7 ms·

Apple’s content blocking is chemo for the cancer of adtech

35 points by cpeterso 11y ago

iwwr 11y ago
This isn't the end of tracking, just the platform owners angling in on the market and setting up toll booths for advertisers. It does have the advantage of potentially less tracking overall, but personal data is still valuable and Apple just wants a piece of the pie on something they perceive they own. Tracking will be allowed as long as it doesn't significantly impact the user's experience or over-burden the data usage.
- egypturnash 11y ago
  Sounds like it's entirely up to the author of the block app (and the user's choices in configuring that) to determine what's blocked. Think about how much tracking most desktop adblockers also block.
- eridius 11y ago
  This is not true. Apple most emphatically does not want a slice of the pie that is personal data. They've made it clear time and time again that they do not want your personal data, they do not monetize it, they do not collect anything more than aggregate statistics necessary to improve their own products[1], and Tim Cook has made it very clear that Apple's executive leadership values privacy very highly. Unlike a lot of other companies (cough Google cough), Apple makes money by selling hardware and software. They do not make it by monetizing your data. And they view this as a competitive advantage. [1] For example, you can bet they collect aggregate statistics on Spotlight searches that search the web, but they get rid of any personally-identifying information, so they can't tell anything about any given user (i.e. no tracking).
  - eropple 11y ago
    > They've made it clear time and time again that they do not want your personal data Until they do. Which may or may not happen, but remains an extant problem regardless. Relying on the beneficence of a corporate entity is never a wise decision.
    - eridius 11y ago
      This is a preposterous statement. This is not about relying on their beneficence. This is about relying on the core values of the company, the things that the company views as a competitive advantage, the things that the company believes is one of the reasons why they've achieved unprecedented success and made boatloads of money. So you're actually relying on capitalism. The argument for why other companies (like Google) do want your personal data is the exact same one for why Apple doesn't. Because that's how they make money. You might as well claim that Google may one day decide to just throw out all the personal data they have on everyone and become a charitable organization that gives away its software out of the goodness of its heart. There is literally no reason to think Apple will change course about this, besides complete ignorance about how Apple works and what the core values that Apple believes in are.
      - na85 11y ago
        >This is about relying on the core values of the company, the things that the company views as a competitive advantage, the things that the company believes is one of the reasons why they've achieved unprecedented success and made boatloads of money. You're being incredibly naive. History has shown us again and again that all companies will eventually screw their users over to make a quick buck. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sooner or later some MBA grad will get shuffled in to a C-level position and decide that they can harness that good ol' Big Data for profit.
        eridius 11y ago
        That's not even remotely true. Every company has some amount of data on their customers (some more, some less), and the overwhelming majority of them don't abuse that data. The problem is you're treating Apple exactly as you would treat Google or some other company giving away its products for free, which is complete nonsense. Of course the companies giving away their products for free are going to have to monetize the customer data they have in order to make money. But Apple doesn't give away its products for free. It sells them. It's exactly like the millions of other companies in the world that charge money for their products and don't attempt to monetize their customer data.
reustle 11y ago
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Apple is (indirectly) going after any ad that they themselves don't power with iAd. Is that even considered "fair", in a legal sense? Seems pretty anti-competitive.
- Zr40 11y ago
  It's a different domain. Content blocking only applies to Safari. iAd ads only appear in third party apps if the developer chooses to use them. They could also use a different ads provider. That's not affected by content blocking because it's not a web page inside Safari.
  - gcb0 11y ago
    we don't know their plans for the future. as long as it is a webview, they own it.
    - Zr40 11y ago
      The future doesn't apply today. Today, webviews don't implement content blocking. GGP appeared to assume webviews did implement that.
- gcb0 11y ago
  fair have never been a problem at apple. http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/10/4510338/apple-found-guilty-of-ebook-price-fixing http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/10/4510338/apple-found-guilty... http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-rejects-324-5m-wage-fixing-settlement-struck-by-apple-google-others/ http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-rejects-324-5m-wage-fixing-se...
- eridius 11y ago
  That's complete nonsense. They're providing content blocking in Safari. They're not blocking in-app ads, which is the area that iAd competes in, so they're not harming any iAd competitors.
cbeach 11y ago
