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I still don't understand why Apple would be compelled to offer the olive branch at all. Sure, advertisers have complained their business model is getting harder

I still don't understand why Apple would be compelled to offer the olive branch at all. Sure, advertisers have complained their business model is getting harder - what motivates Apple to help fix that? What possible leverage could advertisers even have? Apple doesn't need a negotiating tool if there's nothing Apple wants from the advertisers, just block the nefarious tracking and move on.

vkou 7y ago
Apple wants something from advertisers. Money. They want 2 billion in revenue from advertising by 2020. They are testing the waters, and there's no doubt a faction within the company that believes that in the long term, getting a slice of the firehose of ad revenue is worth a small loss in revenue from opinionated anti-ads users[1] leaving their ecosystem. The best part about the Apple walled garden is that once ads become an important part of their revenue stream, they'll be able to ban ad-blockers on their platform. [1] What are they going to do, switch to Android? Communicate by carrier pigeon?
- coldcode 7y ago
  2B to Apple is couch change.
  - vkou 7y ago
    Rome wasn't built in a day. I'm sure there's slide decks that float much bigger future numbers to decision-makers in the firm.
- threeseed 7y ago
  So Apple is going to do a 180 and suddenly switch to being anti-privacy and pro-advertising. Disable the Safari content blockers they only recently added, end the advertising campaigns they just started using. And all for a tiny 1% of their revenue ? Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition and personal to Tim Cook given that in many cases gay and other minorities are killed due to privacy leaks.
  - vkou 7y ago
    > Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition and personal to Tim Cook given that in many cases gay and other minorities are killed due to privacy leaks. Is it part of an immutable corporate charter? Is Tim Cook an immortal lich-king, with absolute authority, that will preside over Apple between now, and the heat death of the universe? Company culture changes, company priorities change, company leaders change, and shareholders always want more money. If advertising will get Apple more money, it's just a matter of when, not if.
    - threeseed 7y ago
      Company culture isn't going to change much at Apple. They have programs like Apple University and the memory of Steve Jobs will always loom large over the company. And Apple could've focused primarily on advertising decades ago. But they didn't because it's just not in their DNA. They are and will forever be a widgets company.
      - vkou 7y ago
        20 years ago, they were an overpriced-computer vendor on their deathbed, with not a widget in sight, burdened with a trailing-edge OS, while Microsoft was an unstoppable behemoth that was eating the world (While convinced that this internet thing was just a fad.) You have no idea what they will be 20 years from now.
  - FoxInBoxers 7y ago
    > Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition and personal to Tim Cook given that in many cases gay and other minorities are killed due to privacy leaks. I love the privacy aspect, but is privacy really part of Apple's core strategy or are we just seeing them make use of the good position they were always in? Is there enough drive at Apple (Cook or otherwise) to keep privacy a focus, or is the topic just going to fall by the wayside when it suits the business?
    - threeseed 7y ago
ggthrowaway12 7y ago
Advertisers are not complaining - they can vote with their money. It's the publishers that are hit by making ads harder. Without allowing publishers to monetize, content will move behind paywalls or closed ecosystems (as opposed to open web) that do make ads easier. Also, over time, browsers that make it impossible to monetize will likely to be banned by publishers - this already started to happen, with some publishers not allowing incognito mode, etc.
comex 7y ago
Not everyone believes that advertising is inherently bad, or that being able to track the effectiveness of particular advertising campaigns is bad – as opposed to tracking individual users.
eridius 7y ago
Ad attribution is not inherently bad. The means by which people do ad attribution are typically evil, and due to the ease by which this data is collected, lead advertising companies down the dark path of becoming user data brokers. But the simple act of "I placed an ad on this site, is that ad driving sales?" is perfectly benign, and if we can enable that use-case without enabling any privacy leakage, that's unambiguously a good thing because making the privacy-conscious approach easy and reliable means people will use it and won't resort to the more privacy-invasive techniques. This is the same underlying justification as the "ping" attribute, which is basically, it enables in a privacy-conscious manner the basic functionality people want, and which they already have other less-privacy-conscious means to get, so let's make the most user-positive option the simplest and most reliable. Also by standardizing how this works it enables content blockers to block these requests. This ad click attribute proposal even explicitly listed this as a feature. If you don't want ad click attribution, use a content blocker that blocks /.well-known/ad-click-attribution/ and you're done.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I disagree, all advertising levies a cost on the advertisee, you are assuming an inherent right to attention that the person has not granted. I understand and agree that this is a graduated scale but the most benign on that scale is "only a minor annoyance" not "perfectly benign".
  - eridius 7y ago
    Advertising is the cost of access to the content. The content provider has the user's attention, and the advertiser is paying the content provider for a small slice of that attention. But that's all the cost should be, just a moment of attention. The cost should not be giving up your privacy.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      The cost shouldn't even be attention, we have little enough control over the silence of our minds in the modern world - we should fight against all those sources that feel falsely entitled to get a slice of our brains and time for themselves. There is no implicit link between "stuff on the internet" and advertising, this "free service" isn't free, we're all paying a gateway fee to get into the internet to begin with, then many content providers have judged their content valuable enough to justify asking for payment, with others relying on soft/burst funding sources like crowdsourcing. The internet and most people's sites really aren't so expensive to maintain that we need this level of crazy marketing.
kitotik 7y ago
Apple may want this so that they can have attribution for ad placements in their own products such as Apple News while still being to able market themselves as a corporation who cares about privacy.

