14 ms·

Apple will attempt to jam Facebook's web-tracking tools

313 points by NoB4Mouth 8y ago

zerostar07 8y ago
How to do GDPR correctly.
fnwx17 8y ago
> Apple's attempts to block data tracking as you travel around the web could have a real impact on companies that rely on your personal information to make their billions. asking the people that working in adtech, cross-device usage prediction and the likes: do you actually think it will disrupt your business or there are always workarounds and are relatively chill about it?
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  I think there's actually very minor benefits to the type of tracking that unauthenticated that they're doing, so while they might be able to track less, it won't have a material impact.
- endymi0n 8y ago
  Apple attacks the core primitives of Adtech very strategically with this update. This is very smart actually, much better than the first iteration. They're going after the meat right away, like cookie synchronization ("Tracker collusion") and the first-party tracker hack that Criteo pioneered, effectively disabling almost all the tracking possibilities on iOS. As a user, this is awesome. And if you want to track, you need to provide both value (i.e. an authenticated service) as well as get explicit consent from the user. Unfortunately, this will also serve to concentrate the power in the hands of Google and Facebook, who have and/or will create such authenticated embeds. Note that all this hardtalk specifically excludes the mobile ad IDs. Apple would face much more headwind from GOOG and FB if they went about killing these. This is going to be very interesting, as Apple will need to carefully tread up to a point, after which there could be harsher repercussions. They also know that an iPhone without access to Google Maps, Search, Mail, Authenticator, Youtube and a whole lot of other essential services won't be worth much to end users anymore. Source: I'm working in Adtech, but we chose a different approach of giving users an actual benefit and being careful, compliant and frugal with data. All these recent updates about Apple and GDPR mainly hit the really bad players of the industry that just hoard sensitive data through shady channels and arbitrage it to hell — and I consider that a good thing.
  - flafla2 8y ago
    > They also know that an iPhone without access to Google Maps, Search, Mail, Authenticator, Youtube and a whole lot of other essential services won't be worth much to end users anymore. Google Authenticator => Authy (it reimplements google auth) Search => Safari Gmail => Native Mail (its not like Google will drop IMAP support) Killing YouTube on iOS would be pretty bad for Apple, but I’m sure that wouldn’t be profitable for Google (cutting off a third of an already-unprofitable company? no thanks). What’s left bedides that, Google docs? Well Apple has their own suite so does Microsoft. And they both have web editors that rival Google Docs and support multi-user editing. In general I’m pretty skeptical about this assertion that Apple “can’t” step on Google’s toes.
    - Aaargh20318 8y ago
      > Google Authenticator => Authy (it reimplements google auth) It doesn't reimplement Google Auth. Both are just different implementations of RFC 6238.
    - oldcynic 8y ago
      Authy want an email before you can do anything with it, and is cloud centred, so that's probably just sending your usage to someone else. Try OTP Auth[0] on iOS that fully respects privacy and security. It was Authy asking for email first that prompted me to search and find this. [0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/otp-auth/id659877384 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/otp-auth/id659877384
      - flafla2 8y ago
        Authy encrypts all of your data with a private passkey that is never sent to Twilio (the parent company) [0]. I found the ability to sync 2FA across devices to be convenient and a good compromise to “if you lose your phone, you’re screwed.” I can understand both perspectives, but I think Authy has done a great job at improving the usability of 2FA without sacrificing security. This is certainly more secure than SMS-based 2FA which most people currently use. (Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Twilio. I am not involved with Authy in any way) [0] https://support.authy.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001932768-Authy-Backups-Password-Retrieval https://support.authy.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001932768-Aut...
- Eridrus 8y ago
  I used to work in adtech, though not the parts focussed on tracking folks. I think this will cause some disruption for people in the short term, and if Apple stays committed to this line of attack, it could really have a long term impact. But on the other hand, IP+UA is a very good signal when you don't have a lot of devices behind NAT, and if you just have a Facebook ServiceWorker installed, it could track all of the IP addresses you use. And there is nothing preventing first-party tracking, e.g. what if Facebook starts a "Facebook Publishing Platform" which is basically a section of Facebook.com designed to ensure that you get all the user tracking as before. Or what if publications now ask for "Login with Facebook to read this article".
