8 ms·

Apple is becoming an ad company despite privacy claims

111 points by Doolwind 4y ago

jks 4y ago
NextDNS has a "Native tracking protection" blocklist for Apple. Looking at my logs, it has blocked iadsdk.apple.com and many subdomains, and supportmetrics, securemetrics, books-analytics-events, weather-analytics-events (all under apple.com).
kaba0 4y ago
Is there any actual substance to these posts, or is this just the usual scare tactics? Because something similar is posted almost daily. Besides perhaps an Apple Music “ad”, I haven’t seen anything factual.
irtefa 4y ago
This is sadly the beginning of the end of Apple.
grahamjperrin 4y ago
A somewhat careless, reactionary blog post. "… On Nov. 20, a pair of iOS developers known as Mysk discovered that Apple has a specific identifier (a “directory services identifier” or DSID) for every Apple iCloud account. …" – as if Mysk discovered this. Not so. DSID-related analysis was performed more than seven months earlier – by a group of five researchers, including four at the University of Oxford. Konrad Kollnig, Anastasia Shuba, Max Van Kleek, Reuben Binns, and Nigel Shadbolt. 2022. Goodbye Tracking? Impact of iOS App Tracking Transparency and Privacy Labels. In 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 508–520. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533116 https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533116 (Version 1 was submitted on 7th April 2022.)
andreysolsty 4y ago
You can be an ad company and respect your users privacy. They’re not mutually exclusive as the headline seems to suggest.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Can you be an ad company and respect your users, though? Google and Microsoft failed to do this, not because they didn't protect their user's identity but because they kept squeezing for more and more cash when the UX was already hurting. I'm not confident that Apple can resist those temptations (judging by the way they treat their own native advertising).
  - Someone 4y ago
    Adding advertising likely will cost them hardware sales. if so, their hardware branch might have enough clout to keep their advertising branch under control. Phrased another way: adding a few billions of advertising revenue wouldn’t make Apple an advertising company, just as selling smartphones hasn’t made Google a hardware company
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      They already have advertising, at least in MacOS. Every time I put on my headphones I get a pop-up ad for Apple Music, and I can't hide iCloud or Safari's constant nagging to get me to use them. Everyone has their own limits, but I left the ecosystem after Mojave (with this being one reason).
      - kaba0 4y ago
        I don’t know, is that really advertisement? These seems more akin to a program’s popup of its new features or that you can also go pro. Sure, nitpickingly these are ads, but they are related to the context, not intrusive, and not coming from a third party. If anything, it is more analogous to my friend telling me about that vacuum cleaner he bought that he finds a great buy when I bring up the topic of vacuum cleaners. Surely, it is still an ad, but you get the difference.
        4y ago
nawgz 4y ago
Ads are taking over the world because they're actually just a propaganda vehicle and control is the only thing worth money Regulation is too toothless to do anything about it so I think we'll naturally see all corporations evolve this way
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ogsalmanxx 4y ago
  This makes sense…
- medion 4y ago
  Sad and true. Attention and value extraction from every aspect of human life is the only goal in corporatism. It’s never enough for these companies, endless growth is all that matters.
- uoaei 4y ago
  > control is the only thing worth money Indeed. Look at anything you or anyone spends money on. It all comes down to controlling your environment. The environment that corporations inhabit is structured in such a way as to demand user attention and data exploitation in order to survive.
- sfe22 4y ago
  And why would government fix it if ads are propaganda tool? Shouldn’t it start using it to advance its interest and fix bigger issues?
UltraViolence 4y ago
You know Apple's mantra: "Don't leave money on the table." I'm totally not surprised about this, although it will hurt their privacy USP (unique selling point).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
denkmoon 4y ago
Please no. There is no refuge from the ads. Not for all the money in the world, apparently. This is the worst timeline. Can I pay 2x to get an ad-free iPhone? 3x? Surely there is some point where it makes sense to sell an ad free phone for those who _need_ to not see ads. They won't even take my money ;_;
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  The only way out is buying devices on which you can flash and use OS/software that was built without profit as a goal (e.g., free software). Anything short of that and you're just sitting under the Sword of Damocles of value extraction, ripe to be used and abused (within personal tolerance or otherwise).
  - reustle 4y ago
    It sounds similar to movie streaming vs piracy.
  - denkmoon 4y ago
