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As an Apple investor, I am happy to seem them grow an advertising business. Human attention is the ultimate analog resource. Throughout our lifetime, it will s

As an Apple investor, I am happy to seem them grow an advertising business. Human attention is the ultimate analog resource. Throughout our lifetime, it will stay in high demand. It cannot be inflated away or commoditized. What I don't get is: How can Apple prevent or even detect that other apps or websites tell Facebook about what you do? If I go to example.com and example.com sends fingerprinting and useage information about me to one of facebooks servers - how would Apple know?

Nextgrid 4y ago
They wouldn't, but until recently they provided explicit functionality that allowed apps to access a persistent identifier so advertising SDKs in those apps could link activities happening in between apps, something that's not normally possible due to app sandboxing. Now they've made that identifier explicitly opt-in (it prompts the user on first run) so if the user declines, advertisers have to fall back on probabilistic methods such as heuristics to try and link sessions together (which is harder especially if other countermeasures such as anti-fingerprinting, IP anonymisation with Private Relay, etc are used).
thomasahle 4y ago
> how would Apple know? I don't think they can. As far as I understand what they blocked was the ability of the Facebook app to send Metadata to the website that the user arrived by the action of clicking an ad. They also blocked the website being able to reply to the Facebook app whether the user bought anything. This way users og Facebook ads aren't able to see whether their ads are effective, which lower the value of them. In principle Facebook and the website could store these events (ad clicking and item buying) on their own servers, and just synchronize once in a while. I don't know if they are working on this or it already exists. However, Apple could threaten to kick the Facebook app of the platform if it provides this "service" to advertisers.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> As an Apple investor, I am happy to seem them grow an advertising business. An an Apple user, I am not. And I'm getting closer and closer to jumping ship on the whole Apple ecosystem. I wonder if this is a wise long-term strategy for their brand.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
I love how my free time and how I use it are just the ultimate analog resource to you.

Nextgrid 4y ago

They wouldn't, but until recently they provided explicit functionality that allowed apps to access a persistent identifier so advertising SDKs in those apps could link activities happening in between apps, something that's not normally possible due to app sandboxing. Now they've made that identifier explicitly opt-in (it prompts the user on first run) so if the user declines, advertisers have to fall back on probabilistic methods such as heuristics to try and link sessions together (which is harder especially if other countermeasures such as anti-fingerprinting, IP anonymisation with Private Relay, etc are used).

thomasahle 4y ago

> how would Apple know? I don't think they can. As far as I understand what they blocked was the ability of the Facebook app to send Metadata to the website that the user arrived by the action of clicking an ad. They also blocked the website being able to reply to the Facebook app whether the user bought anything. This way users og Facebook ads aren't able to see whether their ads are effective, which lower the value of them. In principle Facebook and the website could store these events (ad clicking and item buying) on their own servers, and just synchronize once in a while. I don't know if they are working on this or it already exists. However, Apple could threaten to kick the Facebook app of the platform if it provides this "service" to advertisers.

AlexandrB 4y ago

> As an Apple investor, I am happy to seem them grow an advertising business. An an Apple user, I am not. And I'm getting closer and closer to jumping ship on the whole Apple ecosystem. I wonder if this is a wise long-term strategy for their brand.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago

I love how my free time and how I use it are just the ultimate analog resource to you.