atulvi 8y ago
I read apple jam and instantly went out to get bread
hellofunk 8y ago
Apple is putting itself in an entertaining position in the industry. Most big tech firms have a business model that depends on user data. By explicitly taking the other side of that model, a fascinating new conflict is emerging between tech giants. And Apple is at least positioning itself on the sympathetic side of billions of users in this arena. This conflict will not die down -- the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection, so this tech war will only get more pronounced and dramatic as time passes.
- onion2k 8y ago
  the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection They can though - they can go back to untargetted advertising based on page content as they were doing 10 years ago. All the personal tracking data is a layer on top of that tech aiming to improve the 'targettedness' of adverts. Nothing in the online ad industry really needs any of that personal data, and arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway.
  - hyperbovine 8y ago
    Look at the revenue of those companies 10ya vs. today.
    - mapleoin 8y ago
      Correlation does not imply causation.
      - onetimemanytime 8y ago
        they are certainly not charging less for targeted ads, the opposite is true.
      - Maro 8y ago
        Not strictly related to this discussion, but perhaps worth sharing. I worked at a smaller tech company, and we kept saying "Correlation does not imply causation", and trying to come up with ways to separate them, etc. We spent/wasted a lot of time on this, explaining it to non-mathy people (which leads to even less confidence in data). Then I went to work at one of the big tech companies, which is probably one of the best in the world at testing/data for product, and there I never heard it. If there was correlation, unless it was clearly spurious or a statistical fluke, they pushed on it hard. "It looks like more X means more DAUs. So let's manufacture more X." And it works pretty well for that company. My takeaway is, I stopped thinking about this too much. Today, if there's correlation, unless it's clearly spurious/etc, and unless somebody has a better idea, I tell the product/eng team to push hard on it and don't even mention correlation vs causation.
spac 8y ago
This is why I reward, and will keep rewarding Apple with my money. In a capitalistic system, voting with dollars may effect the change that voting with ballots may not.
- klez 8y ago
  Honest question: how do people with less money vote, then?
  - omnimus 8y ago
    They don't.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - spac 8y ago
    To be clear I was not endorsing the current system, as much as observing that monetary incentives are powerful motivators for companies to change their behavior. Also, not all currencies require income: when using DuckDuckGo instead of Gooogle, one is redirecting ad money from one company to the other; or think of Keybase teams vs Slack, Gitlab vs. GitHub, etc. Every choice we make can affect whether money is sent the way of companies that share our principles or not.
  - hydrox24 8y ago
    > voting with dollars may effect the change that voting with ballots may not This does not mean 'real' change is only created by consumption. I think spac means that consumption may well affect what political institutions do not. So people with less money can still use their political votes to change many things. I would contest the idea that they do not vote (significantly) as consumers though. People with less money still have some money, and rich people don't buy ten iPhones, while many poorer people do still buy one as the richest people do too, so any kind of consumption with a very steep decline in marginal benefit probably hands out power to individuals in the market more equitably than you would otherwise expect.
  - izacus 8y ago
geokon 8y ago
I think it'd be nice to have a browser option where it simply won't load content from outside of the current domain. Though at the moment that would break a lot of the web, it'd be a much more neutral solution. To me what's more alarming than Facebook is what percentage of websites load fonts/js/analytics from Google (even Freedesktop.org did till I pointed it out on their mailist). They don't get a referral link (I think?) but they still effectively know when you're online or not Apple blacklisting sites/companies is honestly more scary... that's basically anti-net-neutrality.. if you're naughty (or Apple doesn't like you) you can't have your images loaded?
- babuskov 8y ago
  > I think it'd be nice to have a browser option where it simply won't load content from outside of the current domain. Though at the moment that would break a lot of the web I have been using RequestPolicy Firefox extension for that for years. You can manually approve domains (ex. let website X load stuff from domain Y as well), so once you figure out which of the dozen other domains it tries to connect to is serving static content (CSS, images) it works great. Unfortunately, new Firefox broke this, so you can only use it with Firefox ESR currently.
- exergy 8y ago
