iOS 14's Upcoming Anti-Tracking Prompt Sparks Antitrust Complaint In France (macrumors.com) 114
tsa shares a report from MacRumors: Starting early next year, iOS 14 will require apps to get opt-in permission from users to collect their random advertising identifier, which advertisers use to deliver personalized ads and track how effective their campaigns were. Ahead of this change, The Wall Street Journal reports that advertising companies and publishers have filed a complaint against Apple with France's competition authority, arguing that the enhanced privacy measures would be anticompetitive.
According to the report, the complaint alleges that the wording of Apple's permission prompt will lead most users to decline tracking of their device's advertising identifier, which could result in lost revenue. In August, Facebook warned advertisers that the prompt could lead to a more than 50 percent drop in Audience Network publisher revenue. In a statement, Apple reiterated its belief that "privacy is a fundamental right," adding that "a user's data belongs to them and they should get to decide whether to share their data and with whom." Apple said that its own data collection doesn't count as tracking because it doesn't share the data with other companies.
According to the report, the complaint alleges that the wording of Apple's permission prompt will lead most users to decline tracking of their device's advertising identifier, which could result in lost revenue. In August, Facebook warned advertisers that the prompt could lead to a more than 50 percent drop in Audience Network publisher revenue. In a statement, Apple reiterated its belief that "privacy is a fundamental right," adding that "a user's data belongs to them and they should get to decide whether to share their data and with whom." Apple said that its own data collection doesn't count as tracking because it doesn't share the data with other companies.
Oh no! (Score:5, Interesting)
the wording of Apple's permission prompt will lead most users to decline tracking of their device's advertising identifier, which could result in lost revenue.
What will this world come to if advertisers have to get people's permission to be tracked? Oh the horror and lamentations of the masses when they're not being bombarded by notices for crap. Will this nightmare of being able to go about one's business without being relentlessly followed and hounded never end? What have the gods wrought upon this world when people can tell advertisers to fuck off?
Apple said that its own data collection doesn't count as tracking because it doesn't share the data with other companies.
And in other news . . .
Re: Oh no! (Score:2)
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Why not abolish marketing, and let word of mouth spread what is good quality.
That is just as much marketing as anything else. The only difference between good and bad companies with respect to marketing is the perception of the person on the receiving end.
Re: Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. You misspelled propaganda and manipulation.
When I tell my friends I had good success with Products X and Y but stay away from Z I'm NOT doing it to make a buck. I'm doing it because I have their best interests at heart.
Go watch The Century of the Self [youtube.com] if you want to understand how industrial marketing was CREATED involving outright manipulation, propaganda, and control.
Ban Advertising -- it has ZERO respect for people's space, time, and minds. It is visual trash and a blight upon society. Word of mouth is a much more honest way.
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Word of mouth is a much more honest way.
How would knowledge of a product's existence spread to its first dozen customers?
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How do you find any new product??
Gee, if only search or browsing was available ... /s
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How do you find any new product??
Gee, if only search or browsing was available ... /s
Sorry, but leaving it to the consumer to find your product hasn't existed for decades now. Greed is NOT that patient and you know it.
When was the last time you saw a company abandon ALL marketing and advertising? (No, products that feed addiction don't really count...that would be the addiction fueling the marketing, which is yet another problem in itself.)
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Gee, if only search or browsing was available
That depends on exactly what sort of search query you had in mind. For example, you can search the web for reviews. If no reviewers know the product exists, you won't find any reviews. You would also need to know the name of the product or at least its category in order to find reviews thereof.
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Ban Advertising -- it has ZERO respect for people's space, time, and minds. It is visual trash and a blight upon society. Word of mouth is a much more honest way.
This all assumes that you can actually trust the other person's endorsement of a product and can guarantee that they have no financial interest in the product. Word of mouth may work fine between friends but would you ban product reviews as well (a form of word of mouth)?
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I believe there is a reasonable compromise to be made. I would ban the "push" model of advertising for the most part and restrict it to the "pull" model.