Personally I don't care about tracking if it means advertisers show me adverts I might want to click on (and thus the ecosystem I use can be funded). But I do care about adverts that aren't targeted to my needs and wants. I'd block those if I could, and leave the targeted ads alone.
WalterGR 11y ago
How likely is it that these apps will be built? 100%. One of those is Crystal, by Dean Murphy. His pitches: ... Pages render more than 3.9x faster on average. How is that measured? Do ads delay the rendering of the important, non-ad content by nearly 4x? Or does that content render before ads, and the ads take a long time to render? Put another way: am I going to see the content I care about 3.9x faster?
- eridius 11y ago
  Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing the content until you've clicked through the ad, then I think it's safe to say that removing the ad lets you see the content faster.
  - WalterGR 11y ago
    Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing the content until you've clicked through the ad In my experience, ads on mobile that don't block you from seeing content are more common than those that do. I wonder if anyone has any hard data on this.
- threeseed 11y ago
  There is a benchmark of various web blockers and the testing methodology: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested-for-best-performance/view-all/ https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested... It's not just about rendering time. There is implications for battery life which on phones is obviously pretty important.
- tdicola 11y ago
  Dan Kaminsky has a great presentation from the latest Defcon a few weeks ago about how ads and other junk on the web eat up a ton of CPU cycles and slow down page rendering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wx2TnaRSGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wx2TnaRSGs
hoodoof 11y ago
I'm happy with advertising. It pays for all the free stuff. Apple wants to kill all the free content so you only have the choice of paying Apple to do anything. Companies built around an advertising model should detect and reject Apple browsers. Individuals who value getting free stuff on the web should switch to non Apple browsers to show support for advertising.
- panabee 11y ago
  Not to mention killing ads kills the primary revenue source for its primary competitor. (90% of Google's revenue in 2014 came from ads.) Though to be clear, Apple isn't trying to nuke all ads. It's just trying to steer people away from the web and toward apps.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    I hope they succeed. Web is for interactive content not apps. <rant mode> too many scars of web projects trying to replicate desktop experience with pixel perfect requirement across browsers. </rant mode>
- onion2k 11y ago
  I'm happy with advertising. It pays for all the free stuff. But not magically with free money that just appears when a company decides to buy an advert. Adverts are paid for by businesses that consequently charge a little more for their goods and services, a cost passed directly to you and me. We don't get free services, we get services that we pay for indirectly through other things. Free is a myth.
  - hoodoof 11y ago
    Yes it's an ecosystem I want to be healthy. Many, many software engineers have jobs and many startups exist because there is an advertising ecosystem. The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy. In whose interest is it to kill that? Apple should stop advertising if it hates advertising so much.
vacri 11y ago
Is this really the right reference to go for? Chemo is universally hated, makes you look like not yourself, makes you throw up and feel sick all the time, steals all your energy, and, importantly, often does not work.
- na85 11y ago
  While I agree with you, chemotherapy is the layperson's only term for most cancer treatment. And make no mistake, advertising is a cancer that needs to be judiciously dealt with. But this particular meme is derived from the bad old days of /b/ when most threads were spammed with stuff like >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/
Animats 11y ago
Can you block Apples iAd, too? This looks like what Apple did with payments on IOS - only Apple's payment system is allowed, and Apple takes a 30% cut.
- liviu 11y ago
  We are talking here about Safari content blocking. iAd ads are not displayed in Safari, they are for native applications and you can display ads from whatever publisher you want in your native app.
tomlock 11y ago
My theory is this is Apple's attempt to push people working in adtech towards Apple's Google-Analytics analogues. It is getting a bit ridiculous how bluntly Google (the incumbent), Apple (whoa we track mobiles really well) and Facebook (wahey, we track real people, come over here) are all trying to push adtech people onto their platforms. They are now truly going for the Enterprise market, and are looking to lock them in.
- hayksaakian 11y ago
  Do Facebook and Apple really have an analytics platform anywhere as good as Google analytics? If one of them acquires kissmetrics or mixpanel of something I'd believe you but having used facebook's business interface first hand it's only good at analytics "on facebook" it tells you very little about your actual site even if you have their pixels on every page. With Google I can see my marketing funnel from on every platform.
  - tomlock 11y ago
    I totally agree, but having a bad platform hasn't stopped people trying to sell theirs to enterprise, afaik.
Asbostos 11y ago
Is this really different from what AdBlock already does on every platform? It looks like the key feature is that the adblocker app doesn't have to have access to your browsing data. But people will still have to install it, just like they already have to install existing adblockers.