  Umatrix does a significant portion of what you desire. You can set global rules, so I always block Facebook. I have a separate browser for stuff like banking where I don't want to break the websites by blocking JS. As to your second point, I think there's a huge, gaping chasm between apple blocking Facebook's tracking and the collapse of civilization at the hands of apple's alleged anti net neutrality.
- gregoriol 8y ago
  > simply won't load content from outside of the current domain This would be a very bad idea! First because it will break a lot of legit use-cases: CDNs, distributed architectures, SSO, payment gateways, ... Second because it won't actually prevent the tracking: it would be easy to make a subdomain and point it to Google Analytics or any ad network to "re-enable".
ourmandave 8y ago
From this link below, it looks like Apple doesn't collect much data on you to begin with (vs Facebook, Google, and Twitter). I asked Apple for all my data. Here's what was sent back https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-request/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r... So is Apple trying to position itself as the Data Protector Platform You Can Trust? Like how The New York Times has seen a record increase in subscriptions because of fake news.
ddtaylor 8y ago
Is this a change to how they handle CORS overall or specifically a peephole check for Facebook?
- dbbk 8y ago
  I think it's a change to iframe loading.
wyclif 8y ago
As of right now, you can't post this story on Facebook. Coincidence?
- cricalix 8y ago
  Seems like coincidence, because it's not just that link. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/ fails too.
  - cosmojg 8y ago
    Why would Facebook block BBC?
_cs2017_ 8y ago
The economic value of ad personalization is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars a year. A part of that value goes to Facebook, Google, and other social media and advertising firms. A part goes to publishers, who provide free shit such as news to billions of people. A part goes to advertisers who get to sell more stuff. A part goes to consumers who get to see the aforementioned free news, plus occasionally see slightly less shitty ads. When Apple blocks user data, it destroys a lot of economic value, which costs jobs; a lot of them are in the US since the biggest advertisers, publishers, and ad firms are US based. Maybe it's worth it because privacy. But it certainly hurts millions of people who depend, directly or indirectly, on the effectiveness of ads.
- soneil 8y ago
  I can't really think of a nicer way to say this: I don't care. I get the theory. I get that everyone wants everything for free, and many providers still need a return. But we've let adtech run wild, and they've just got scummier and scummier. "When in hole, stop digging". adtech really need to start taking responsibility for their own actions. They've been at war with users for far too long, and still play victim when the user doesn't appreciate it.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    One the one hand, I agree wholeheartedly. But then there is reality. You can make two equally nice services, and charge a nominal fee for one while making the other one free but with lots of offensive advertising and tracking ... and you could tell users the truth about all of it ... and still, the 'free' one would dominate and the paid one would go out of business. This is the world we live in.
  - _cs2017_ 8y ago
    When your say "scummier", are you referring to Facebook ads that follow your recent activity online? Or something else? On another note, as you put it, everyone wants everything for free. Is it really your place to tell them they can't have it, by disrupting the flow of money that makes that free stuff possible?
projectramo 8y ago
About 5 to 8 years after I expected it but a welcome decision
iliaznk 8y ago
So it really does have to do with Facebook services only? That's what I thought yesterday, but still wasn't sure. Why not all social media then? What if I do want to share/like stuff? Just don't use Safari?
- whywhywhywhy 8y ago
  Safari has a button that opens the OS share dialog. To be fair it never made any sense digging around a webpage for a like/tweet button to share something anyway.
  - iliaznk 8y ago
    That's a different story, but cutting off selectively just one party only reminds me of Orwell's "some are more equal".
    - whywhywhywhy 8y ago
      It's not one party, they just said share buttons so that would include Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pintrest, etc
      - iliaznk 8y ago
        That I have no problems with. But in media I've only seen references to Facebook. If this https://webkit.org/blog/8311/intelligent-tracking-prevention-2-0/ https://webkit.org/blog/8311/intelligent-tracking-prevention... is the actual implementation, then it's good.
  - hgzlriudh749383 8y ago
    I use a content blocker Quiet https://itunes.apple.com/app/quiet/id1315398116?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/app/quiet/id1315398116?mt=8 for Safari on iOS to delete those share buttons on websites. The share buttons and counters are so useless!!
yedawg 8y ago
zucc buys relationship with Apple by handing over user data. A few years later and apple rebukes facebook by jacking what I assume is sandboxed javascript when facebook has bad pr
sametmax 8y ago