Review sites use the pull model. I have to actively go out of my way to read these. i.e. Consumer Reports, Tech YouTubers, etc.
I agree that "trust" for reviews and endorsements is definitely an issue. Amazon reviews have definitely seen an increase in "shill reviews" -- I don't see a good way to combat that problem at this time other then S:N over time of
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Ban Advertising -- it has ZERO respect for people's space, time, and minds. It is visual trash and a blight upon society. Word of mouth is a much more honest way.
Let's stop pretending Greed is going to wait around for you to pimp their product. You're right, you're not making a buck, but you and your mouth take way too damn long to make them money. Greed INVENTED manipulation, propaganda and control, in order to feed Greed.
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So how exactly is a company supposed to enter the market? Word of mouth is fine but if it takes literally years for your product to gain any kind of market share because you are only relying on word of mouth most companies won't be able to stay in business. If you all of a sudden abolish marketing you are only giving the well established brands a virtual monopoly for several years at the least.
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Why not abolish marketing, and let word of mouth spread what is good quality. Bad companies need to market and the good don't.
Greed will ensure that ANY company makes it's competition look bad with marketing. And no, you will not convince Greed to act accordingly or even honestly. Even if you try and legislate it. This is like assuming that a Presidential election would start out with nice, kind advertisements, and never devolve into utter shit-slinging and hatred when it happens every damn time.
Corporate marketing would eventually devolve to be no better. (We also going to get rid of the entire patent/trademark/copyright syst
Re: Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude that is like saying the war on drugs created a fuckton of jobs so we should keep it up.
Marketing is exactly what got American politics into the miserable state it currently is.
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Tracking merely to improve the quality of ads that are shown to you has, on the face of it, not done a lot. Now, I know, some organizations like Facebook use tracking to increase engagement in immoral ways, but they're not typical. Most marketers are looking at the information tracking provides to see what stages of their funnels are performing poorly, not encouraging third party advertisers to whip their users into a hysteria in order to improve their ability to show other third party ads.
Marketing is just PSYOP without the guns. It definitely influences people in immoral ways by preying on well-know psychological vulnerabilities that most people have. Tracking helps you sort individuals into a particular target audience so you can identify probable vulnerabilities and engage them with the influence operation that will most effectively alter their behavior. Tracking is many things, but it's definitely not benign.
When tracking data shows that a funnel is not performing correctly the advert
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Because the drugs themselves never destroyed people's lives.
It encourages organized crime and provides a revenue source for them,
Because none of that existed before the war on drugs.
it throws people in prison and provides them with criminal records.
When you break the law, this is what happens.
It ensures dangerous drugs are provided in a deregulated environment,
Why would we want anyone to have dangerous drugs?
making them more
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Dude that is like saying the war on drugs created a fuckton of jobs so we should keep it up.
The war on drugs created approximately 9,000 jobs in the DEA. That's it. No way in hell would I ever defend that bullshit. Shut down the DEA, and re-assign them to border patrol for all I care. No one even has to lose their job.
Marketing is exactly what got American politics into the miserable state it currently is.
No, reducing politics to shit-slinging for the sake of ratings was a tactic stolen from the MSM, who no longer care about delivering truth or facts. Their job, is ratings now, by any means necessary. It is the reduction of our "Representatives" to fucking children throwing shit
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Dude that is like saying the war on drugs created a fuckton of jobs so we should keep it up.
The war on drugs created approximately 9,000 jobs in the DEA. That's it. No way in hell would I ever defend that bullshit. Shut down the DEA, and re-assign them to border patrol for all I care. No one even has to lose their job.
Oh plus also all the lawyers involved, all the extra cops hired, all the private prisons built to accommodate the overflow and all the industries like prison food suppliers and construction that feed into/from them, all the military grade hardware sold to cops to pursue drug offenders and the list just goes on and on and on. Nearly half a million people are in prison for non-violent drug offenses and AT LEAST 20 billion dollars a year goes just into keeping them there.
Marketing is exactly what got American politics into the miserable state it currently is.
