6 ms·

Isn’t the easiest solution here for companies to register their own domain? Why be company.service.tld and not just company.tld? What are these businesses doing

by kogir 6y ago

Isn’t the easiest solution here for companies to register their own domain? Why be company.service.tld and not just company.tld? What are these businesses doing for email?

mrweasel 6y ago
In this case I think the issue is trackers. If you owned a retargeting or tracking service, you might have customer1.retargetting.com and customer2.retargetting.com. Apple will now see these as being the same site, unless individually registered in PSL. This limits the amount of data that can be aggregated by retargetting.com, unless each subdomain is added to PSL.
- 3np 6y ago
  I think this is it - the only "small businesses" I see being actually hurt (as opposed to slightly inconvenienced) by this would be retargeting and tracking companies.
donmcronald 6y ago
Yes, it is. The main reason I can think of for using subdomains would be for super low value content that isn’t worth $10-30 / year for a real domain. There could also be a setup / maintenance angle I guess. Specifying a big list of custom domains is more work than *.example.com.
- mangosquash 6y ago
  I work on digital advertising for a franchise where each individual store manages their own shopify site at location.franchise.com. Soon, these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases, unless franchise.com is added to this list. I understand the PSL managers' position that this is an unfair burden to place on them though.
  - local_dev 6y ago
    >these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases Isn't that part of the purpose of the changes that Apple is making? As a user, this seems like a great change. Less tracking is a positive.
    - donmcronald 6y ago
      Yeah, but if they’re talking about physical location franchises individually owned by local residents (there are a lot), the tracking they want to do probably isn’t nearly as pervasive as Facebook as a whole. For example, each location might want to track the effectiveness of ads for their locality. Facebook is probably a decent place for them to run ads too. The big problem is that Facebook has earned a reputation of abusing all the data they collect, so most people are going to say the same thing as you and not have any sympathy, but it probably screws over the poster you’re replying to pretty bad.
    - mangosquash 6y ago
      Apple is doing some cool things to make personally identifiable tracking from Facebook ads much less pervasive, while still providing advertisers/businesses data about whether or not their ads are working. These things include sending batches of data every 36-48 hours instead of data as it happens, etc. But in order for these tools to work, Apple is asking Facebook to rely on this list to see if subdomains would be able to set up conversion events to collect this anonymized batched data. This system will make ads worse, but I think it's an alright balance. Not being able to have any conversion tracking will make ads dismal. I wish that Apple would work to maintain their own list that served this purpose, or provided support to the volunteers that were tasked with keeping this updated.
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
      In principle, you can know that an ad click resulted in a purchase without knowing who clicked the ad and who made the purchase. Apple supports these kinds of measurements for its own Apple Search Ads product. The “entropy limit” you see people talking about elsewhere in the thread is one means that attempts to allow ads to be measured like this without revealing information about the users. But if every store *.shopify.com is in the same entropy pool, there won’t even be enough information to tell which ad campaign led to a sale on which store.

by kogir 6y ago

Isn’t the easiest solution here for companies to register their own domain? Why be company.service.tld and not just company.tld? What are these businesses doing for email?

mrweasel 6y ago

In this case I think the issue is trackers. If you owned a retargeting or tracking service, you might have customer1.retargetting.com and customer2.retargetting.com. Apple will now see these as being the same site, unless individually registered in PSL. This limits the amount of data that can be aggregated by retargetting.com, unless each subdomain is added to PSL.

3np 6y ago
I think this is it - the only "small businesses" I see being actually hurt (as opposed to slightly inconvenienced) by this would be retargeting and tracking companies.

donmcronald 6y ago

Yes, it is. The main reason I can think of for using subdomains would be for super low value content that isn’t worth $10-30 / year for a real domain. There could also be a setup / maintenance angle I guess. Specifying a big list of custom domains is more work than *.example.com.

mangosquash 6y ago
I work on digital advertising for a franchise where each individual store manages their own shopify site at location.franchise.com. Soon, these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases, unless franchise.com is added to this list. I understand the PSL managers' position that this is an unfair burden to place on them though.
- local_dev 6y ago
  >these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases Isn't that part of the purpose of the changes that Apple is making? As a user, this seems like a great change. Less tracking is a positive.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    Yeah, but if they’re talking about physical location franchises individually owned by local residents (there are a lot), the tracking they want to do probably isn’t nearly as pervasive as Facebook as a whole. For example, each location might want to track the effectiveness of ads for their locality. Facebook is probably a decent place for them to run ads too. The big problem is that Facebook has earned a reputation of abusing all the data they collect, so most people are going to say the same thing as you and not have any sympathy, but it probably screws over the poster you’re replying to pretty bad.
  - mangosquash 6y ago
    Apple is doing some cool things to make personally identifiable tracking from Facebook ads much less pervasive, while still providing advertisers/businesses data about whether or not their ads are working. These things include sending batches of data every 36-48 hours instead of data as it happens, etc. But in order for these tools to work, Apple is asking Facebook to rely on this list to see if subdomains would be able to set up conversion events to collect this anonymized batched data. This system will make ads worse, but I think it's an alright balance. Not being able to have any conversion tracking will make ads dismal. I wish that Apple would work to maintain their own list that served this purpose, or provided support to the volunteers that were tasked with keeping this updated.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
    In principle, you can know that an ad click resulted in a purchase without knowing who clicked the ad and who made the purchase. Apple supports these kinds of measurements for its own Apple Search Ads product. The “entropy limit” you see people talking about elsewhere in the thread is one means that attempts to allow ads to be measured like this without revealing information about the users. But if every store *.shopify.com is in the same entropy pool, there won’t even be enough information to tell which ad campaign led to a sale on which store.