So like firefox with the facebook container ? But with more PR ?
victor106 8y ago
Apple should provide a default VPN service for all traffic that would be killer.
j2bax 8y ago
Does anyone know what Apple's stance is on using Facebook/Google/etc for targeted advertising of their own products? My assumption would be that they use every tool at their disposal to advertise/sell their products, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised and find out that they are putting their money where their mouth is on the flip side of this (the companies that pay for/fund the collection of this data).
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  I regularly see Apple banner ads on news sites like the homepage of the Washington Post. I have not checked, but I bet that these ads are served through an ad platform like Doubleclick and are targeted at me based on data they have about me.
CodeSheikh 8y ago
I have been actively using Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and I do most of my shopping online. What always boggles my mind is that how do advertisers make money? I don't remember the last time I actually saw an ad on Facebook/Google, liked the product so much that I instantly bought it. Everyone I know in my circle would agree and comply with me.
- carlmcqueen 8y ago
  That's a pretty closed feedback loop and not yet representative of the web as a whole. A simple example of someone different are those who work around me who work in a corporation and aren't allowed ad-blockers by company policy and look at Ads by force.
  - CodeSheikh 8y ago
    "aren't allowed ad-blockers by company policy and look at Ads by force". Extreme!. Do you mean people working for ad agencies?
    - carlmcqueen 8y ago
      no, just poorly written. Just can't use ad-blockers and thus have to witness the horrors of the state of ads if we look at websites.
- Fifer82 8y ago
  I have a selected blindness with ads. However what I found recently was so do others. I was with my friend, and we wanted to know the exchange rate, so my friend fired up his phone and googled it. We got to a web page with tiny white boxes with black text, and a half screen booking.com ad. I asked him what his thoughts were on annoying ads shifting the content down like that, and he said "I haven't seen an ad for years mate". The glaring device screen was mostly ad and he failed to even make the connection. It makes me wonder, are ads really so easily ignored, or have ads went down some psychological hole where you think you are clever but a few years later you are foaming at the mouth as a booking.com customer?
CodeSheikh 8y ago
I would be more than happy to pay for a premium Facebook and premium Google where 0 tracking bytes are harvested about my activity and I just use their product as it is. But we all know that as much as some people sitting in the boardrooms of these companies would want a premium service model too they will never allow it. Tracking users make them money on multiple folds that premium revenue stream would be a chump-change for them.
- foepys 8y ago
  How would that work? You would need an account to pay them and also need to be logged in for everything. Tracking you is so much easier then.
  - CodeSheikh 8y ago
    They way I use Facebook and the kind of information I have shared with it (photos, places, connections) I have already established a valid identity with them. I don't use Facebook as some anon profile "LonelyGirl99". By paying them a premium fee Facebook and I would bind into a new agreement about not persisting my information for ad tracking and wherever possible ask its third party affiliates to do the same. Say you and I are both logged in and actively commenting on TechCrunch. You are a free user and I pay premium. TechCrunch can request FB to have metrics for free users but not for premium. Unless FB provides a backdoor, has a bug or TechCrunch savvy programmers can hack FB social plugin to extract info about premium users as well. Similarly, FB will also not sell my meta-data to advertisers. Even if I fall well into the targeting of advertisers I will be excluded. FB will not even give me "opt-out" options. I will be opted-out by default unless I choose I want to be opt-in. I will have more tight control over shared entities as well. If my ex tagged me in his/her pictures and then we are unfriended, then I would still have the option to go through his/her pictures and choose to remove myself (I think FB allows this currently anyway). Basically the contract b/w me and FB will be iron clad.
- obblekk 8y ago
  I hear this sentiment a lot. Here's why it doesn't work: If facebook sets the price at $20/mo for no ads no tracking, most of the people who can afford that actually generate more than $20/mo of ARPU for facebook with ads. So they get this adverse selection where mostly only the wealthy (highly valuable advertising targets) opt out of ads and this eventually decreases FB's revenue. If they raised the price to offset this, the adverse selection would get even stronger. The flip side of this is that Netflix could almost certainly make more money if they showed interstitial video ads, because this allows them to effectively make more money off wealthier people (because advertisers pay more to advertise to them).