35 points by cpeterso 11y ago

iwwr 11y ago

This isn't the end of tracking, just the platform owners angling in on the market and setting up toll booths for advertisers. It does have the advantage of potentially less tracking overall, but personal data is still valuable and Apple just wants a piece of the pie on something they perceive they own. Tracking will be allowed as long as it doesn't significantly impact the user's experience or over-burden the data usage.

egypturnash 11y ago
Sounds like it's entirely up to the author of the block app (and the user's choices in configuring that) to determine what's blocked. Think about how much tracking most desktop adblockers also block.
eridius 11y ago
This is not true. Apple most emphatically does not want a slice of the pie that is personal data. They've made it clear time and time again that they do not want your personal data, they do not monetize it, they do not collect anything more than aggregate statistics necessary to improve their own products[1], and Tim Cook has made it very clear that Apple's executive leadership values privacy very highly. Unlike a lot of other companies (cough Google cough), Apple makes money by selling hardware and software. They do not make it by monetizing your data. And they view this as a competitive advantage. [1] For example, you can bet they collect aggregate statistics on Spotlight searches that search the web, but they get rid of any personally-identifying information, so they can't tell anything about any given user (i.e. no tracking).
- eropple 11y ago
  > They've made it clear time and time again that they do not want your personal data Until they do. Which may or may not happen, but remains an extant problem regardless. Relying on the beneficence of a corporate entity is never a wise decision.
  - eridius 11y ago
    This is a preposterous statement. This is not about relying on their beneficence. This is about relying on the core values of the company, the things that the company views as a competitive advantage, the things that the company believes is one of the reasons why they've achieved unprecedented success and made boatloads of money. So you're actually relying on capitalism. The argument for why other companies (like Google) do want your personal data is the exact same one for why Apple doesn't. Because that's how they make money. You might as well claim that Google may one day decide to just throw out all the personal data they have on everyone and become a charitable organization that gives away its software out of the goodness of its heart. There is literally no reason to think Apple will change course about this, besides complete ignorance about how Apple works and what the core values that Apple believes in are.
    - na85 11y ago
      >This is about relying on the core values of the company, the things that the company views as a competitive advantage, the things that the company believes is one of the reasons why they've achieved unprecedented success and made boatloads of money. You're being incredibly naive. History has shown us again and again that all companies will eventually screw their users over to make a quick buck. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sooner or later some MBA grad will get shuffled in to a C-level position and decide that they can harness that good ol' Big Data for profit.
      - eridius 11y ago
        That's not even remotely true. Every company has some amount of data on their customers (some more, some less), and the overwhelming majority of them don't abuse that data. The problem is you're treating Apple exactly as you would treat Google or some other company giving away its products for free, which is complete nonsense. Of course the companies giving away their products for free are going to have to monetize the customer data they have in order to make money. But Apple doesn't give away its products for free. It sells them. It's exactly like the millions of other companies in the world that charge money for their products and don't attempt to monetize their customer data.

reustle 11y ago

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Apple is (indirectly) going after any ad that they themselves don't power with iAd. Is that even considered "fair", in a legal sense? Seems pretty anti-competitive.

Zr40 11y ago
It's a different domain. Content blocking only applies to Safari. iAd ads only appear in third party apps if the developer chooses to use them. They could also use a different ads provider. That's not affected by content blocking because it's not a web page inside Safari.
- gcb0 11y ago
  we don't know their plans for the future. as long as it is a webview, they own it.
  - Zr40 11y ago
    The future doesn't apply today. Today, webviews don't implement content blocking. GGP appeared to assume webviews did implement that.
gcb0 11y ago
fair have never been a problem at apple. http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/10/4510338/apple-found-guilty-of-ebook-price-fixing http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/10/4510338/apple-found-guilty... http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-rejects-324-5m-wage-fixing-settlement-struck-by-apple-google-others/ http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-rejects-324-5m-wage-fixing-se...
eridius 11y ago
That's complete nonsense. They're providing content blocking in Safari. They're not blocking in-app ads, which is the area that iAd competes in, so they're not harming any iAd competitors.

cbeach 11y ago

Personally I don't care about tracking if it means advertisers show me adverts I might want to click on (and thus the ecosystem I use can be funded). But I do care about adverts that aren't targeted to my needs and wants. I'd block those if I could, and leave the targeted ads alone.