No, reducing politics to shit-slinging for the sake of ratings was a tactic stolen from the MSM, who no longer care about delivering truth or facts. Their job, is ratings now, by any means necessary. It is the reduction of our "Representatives" to fucking children throwing shit at each other that is the main culprit. CSPAN sure as hell wasn't sitting around wondering how they could destroy the entire American political system because they suddenly had investors to answer to overnight in a pre-IPO rush to generate value.
IDK if you're being deliberately obtus
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Dude that is like saying the war on drugs created a fuckton of jobs so we should keep it up.
The war on drugs created approximately 9,000 jobs in the DEA. That's it. No way in hell would I ever defend that bullshit. Shut down the DEA, and re-assign them to border patrol for all I care. No one even has to lose their job.
Oh plus also all the lawyers involved, all the extra cops hired, all the private prisons built to accommodate the overflow and all the industries like prison food suppliers and construction that feed into/from them, all the military grade hardware sold to cops to pursue drug offenders and the list just goes on and on and on. Nearly half a million people are in prison for non-violent drug offenses and AT LEAST 20 billion dollars a year goes just into keeping them there.
Lawyers I could give a shit about. We have too many anyway, and they can become public defenders if they really want to practice law and help out the common man. All the "extra" cops won't be so "extra" as calls to defund the police continue to make that job impossible, which will cause many to quit. Sadly with the way shit keeps getting thrown from BOTH Red and Blue Gangs, there will likely be no one claiming we have "extra" cops anywhere in America soon. It may be quite the opposite problem.
Shut down
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While I can sense the sarcasm here, be careful what you ask for. When seventy percent of American GDP is derived from consumer spending, the pimps in marketing tend to make the world go round. For better or worse, advertising and marketing create a metric fuckton of jobs.
There are many kinds of marketing. Making good information available for a product is valuable, as are independent reviews. Both of these are marketing activities.
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Yeah, like that goodd kind of marketing ever existed anywhere but in the fantasy worlds of the very fraudsters who tried ro market marketinf itself.
Look up skinflint.co.uk. The huge list of product features you can filter and sort by and display and compare. The German/Austrian bigger original site is the only thing customers need, to find products. Anything beyond such a database, is lying, and hence by definition criminal.
That is the massive elephant in the tiny room: All marketing is criminal.
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And that won't change. Marketing and advertising will still exist just as they have existed before data mining via smart phones.
Ironically if they can't do it in such an automated fashion they might need to hire additional people to do their market research through some other means.
Though what I can see happening here is that app vendors will diminish the functionality of their apps if tracking is declined.
Re: Oh no! (Score:4, Interesting)
So the problem with the the argument "... creates a lot of jobs" is that does not make it good alone. We should be asking does the activity produce real wealth or is it just activity. Activity alone might move wealth but may not generate much. Of course society exists for more than just making things so some activities like say sports exhibitions for entertainment, while leaving nothing tangible after their completion are certainly not 'wrong' in any moral sense. As long as someone wants to watch it may be worth doing.
Other activity not so much; A command economy might have put a rule in place that say "we will produce 100K buggy whips each year", the activity might employee people and put a pay check in their pockets but it generates little if any wealth in a world where the whips just get dumped in the landfill because their are not enough buggies, horses, and drivers to utilize them.
I think there is relatively little *want* on the part of individuals to have more marketing materials thrust at them. I as relatively little because I actually think people do like some amount of advertising and even some ad targeting because its actually a good and useful way for them to discover products and services they may wish to buy but did not know existed in the market place. However when you have a consume that when is presented the choice to disable ads or not be tracked for targeted advertising and they chose that option well that means its unwanted.
The question is does it trigger additional consumption in those instances anyway and does that tail wag the dog and cause more production. This has been tough question to answer for advertisers since the inception of the industry, at what point does pushing more ads at someone who already is exposed to quite a lot of advertisements stop converting into more sales; because after that its 'just activity' not useful work.
Re: Oh no! (Score:2)
A failing business model taking to the courts? Next they'll demand we not be able to change channels during commercial breaks - oh wait, they already argued that fast-forwarding through ads, ad blocking, and changing channels during commercials are theft. Didn't work.