313 points by NoB4Mouth 8y ago

How to do GDPR correctly.

> Apple's attempts to block data tracking as you travel around the web could have a real impact on companies that rely on your personal information to make their billions. asking the people that working in adtech, cross-device usage prediction and the likes: do you actually think it will disrupt your business or there are always workarounds and are relatively chill about it?

madeofpalk 8y ago
I think there's actually very minor benefits to the type of tracking that unauthenticated that they're doing, so while they might be able to track less, it won't have a material impact.
endymi0n 8y ago
Apple attacks the core primitives of Adtech very strategically with this update. This is very smart actually, much better than the first iteration. They're going after the meat right away, like cookie synchronization ("Tracker collusion") and the first-party tracker hack that Criteo pioneered, effectively disabling almost all the tracking possibilities on iOS. As a user, this is awesome. And if you want to track, you need to provide both value (i.e. an authenticated service) as well as get explicit consent from the user. Unfortunately, this will also serve to concentrate the power in the hands of Google and Facebook, who have and/or will create such authenticated embeds. Note that all this hardtalk specifically excludes the mobile ad IDs. Apple would face much more headwind from GOOG and FB if they went about killing these. This is going to be very interesting, as Apple will need to carefully tread up to a point, after which there could be harsher repercussions. They also know that an iPhone without access to Google Maps, Search, Mail, Authenticator, Youtube and a whole lot of other essential services won't be worth much to end users anymore. Source: I'm working in Adtech, but we chose a different approach of giving users an actual benefit and being careful, compliant and frugal with data. All these recent updates about Apple and GDPR mainly hit the really bad players of the industry that just hoard sensitive data through shady channels and arbitrage it to hell — and I consider that a good thing.
- flafla2 8y ago
  > They also know that an iPhone without access to Google Maps, Search, Mail, Authenticator, Youtube and a whole lot of other essential services won't be worth much to end users anymore. Google Authenticator => Authy (it reimplements google auth) Search => Safari Gmail => Native Mail (its not like Google will drop IMAP support) Killing YouTube on iOS would be pretty bad for Apple, but I’m sure that wouldn’t be profitable for Google (cutting off a third of an already-unprofitable company? no thanks). What’s left bedides that, Google docs? Well Apple has their own suite so does Microsoft. And they both have web editors that rival Google Docs and support multi-user editing. In general I’m pretty skeptical about this assertion that Apple “can’t” step on Google’s toes.
  - Aaargh20318 8y ago
    > Google Authenticator => Authy (it reimplements google auth) It doesn't reimplement Google Auth. Both are just different implementations of RFC 6238.
  - oldcynic 8y ago
    Authy want an email before you can do anything with it, and is cloud centred, so that's probably just sending your usage to someone else. Try OTP Auth[0] on iOS that fully respects privacy and security. It was Authy asking for email first that prompted me to search and find this. [0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/otp-auth/id659877384 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/otp-auth/id659877384
    - flafla2 8y ago
      Authy encrypts all of your data with a private passkey that is never sent to Twilio (the parent company) [0]. I found the ability to sync 2FA across devices to be convenient and a good compromise to “if you lose your phone, you’re screwed.” I can understand both perspectives, but I think Authy has done a great job at improving the usability of 2FA without sacrificing security. This is certainly more secure than SMS-based 2FA which most people currently use. (Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Twilio. I am not involved with Authy in any way) [0] https://support.authy.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001932768-Authy-Backups-Password-Retrieval https://support.authy.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001932768-Aut...
Eridrus 8y ago
I used to work in adtech, though not the parts focussed on tracking folks. I think this will cause some disruption for people in the short term, and if Apple stays committed to this line of attack, it could really have a long term impact. But on the other hand, IP+UA is a very good signal when you don't have a lot of devices behind NAT, and if you just have a Facebook ServiceWorker installed, it could track all of the IP addresses you use. And there is nothing preventing first-party tracking, e.g. what if Facebook starts a "Facebook Publishing Platform" which is basically a section of Facebook.com designed to ensure that you get all the user tracking as before. Or what if publications now ask for "Login with Facebook to read this article".