vkou 7y ago

Apple wants something from advertisers. Money. They want 2 billion in revenue from advertising by 2020. They are testing the waters, and there's no doubt a faction within the company that believes that in the long term, getting a slice of the firehose of ad revenue is worth a small loss in revenue from opinionated anti-ads users[1] leaving their ecosystem. The best part about the Apple walled garden is that once ads become an important part of their revenue stream, they'll be able to ban ad-blockers on their platform. [1] What are they going to do, switch to Android? Communicate by carrier pigeon?

coldcode 7y ago
2B to Apple is couch change.
- vkou 7y ago
  Rome wasn't built in a day. I'm sure there's slide decks that float much bigger future numbers to decision-makers in the firm.
threeseed 7y ago
So Apple is going to do a 180 and suddenly switch to being anti-privacy and pro-advertising. Disable the Safari content blockers they only recently added, end the advertising campaigns they just started using. And all for a tiny 1% of their revenue ? Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition and personal to Tim Cook given that in many cases gay and other minorities are killed due to privacy leaks.
- vkou 7y ago
  > Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition and personal to Tim Cook given that in many cases gay and other minorities are killed due to privacy leaks. Is it part of an immutable corporate charter? Is Tim Cook an immortal lich-king, with absolute authority, that will preside over Apple between now, and the heat death of the universe? Company culture changes, company priorities change, company leaders change, and shareholders always want more money. If advertising will get Apple more money, it's just a matter of when, not if.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    Company culture isn't going to change much at Apple. They have programs like Apple University and the memory of Steve Jobs will always loom large over the company. And Apple could've focused primarily on advertising decades ago. But they didn't because it's just not in their DNA. They are and will forever be a widgets company.
    - vkou 7y ago
      20 years ago, they were an overpriced-computer vendor on their deathbed, with not a widget in sight, burdened with a trailing-edge OS, while Microsoft was an unstoppable behemoth that was eating the world (While convinced that this internet thing was just a fad.) You have no idea what they will be 20 years from now.
- FoxInBoxers 7y ago
  > Privacy is a fundamental part of Apple's selling proposition and personal to Tim Cook given that in many cases gay and other minorities are killed due to privacy leaks. I love the privacy aspect, but is privacy really part of Apple's core strategy or are we just seeing them make use of the good position they were always in? Is there enough drive at Apple (Cook or otherwise) to keep privacy a focus, or is the topic just going to fall by the wayside when it suits the business?
  - threeseed 7y ago

ggthrowaway12 7y ago

Advertisers are not complaining - they can vote with their money. It's the publishers that are hit by making ads harder. Without allowing publishers to monetize, content will move behind paywalls or closed ecosystems (as opposed to open web) that do make ads easier. Also, over time, browsers that make it impossible to monetize will likely to be banned by publishers - this already started to happen, with some publishers not allowing incognito mode, etc.

comex 7y ago

Not everyone believes that advertising is inherently bad, or that being able to track the effectiveness of particular advertising campaigns is bad – as opposed to tracking individual users.

eridius 7y ago

Ad attribution is not inherently bad. The means by which people do ad attribution are typically evil, and due to the ease by which this data is collected, lead advertising companies down the dark path of becoming user data brokers. But the simple act of "I placed an ad on this site, is that ad driving sales?" is perfectly benign, and if we can enable that use-case without enabling any privacy leakage, that's unambiguously a good thing because making the privacy-conscious approach easy and reliable means people will use it and won't resort to the more privacy-invasive techniques. This is the same underlying justification as the "ping" attribute, which is basically, it enables in a privacy-conscious manner the basic functionality people want, and which they already have other less-privacy-conscious means to get, so let's make the most user-positive option the simplest and most reliable. Also by standardizing how this works it enables content blockers to block these requests. This ad click attribute proposal even explicitly listed this as a feature. If you don't want ad click attribution, use a content blocker that blocks /.well-known/ad-click-attribution/ and you're done.

munk-a 7y ago
I disagree, all advertising levies a cost on the advertisee, you are assuming an inherent right to attention that the person has not granted. I understand and agree that this is a graduated scale but the most benign on that scale is "only a minor annoyance" not "perfectly benign".
- eridius 7y ago
  Advertising is the cost of access to the content. The content provider has the user's attention, and the advertiser is paying the content provider for a small slice of that attention. But that's all the cost should be, just a moment of attention. The cost should not be giving up your privacy.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    The cost shouldn't even be attention, we have little enough control over the silence of our minds in the modern world - we should fight against all those sources that feel falsely entitled to get a slice of our brains and time for themselves. There is no implicit link between "stuff on the internet" and advertising, this "free service" isn't free, we're all paying a gateway fee to get into the internet to begin with, then many content providers have judged their content valuable enough to justify asking for payment, with others relying on soft/burst funding sources like crowdsourcing. The internet and most people's sites really aren't so expensive to maintain that we need this level of crazy marketing.

kitotik 7y ago

Apple may want this so that they can have attribution for ad placements in their own products such as Apple News while still being to able market themselves as a corporation who cares about privacy.