Next they'll argue for surveillance in the home as a right. Because their business model requires it.
Why should I care about their business model failing? They're just going to have to come up with another business model. You know, innovat
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Because without advertising and marketing, nobody would buy the products?
Granted, they may sell a little less (accidentally helping improve finances and health of the consumers), but nothing nearly as significant as they'd like to pretend.
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While I can sense the sarcasm here, be careful what you ask for. When seventy percent of American GDP is derived from consumer spending, the pimps in marketing tend to make the world go round. For better or worse, advertising and marketing create a metric fuckton of jobs.
And none of this was true prior to the widespread adoption of personal cell phones?
The producers of Mad Men would like to differ.
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While I can sense the sarcasm here, be careful what you ask for. When seventy percent of American GDP is derived from consumer spending, the pimps in marketing tend to make the world go round. For better or worse, advertising and marketing create a metric fuckton of jobs.
And none of this was true prior to the widespread adoption of personal cell phones?
The producers of Mad Men would like to differ.
Of course it was true in the 20th Century. But what the hell makes you think a metric fuckton of 21st-Century marketing jobs haven't been added since the times of Mad Men? We're here discussing an out-of-control privacy robbing problem right now. And enough of pointing to fictional Hollywood as some kind of metric. The real world is barely believable, and we love to exaggerate history on the silver screen.
And no, American GDP was not always buried solidly in outrageous consumer spending and obscene debt
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While I can sense the sarcasm here, be careful what you ask for. When seventy percent of American GDP is derived from consumer spending, the pimps in marketing tend to make the world go round. For better or worse, advertising and marketing create a metric fuckton of jobs.
The money will still be there to spend if on-line tracking goes away. It may not get spent the way the current crop of pimps, or their clients, want, but, hey, that's not the consumer's problem. After too many years of riding the (relatively) easy data-mining gravy train, the pimps will need to start working again. Either find other ways of reaching consumers, or yield the field to a new generation who will.
The other issue are the companies who generate income by gathering and selling harvested data. Not
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While I can sense the sarcasm here, be careful what you ask for. When seventy percent of American GDP is derived from consumer spending, the pimps in marketing tend to make the world go round. For better or worse, advertising and marketing create a metric fuckton of jobs.
Advertising can't die fast enough.
Yeah, and neither can the fucking ignorance that completely misses the point.
I know how caustic marketing and advertising has become. I'm not some damn fan, and don't like it any more than you do. Go ahead. Shitcan it all. Do it tomorrow. Watch the world "magically" become a better place.
Then get back to me as to how the fuck you feel when your taxes are paying for that decision when unemployment goes through the roof rather permanently. There are a lot more pimps out there than you assume.
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This is just about TRACKING for TARGETED marketing, not all marketing. The economy still worked back in the day when everyone saw the same commercials.
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This is just about TRACKING for TARGETED marketing, not all marketing. The economy still worked back in the day when everyone saw the same commercials.
But GP wasn't talking about TRACKING for TARGETED marketing. They specified "If all 'advertising and marketing'," not targeted.
Ad will end in 180 seconds (Score:2)
The economy still worked back in the day when everyone saw the same commercials.
When everyone saw the same commercials, they were unskippable in 180-second blocks at a time. Do you want interstitials? Because banning targeting is a good way to bring back interstitials.
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The economy still worked back in the day when everyone saw the same commercials.
When everyone saw the same commercials, they were unskippable in 180-second blocks at a time. Do you want interstitials? Because banning targeting is a good way to bring back interstitials.
Good point, and now we must think of the psychological impact of this, since spoiled humans tend to lose their fucking minds within the four seconds it takes to generate the "Skip Ad" button.
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Advertising can't die fast enough.
Enjoy your new life of paying a subscription for every page you read on the Web.
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Enjoy your new web, only containing sites that are actually worth money, and not just worthless crap you can get anywhere, financed by manipulating vicrims into wasting money for more worthless crap.
The horror!
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Why would a court in France give a flying fuck about American GDP?