WalterGR 11y ago

How likely is it that these apps will be built? 100%. One of those is Crystal, by Dean Murphy. His pitches: ... Pages render more than 3.9x faster on average. How is that measured? Do ads delay the rendering of the important, non-ad content by nearly 4x? Or does that content render before ads, and the ads take a long time to render? Put another way: am I going to see the content I care about 3.9x faster?

eridius 11y ago
Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing the content until you've clicked through the ad, then I think it's safe to say that removing the ad lets you see the content faster.
- WalterGR 11y ago
  Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing the content until you've clicked through the ad In my experience, ads on mobile that don't block you from seeing content are more common than those that do. I wonder if anyone has any hard data on this.
threeseed 11y ago
There is a benchmark of various web blockers and the testing methodology: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested-for-best-performance/view-all/ https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested... It's not just about rendering time. There is implications for battery life which on phones is obviously pretty important.
tdicola 11y ago
Dan Kaminsky has a great presentation from the latest Defcon a few weeks ago about how ads and other junk on the web eat up a ton of CPU cycles and slow down page rendering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wx2TnaRSGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wx2TnaRSGs

hoodoof 11y ago

I'm happy with advertising. It pays for all the free stuff. Apple wants to kill all the free content so you only have the choice of paying Apple to do anything. Companies built around an advertising model should detect and reject Apple browsers. Individuals who value getting free stuff on the web should switch to non Apple browsers to show support for advertising.

panabee 11y ago
Not to mention killing ads kills the primary revenue source for its primary competitor. (90% of Google's revenue in 2014 came from ads.) Though to be clear, Apple isn't trying to nuke all ads. It's just trying to steer people away from the web and toward apps.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  I hope they succeed. Web is for interactive content not apps. <rant mode> too many scars of web projects trying to replicate desktop experience with pixel perfect requirement across browsers. </rant mode>
onion2k 11y ago
I'm happy with advertising. It pays for all the free stuff. But not magically with free money that just appears when a company decides to buy an advert. Adverts are paid for by businesses that consequently charge a little more for their goods and services, a cost passed directly to you and me. We don't get free services, we get services that we pay for indirectly through other things. Free is a myth.
- hoodoof 11y ago
  Yes it's an ecosystem I want to be healthy. Many, many software engineers have jobs and many startups exist because there is an advertising ecosystem. The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy. In whose interest is it to kill that? Apple should stop advertising if it hates advertising so much.

vacri 11y ago

Is this really the right reference to go for? Chemo is universally hated, makes you look like not yourself, makes you throw up and feel sick all the time, steals all your energy, and, importantly, often does not work.

na85 11y ago
While I agree with you, chemotherapy is the layperson's only term for most cancer treatment. And make no mistake, advertising is a cancer that needs to be judiciously dealt with. But this particular meme is derived from the bad old days of /b/ when most threads were spammed with stuff like >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/ >XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

Animats 11y ago

Can you block Apples iAd, too? This looks like what Apple did with payments on IOS - only Apple's payment system is allowed, and Apple takes a 30% cut.

liviu 11y ago
We are talking here about Safari content blocking. iAd ads are not displayed in Safari, they are for native applications and you can display ads from whatever publisher you want in your native app.

tomlock 11y ago

My theory is this is Apple's attempt to push people working in adtech towards Apple's Google-Analytics analogues. It is getting a bit ridiculous how bluntly Google (the incumbent), Apple (whoa we track mobiles really well) and Facebook (wahey, we track real people, come over here) are all trying to push adtech people onto their platforms. They are now truly going for the Enterprise market, and are looking to lock them in.

hayksaakian 11y ago
Do Facebook and Apple really have an analytics platform anywhere as good as Google analytics? If one of them acquires kissmetrics or mixpanel of something I'd believe you but having used facebook's business interface first hand it's only good at analytics "on facebook" it tells you very little about your actual site even if you have their pixels on every page. With Google I can see my marketing funnel from on every platform.
- tomlock 11y ago
  I totally agree, but having a bad platform hasn't stopped people trying to sell theirs to enterprise, afaik.

Asbostos 11y ago

Is this really different from what AdBlock already does on every platform? It looks like the key feature is that the adblocker app doesn't have to have access to your browsing data. But people will still have to install it, just like they already have to install existing adblockers.