    I know you are right, but I've tried doing the de-googled Android thing (when I was an Android user even). It sucks, hard. Android is a pretty bad UX platform to begin with, and trying to make it work with free software is just... awful. I can't contribute because I only have so many hours in a day. I'd rather pay. I'd pay a boatload for an operating system that replaces Android with something that has a good user experience and has no ads.
    - calciphus 4y ago
      I pay for a lifetime license on adguard, on Android. It is vanishing rare to see ads and the audit logs show how often and which apps are having their telemetry and other trackers blocked. It blocks a lot of Google stuff. That's the reason I stay with android. The Apple version of the app (which has to come through the app store) is not allowed to block anything for Apple apps or services. This they exempt themselves from user control.
stephc_int13 4y ago
With an accountant at the head of the company, what would you expect? They also have too much power, too much money, not enough competition and a deteriorating company culture. But aside from their dominance, they also have a few gems, their bet on ARM is paying off big time.
- ml_basics 4y ago
  > a deteriorating company culture Could you elaborate on this? Genuine question, because how Apple is so successful is a complete mystery to me. I worked there during the pandemic and my experience was that there is no company culture, it's just a bunch of totally siloed small teams. Culture grows as a result of people speaking to each other, which I didn't really see happening. Could be that I was in a particularly siloed part though.
  - NBJack 4y ago
    Silo'd teams that don't talk to each other? That sounds like a sign the culture is already deteriorating, or the lack of communication is inherently part of the culture. I'd be curious as to how the iOS team would be independent of the hardware team or the app dev experience teams. I suspect your team experience was a corner case.
frankjr 4y ago
Who is clicking on these ads? Or do companies pay for the ad to just show up? I have never in my life intentionally clicked on an ad.
- seaal 4y ago
  I just recently clicked on an App Store ad for the first time. It was on a desperate search for an IPTV that didn’t suck. I was hoping it might be good considering the dev was paying for ads, it was not.
- asadotzler 4y ago
  Not all ads are about click-through. Impressions can be a goal by itself for some who are seeking brand recognition benefits in addition to or even as an alternative to clicks or installs.
jcadam 4y ago
I wish they would spin off their hardware business. Or at least their Mac business.
secretprocess 4y ago
Funny, if you make it to the end of the article the entire thing is an ad for Proton.
ViceCitySage 4y ago
Apple's "privacy" is really just data protection from other competing companies. It was just another marketing campaign to maintain their positive image.
yarg 4y ago
It's the carcinisation of the modern corporation.
noizejoy 4y ago
Lovely free advertising for Proton. Very smart blog post, since numerous employees and fans of Apple competitors, as well as anyone who dislikes Apple for whatever reason, has plenty motivation to upvote this post. Also: Calling someone an ad company when approximately 1% of revenue seems to be generated by ads would seem quite a stretch. Also: Being tracked while on someone’s property isn’t exactly the same as tracking someone across unrelated properties. Also: Every company with a decent CRM system and culture has been tracking all kinds of (often personal) details about their (potential) customers gathered from their interactions and whatever sources they could get their hands on. This has been going on since before the Internet was widely used. But while this blog post (attack ad?) doesn’t seem to have that much meaningful substance, it’s also kind of just doing the same to Apple as Apple often does to others.
- politelemon 4y ago
  Also: Yet I see many comments rushing to perform mental gymnastics on their behalf. There are several attributes here that match up exactly with other companies that are somehow vilified. The blog post is on point, the user have been in denial for a long time and will continue to be.
  - noizejoy 4y ago
    > Also: Yet I see many comments rushing to perform mental gymnastics on their behalf. There are several attributes here that match up exactly with other companies that are somehow vilified. The blog post is on point, the user have been in denial for a long time and will continue to be. I’m all in favour of calling out Apple on their crap. But Apple’s evils aren’t the same as Google’s and Meta’s evils. I just prefer my conversations and criticisms to be more nuanced, rather than brushing everyone with the same simplistic brush. Also: Calling users to be in denial is a cheap attack. The reality is, that all of us users live in a world filled with nothing but imperfect choices. — So all we can do is pick our poison according to our personal priorities and preferences at any given time.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  > Also: Being tracked while on someone’s property isn’t exactly the same as tracking someone across unrelated properties. Do you consider Apple-made devices property of their buyers or do they forever remain property of Apple?
mrmister00 4y ago
Proton mail doing a little advertising of their own through a blog post. lol
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