They are hoping that an EU court will by reflex action impose huge fines on Apple for being a (ptui!) American company.
Re: Oh no! (Score:2)
Why would a court in France give a flying fuck about American GDP?
They are hoping that an EU court will by reflex action impose huge fines on Apple for being a (ptui!) American company.
Precisely!
Much like many Slashdotters will automatically gainsay almost anything Apple does, just because it came from (ptui!) Apple.
Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually the case already that they must get affirmative, opt-in, no strings attached permission to track you because of GDPR.
The fact that they try to claim they did because they buried it in the EULA of their app is bullshit. It has to be up-front and clear what they are requesting. Apple is doing the right thing here, this is how it's supposed to work.
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The GDPR does not allow free services to mandate opting in to non-essential personal data use to get the service either. Consent must be freely given, and that means no incentives or encouragement by refusing to offer the service otherwise.
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For example if there is a news website that is published on the open internet, not behind a paywall, it cannot block people because they rejected tracking cookies.
The ICO has a clear explanation here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organis... [ico.org.uk]
The belief that a a "cookie wall" is allowed seems to stem from a misunderstanding of what a "legitimate purpose" is. The ICO is very clear about it: "This does not include third parties such as analytics services or online advertising." Furthermore
"If your use of a cookie wall
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It's like asking if the point of the law is to put criminals out of work. They built their businesses on data-rape, it's on them if people don't like that and want protection from it.
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How about simply offering this as an incentive:
By opting in to personalized ads, you will not receive the same ad for the same product more than once every 30 days.
Since really the ad's entire purpose is to try and convince someone who wouldn't have *OTHERWISE* bought the product to do so, it seems that the best chance the ad has of doing this is if the person either haven't heard of the product and is seeing the ad for the first time, or the last time they thought about the product was long enough ago
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Apple said that its own data collection doesn't count as tracking because fuck you, that's why.
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Apple said that its own data collection doesn't count as tracking because fuck you, that's why.
I don't see how "because we have a history of not sharing it with other businesses" is the same as "because intercourse you."
Doubt this will be seen as antitrust issues (Score:3)
It depends if this is Apple's attempt to strong arm their own data collection and advertising business at the expense of others. Based on their actions thus far unless they are bolstering their own business in direct competition to these guys it will be unlikely that this is considered an antitrust issue.
Anti-trust law does not preclude a company from deciding that they don't want that kind of shit on their platform, unless they do so in order to introduce their own same tasting shit.
Prediction: This will go nowhere.
iOS 14's Upcoming Anti-Tracking Prompt (Score:2)
Re: iOS 14's Upcoming Anti-Tracking Prompt (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: This will be fun to watch (Score:2)
Re: This will be fun to watch (Score:2)
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Apple said that its own data collection doesn't count as tracking because it doesn't share the data with other companies.
Is it possible to opt out of Apple's tracking? If not, then this definitely counts as an abuse of monopoly... Monopoly on tracking, I guess.
Re: This will be fun to watch (Score:2)
Privacy - analytics - share analytics - off
Privacy - advertising - limit ad tracking - on
Privacy - advertising - reset advertising identifier
Wifi - off
Bluetooth - off
Airdrop, handoff, CarPlay - off
Siri and Search - turn everything off.
Delete Apple News, Music, etc. Also delete all Google apps, Facebook, Twitter.
Install Firefox for iOS, turn off all image display (prevents loading of web bugs, social media tracking icons, graphical ads, videos).
I don't think so (Score:3)
"alleges that the wording of Apple's permission prompt will lead most users to decline tracking of their device's advertising identifier, "
We'd decline no matter what the wording would be, we'd do it right now without any word at all.
Easier solution (Score:2)
Just kill the advertising identifier. That will hurt them more and harass the users less.
Re: Easier solution (Score:2)
Dear Amazon (Score:1)
kthxbye
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Re: Dear Amazon (Score:2)
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Original tweet here: https://twitter.com/baldbeardb... [twitter.com]
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truth! I bought PC Learning games for my kids in the early 2000s and they still send me "Because you bought 'Where in the World is Carmen San Diego' " almost 20 years later.
