] bobbylarrybobby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawkinaw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FriedrichN|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blakesterz|4 years ago|reply
How is Flurry Analytics measuring app tracking on iOS devices? Are they just reporting how much they themselves are being disabled?
[0] https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restric...
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|4 years ago|reply
I know, right? Explain to me how anyone made any money at all 20 years ago?
Seriously though, can we get back to making good products that sell themselves?
[+] [-] bogwog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arielm|4 years ago|reply
So the odds of seeing the prompt in the wild aren’t too high unless you’re a Facebook user.
But as more apps show the prompt and it’ll become very common all you need is to agree once and you’ll then be more likely to opt in more than opt out, in my opinion.
I expect that 10k to 10x before the end of the year. Even then, 100k apps out of ~2M isn’t all that many, so it might take a long time for advertisers to regain the kind of access they had pre ATT.
[+] [-] KoftaBob|4 years ago|reply
"App tracking" here means reading your device ID, called the 'Identity For Advertisers' (IDFA for short). They do this so that they can cross reference that IDFA with data that other apps have collected on that same IDFA, allowing them to connect the dots that it's the same user.
This app tracking transparency feature makes it so that they can't access your IDFA, and can only show you ads based on info you provide within their own app, not from the other apps you use. It keeps your data silo-ed to each app.
This is where the whole "I looked up nike shoes on Amazon and now I'm getting nike shoe ads on Facebook" comes from. Without the IDFA, Facebook has no way of knowing what you looked up on Amazon, only what you look up on Facebook.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|4 years ago|reply
I especially don't understand the complaint from Facebook with reference to the four plus apps they have where users may very well just use the same account. As it stands, they've been wildly inconsistent about this. Here is Mark Zuckerberg only six weeks ago claiming this change would be good for Facebook: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/as-apple-app-trackin...
[+] [-] disgruntledphd2|4 years ago|reply
That's not really true, as far as I know. FB provide a feature called custom audiences, which can take a set of emails and match them to FB users. Amazon could easily upload this list and use it to target on FB.
Apple can't really prevent advertisers/platforms from sharing information from other sources. What they can stop is apps using IDFA as a primary key for a particular Apple user, and that's what they appear to have done.
[+] [-] everdrive|4 years ago|reply
Can this really be true? Wouldn't the conclusion be "Facebook can no longer rely on the IDFA for this information, but can probably gather it by a different ID shared between both Amazon and Facebook?"
[+] [-] hyperbovine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justapassenger|4 years ago|reply
Apple is disrupting whole economy for apps. It’s a very broken economy, with lots of questionable practices, that’s for sure. But we’ll see if it’ll be net benefit for customers. For sure for Apple, as more apps will have to move to be paid, and give Apple their 30% cut.
[+] [-] excalibur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvilo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worik|4 years ago|reply
That said I am very impressed that they turn off apps access to the UUID for the device by default. Bless them. There is more money to be made, I would have thought, by going down the well trodden path of avarice, duplicity, and self deception that Google has trodden. Well done Apple.
(Perhaps I am wrong and there is some nefarious plan for world domination behind their moves - just because I cannot see it does not mean it is not there!)
[+] [-] Grustaf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grumpitron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway287391|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|4 years ago|reply
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
So that 4% is basically meaningless, indistinguishable from 0%, it might represent misunderstanding, misclicks and the like.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27076848
[+] [-] lsllc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostpepper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dubcanada|4 years ago|reply
There is a variety of reasons one may click "Yes".
[+] [-] wmeredith|4 years ago|reply
The number is certainly almost zero. Hence the Facebook/Google shit-fit about all of this.
[+] [-] MengerSponge|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]