atulvi 8y ago

I read apple jam and instantly went out to get bread

hellofunk 8y ago

Apple is putting itself in an entertaining position in the industry. Most big tech firms have a business model that depends on user data. By explicitly taking the other side of that model, a fascinating new conflict is emerging between tech giants. And Apple is at least positioning itself on the sympathetic side of billions of users in this arena. This conflict will not die down -- the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection, so this tech war will only get more pronounced and dramatic as time passes.

onion2k 8y ago
the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection They can though - they can go back to untargetted advertising based on page content as they were doing 10 years ago. All the personal tracking data is a layer on top of that tech aiming to improve the 'targettedness' of adverts. Nothing in the online ad industry really needs any of that personal data, and arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway.
- hyperbovine 8y ago
  Look at the revenue of those companies 10ya vs. today.
  - mapleoin 8y ago
    Correlation does not imply causation.
    - onetimemanytime 8y ago
      they are certainly not charging less for targeted ads, the opposite is true.
    - Maro 8y ago
      Not strictly related to this discussion, but perhaps worth sharing. I worked at a smaller tech company, and we kept saying "Correlation does not imply causation", and trying to come up with ways to separate them, etc. We spent/wasted a lot of time on this, explaining it to non-mathy people (which leads to even less confidence in data). Then I went to work at one of the big tech companies, which is probably one of the best in the world at testing/data for product, and there I never heard it. If there was correlation, unless it was clearly spurious or a statistical fluke, they pushed on it hard. "It looks like more X means more DAUs. So let's manufacture more X." And it works pretty well for that company. My takeaway is, I stopped thinking about this too much. Today, if there's correlation, unless it's clearly spurious/etc, and unless somebody has a better idea, I tell the product/eng team to push hard on it and don't even mention correlation vs causation.

spac 8y ago

This is why I reward, and will keep rewarding Apple with my money. In a capitalistic system, voting with dollars may effect the change that voting with ballots may not.

klez 8y ago
Honest question: how do people with less money vote, then?
- omnimus 8y ago
  They don't.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- spac 8y ago
  To be clear I was not endorsing the current system, as much as observing that monetary incentives are powerful motivators for companies to change their behavior. Also, not all currencies require income: when using DuckDuckGo instead of Gooogle, one is redirecting ad money from one company to the other; or think of Keybase teams vs Slack, Gitlab vs. GitHub, etc. Every choice we make can affect whether money is sent the way of companies that share our principles or not.
- hydrox24 8y ago
  > voting with dollars may effect the change that voting with ballots may not This does not mean 'real' change is only created by consumption. I think spac means that consumption may well affect what political institutions do not. So people with less money can still use their political votes to change many things. I would contest the idea that they do not vote (significantly) as consumers though. People with less money still have some money, and rich people don't buy ten iPhones, while many poorer people do still buy one as the richest people do too, so any kind of consumption with a very steep decline in marginal benefit probably hands out power to individuals in the market more equitably than you would otherwise expect.
- izacus 8y ago

geokon 8y ago

I think it'd be nice to have a browser option where it simply won't load content from outside of the current domain. Though at the moment that would break a lot of the web, it'd be a much more neutral solution. To me what's more alarming than Facebook is what percentage of websites load fonts/js/analytics from Google (even Freedesktop.org did till I pointed it out on their mailist). They don't get a referral link (I think?) but they still effectively know when you're online or not Apple blacklisting sites/companies is honestly more scary... that's basically anti-net-neutrality.. if you're naughty (or Apple doesn't like you) you can't have your images loaded?

babuskov 8y ago
> I think it'd be nice to have a browser option where it simply won't load content from outside of the current domain. Though at the moment that would break a lot of the web I have been using RequestPolicy Firefox extension for that for years. You can manually approve domains (ex. let website X load stuff from domain Y as well), so once you figure out which of the dozen other domains it tries to connect to is serving static content (CSS, images) it works great. Unfortunately, new Firefox broke this, so you can only use it with Firefox ESR currently.
exergy 8y ago
Umatrix does a significant portion of what you desire. You can set global rules, so I always block Facebook. I have a separate browser for stuff like banking where I don't want to break the websites by blocking JS. As to your second point, I think there's a huge, gaping chasm between apple blocking Facebook's tracking and the collapse of civilization at the hands of apple's alleged anti net neutrality.
gregoriol 8y ago
> simply won't load content from outside of the current domain This would be a very bad idea! First because it will break a lot of legit use-cases: CDNs, distributed architectures, SSO, payment gateways, ... Second because it won't actually prevent the tracking: it would be easy to make a subdomain and point it to Google Analytics or any ad network to "re-enable".