Yesterday story: Apple making Search Engine (Score:2)
Today's story, they'll make it likely users will reduce tracking by other services while Apple still collects data.
Sounds like a symbiotic plan to empower their search engine.
To be fair: I'm an Apple user and not an Apple basher, but these two tidbits together seem suspicious.
Advertising... (Score:1)
Re: Advertising... (Score:2)
To the advertisers, we are the product. But to google, the advertisers are the product, to be harvested/screwed over as much as possible.
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I personally have never bought anything because of a google or other ad.
You sure? Can you be sure you've never made a purchase that you wouldn't have if you haven't seen an ad?
Why would anyone buy a car after being shown different cars for over and over again ? Do people really buy a car because they have seen the same ad 1000x times ?
Enough do. Maybe. Although the real thing with advertising is: no one buys a product they don't know exists. Part of the point to advertising is ensuring people are aware a product or service exists at all. Ensuring that people are kept aware that a product exists at all can get them to purchase it when they're ready to buy.
Actually, though, I agree with you: advertising is a giant scam and the people sel
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Yes it does. (Score:2)
Why not just make ads illegal? (Score:2)
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Then products will spread only by word of mouth based on their merits.
Who would spread knowledge of a brand new product the first time?
I guess we will learn (Score:2)
Your honor! (Score:2)
It's not fair! Why do I need my wife's permission to fuck her!?
A new business model may emerge (Score:2)
If this complaint is rejected, advertisers may have to offer incentives to individuals, probably as product discounts, for granting permission to track.
How about No (Score:2)
How about we just say no to this personalized ad nonsense? If we do that we obviously erode the profits of companies that have made billions by tracking us. It'd be a simple fix to all of this.
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If you want users to opt in.... (Score:2)
Otherwise, you are just coming across as a company who is whining about another company doing something that might actually improve a user experience, but simultaneously may make it harder for you to profit.
That's not antitrust, that's dependency on a business model that doesn't actually cater to customer demand and whining about it as your business model stops making money. Fix your business model. Gi
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Per here, it appears that apple defines "value" as "paid functionality". [apple.com]
The only other requirements are that the app must not attempt to trick or deceive users to get them to agree to be tracked.
So it seems obvious to me that if you offer something to users who agree to be tracked that they cannot get absolutely *ANY* other way, then you should be good to go.
Then it must be working great! (Score:2)
They could not have gotten a better promotion for this feature if they paid for it! If these guys are willing to sue over it, then it must actually be working great.
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So why does Apple claim a right to track, then? They beg off their tracking by claiming it's not third party. Why should they track at all?
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To make Apple Maps work. The information collected from your apps is part of what creates their database of locations and roads.
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Re: Apple sells ads? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google and Facebook and Twitter are advertising businesses. Apple makes its money off its products.
The problem with advertising is that the more there is, the less valuable each ad is, and the less valuable all ads in the aggregate are. People have become ad blind.
Most people know how to block ads and ad trackers, and the rest will learn, or get products that block tracking by default.
What are advertisers going to do if someone comes out with a browser that doesn't load ad trackers, ads, embedded videos and images by default? That modified the HTML before it tres to display it so that none of that crap never actually reaches the display subsystem? Sue?
Probably a few lawyers letters, which can be ignored.
Re: Apple sells ads? (Score:1)
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Ever heard of "Apple Search Ads"?
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perhaps they are planning to, so are doing this preemptively? there was a news article just a few days ago that they are silently creating their own search engine. maybe they want a piece of google's pie.
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If Biden wins, don't worry. We'll address it then.
Let's all hope Hunter Biden is a boring footnote of history in a few weeks.
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Stop hiding and come out of the closet already.
Re: Another attack on your freedoms. (Score:1)
Collusion to track a user (Score:2)
As I understand it: It's OK for one company to track a user through use of that one company's websites and apps. It isn't OK for multiple companies, such as participants in an ad exchange, to collude to track a user across multiple companies' websites and apps.