ourmandave 8y ago

From this link below, it looks like Apple doesn't collect much data on you to begin with (vs Facebook, Google, and Twitter). I asked Apple for all my data. Here's what was sent back https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-request/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r... So is Apple trying to position itself as the Data Protector Platform You Can Trust? Like how The New York Times has seen a record increase in subscriptions because of fake news.

ddtaylor 8y ago

Is this a change to how they handle CORS overall or specifically a peephole check for Facebook?

dbbk 8y ago
I think it's a change to iframe loading.

wyclif 8y ago

As of right now, you can't post this story on Facebook. Coincidence?

cricalix 8y ago
Seems like coincidence, because it's not just that link. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/ fails too.
- cosmojg 8y ago
  Why would Facebook block BBC?

_cs2017_ 8y ago

The economic value of ad personalization is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars a year. A part of that value goes to Facebook, Google, and other social media and advertising firms. A part goes to publishers, who provide free shit such as news to billions of people. A part goes to advertisers who get to sell more stuff. A part goes to consumers who get to see the aforementioned free news, plus occasionally see slightly less shitty ads. When Apple blocks user data, it destroys a lot of economic value, which costs jobs; a lot of them are in the US since the biggest advertisers, publishers, and ad firms are US based. Maybe it's worth it because privacy. But it certainly hurts millions of people who depend, directly or indirectly, on the effectiveness of ads.

soneil 8y ago
I can't really think of a nicer way to say this: I don't care. I get the theory. I get that everyone wants everything for free, and many providers still need a return. But we've let adtech run wild, and they've just got scummier and scummier. "When in hole, stop digging". adtech really need to start taking responsibility for their own actions. They've been at war with users for far too long, and still play victim when the user doesn't appreciate it.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  One the one hand, I agree wholeheartedly. But then there is reality. You can make two equally nice services, and charge a nominal fee for one while making the other one free but with lots of offensive advertising and tracking ... and you could tell users the truth about all of it ... and still, the 'free' one would dominate and the paid one would go out of business. This is the world we live in.
- _cs2017_ 8y ago
  When your say "scummier", are you referring to Facebook ads that follow your recent activity online? Or something else? On another note, as you put it, everyone wants everything for free. Is it really your place to tell them they can't have it, by disrupting the flow of money that makes that free stuff possible?

projectramo 8y ago

About 5 to 8 years after I expected it but a welcome decision

iliaznk 8y ago

So it really does have to do with Facebook services only? That's what I thought yesterday, but still wasn't sure. Why not all social media then? What if I do want to share/like stuff? Just don't use Safari?

whywhywhywhy 8y ago
Safari has a button that opens the OS share dialog. To be fair it never made any sense digging around a webpage for a like/tweet button to share something anyway.
- iliaznk 8y ago
  That's a different story, but cutting off selectively just one party only reminds me of Orwell's "some are more equal".
  - whywhywhywhy 8y ago
    It's not one party, they just said share buttons so that would include Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pintrest, etc
    - iliaznk 8y ago
      That I have no problems with. But in media I've only seen references to Facebook. If this https://webkit.org/blog/8311/intelligent-tracking-prevention-2-0/ https://webkit.org/blog/8311/intelligent-tracking-prevention... is the actual implementation, then it's good.
- hgzlriudh749383 8y ago
  I use a content blocker Quiet https://itunes.apple.com/app/quiet/id1315398116?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/app/quiet/id1315398116?mt=8 for Safari on iOS to delete those share buttons on websites. The share buttons and counters are so useless!!

yedawg 8y ago

zucc buys relationship with Apple by handing over user data. A few years later and apple rebukes facebook by jacking what I assume is sandboxed javascript when facebook has bad pr

sametmax 8y ago

So like firefox with the facebook container ? But with more PR ?

victor106 8y ago

Apple should provide a default VPN service for all traffic that would be killer.

j2bax 8y ago

Does anyone know what Apple's stance is on using Facebook/Google/etc for targeted advertising of their own products? My assumption would be that they use every tool at their disposal to advertise/sell their products, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised and find out that they are putting their money where their mouth is on the flip side of this (the companies that pay for/fund the collection of this data).

snowwrestler 8y ago
I regularly see Apple banner ads on news sites like the homepage of the Washington Post. I have not checked, but I bet that these ads are served through an ad platform like Doubleclick and are targeted at me based on data they have about me.

CodeSheikh 8y ago

I have been actively using Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and I do most of my shopping online. What always boggles my mind is that how do advertisers make money? I don't remember the last time I actually saw an ad on Facebook/Google, liked the product so much that I instantly bought it. Everyone I know in my circle would agree and comply with me.

carlmcqueen 8y ago
That's a pretty closed feedback loop and not yet representative of the web as a whole. A simple example of someone different are those who work around me who work in a corporation and aren't allowed ad-blockers by company policy and look at Ads by force.
- CodeSheikh 8y ago
  "aren't allowed ad-blockers by company policy and look at Ads by force". Extreme!. Do you mean people working for ad agencies?
  - carlmcqueen 8y ago
    no, just poorly written. Just can't use ad-blockers and thus have to witness the horrors of the state of ads if we look at websites.
Fifer82 8y ago
I have a selected blindness with ads. However what I found recently was so do others. I was with my friend, and we wanted to know the exchange rate, so my friend fired up his phone and googled it. We got to a web page with tiny white boxes with black text, and a half screen booking.com ad. I asked him what his thoughts were on annoying ads shifting the content down like that, and he said "I haven't seen an ad for years mate". The glaring device screen was mostly ad and he failed to even make the connection. It makes me wonder, are ads really so easily ignored, or have ads went down some psychological hole where you think you are clever but a few years later you are foaming at the mouth as a booking.com customer?

CodeSheikh 8y ago

I would be more than happy to pay for a premium Facebook and premium Google where 0 tracking bytes are harvested about my activity and I just use their product as it is. But we all know that as much as some people sitting in the boardrooms of these companies would want a premium service model too they will never allow it. Tracking users make them money on multiple folds that premium revenue stream would be a chump-change for them.

foepys 8y ago
How would that work? You would need an account to pay them and also need to be logged in for everything. Tracking you is so much easier then.
- CodeSheikh 8y ago
  They way I use Facebook and the kind of information I have shared with it (photos, places, connections) I have already established a valid identity with them. I don't use Facebook as some anon profile "LonelyGirl99". By paying them a premium fee Facebook and I would bind into a new agreement about not persisting my information for ad tracking and wherever possible ask its third party affiliates to do the same. Say you and I are both logged in and actively commenting on TechCrunch. You are a free user and I pay premium. TechCrunch can request FB to have metrics for free users but not for premium. Unless FB provides a backdoor, has a bug or TechCrunch savvy programmers can hack FB social plugin to extract info about premium users as well. Similarly, FB will also not sell my meta-data to advertisers. Even if I fall well into the targeting of advertisers I will be excluded. FB will not even give me "opt-out" options. I will be opted-out by default unless I choose I want to be opt-in. I will have more tight control over shared entities as well. If my ex tagged me in his/her pictures and then we are unfriended, then I would still have the option to go through his/her pictures and choose to remove myself (I think FB allows this currently anyway). Basically the contract b/w me and FB will be iron clad.
obblekk 8y ago
I hear this sentiment a lot. Here's why it doesn't work: If facebook sets the price at $20/mo for no ads no tracking, most of the people who can afford that actually generate more than $20/mo of ARPU for facebook with ads. So they get this adverse selection where mostly only the wealthy (highly valuable advertising targets) opt out of ads and this eventually decreases FB's revenue. If they raised the price to offset this, the adverse selection would get even stronger. The flip side of this is that Netflix could almost certainly make more money if they showed interstitial video ads, because this allows them to effectively make more money off wealthier people (because advertisers pay more to advertise to them).