111 points by Doolwind 4y ago

jks 4y ago

NextDNS has a "Native tracking protection" blocklist for Apple. Looking at my logs, it has blocked iadsdk.apple.com and many subdomains, and supportmetrics, securemetrics, books-analytics-events, weather-analytics-events (all under apple.com).

kaba0 4y ago

Is there any actual substance to these posts, or is this just the usual scare tactics? Because something similar is posted almost daily. Besides perhaps an Apple Music “ad”, I haven’t seen anything factual.

irtefa 4y ago

This is sadly the beginning of the end of Apple.

grahamjperrin 4y ago

A somewhat careless, reactionary blog post. "… On Nov. 20, a pair of iOS developers known as Mysk discovered that Apple has a specific identifier (a “directory services identifier” or DSID) for every Apple iCloud account. …" – as if Mysk discovered this. Not so. DSID-related analysis was performed more than seven months earlier – by a group of five researchers, including four at the University of Oxford. Konrad Kollnig, Anastasia Shuba, Max Van Kleek, Reuben Binns, and Nigel Shadbolt. 2022. Goodbye Tracking? Impact of iOS App Tracking Transparency and Privacy Labels. In 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 508–520. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533116 https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533116 (Version 1 was submitted on 7th April 2022.)

andreysolsty 4y ago

You can be an ad company and respect your users privacy. They’re not mutually exclusive as the headline seems to suggest.

smoldesu 4y ago
Can you be an ad company and respect your users, though? Google and Microsoft failed to do this, not because they didn't protect their user's identity but because they kept squeezing for more and more cash when the UX was already hurting. I'm not confident that Apple can resist those temptations (judging by the way they treat their own native advertising).
- Someone 4y ago
  Adding advertising likely will cost them hardware sales. if so, their hardware branch might have enough clout to keep their advertising branch under control. Phrased another way: adding a few billions of advertising revenue wouldn’t make Apple an advertising company, just as selling smartphones hasn’t made Google a hardware company
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    They already have advertising, at least in MacOS. Every time I put on my headphones I get a pop-up ad for Apple Music, and I can't hide iCloud or Safari's constant nagging to get me to use them. Everyone has their own limits, but I left the ecosystem after Mojave (with this being one reason).
    - kaba0 4y ago
      I don’t know, is that really advertisement? These seems more akin to a program’s popup of its new features or that you can also go pro. Sure, nitpickingly these are ads, but they are related to the context, not intrusive, and not coming from a third party. If anything, it is more analogous to my friend telling me about that vacuum cleaner he bought that he finds a great buy when I bring up the topic of vacuum cleaners. Surely, it is still an ad, but you get the difference.
      - 4y ago

nawgz 4y ago

Ads are taking over the world because they're actually just a propaganda vehicle and control is the only thing worth money Regulation is too toothless to do anything about it so I think we'll naturally see all corporations evolve this way

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ogsalmanxx 4y ago
This makes sense…
medion 4y ago
Sad and true. Attention and value extraction from every aspect of human life is the only goal in corporatism. It’s never enough for these companies, endless growth is all that matters.
uoaei 4y ago
> control is the only thing worth money Indeed. Look at anything you or anyone spends money on. It all comes down to controlling your environment. The environment that corporations inhabit is structured in such a way as to demand user attention and data exploitation in order to survive.
sfe22 4y ago
And why would government fix it if ads are propaganda tool? Shouldn’t it start using it to advance its interest and fix bigger issues?

UltraViolence 4y ago

You know Apple's mantra: "Don't leave money on the table." I'm totally not surprised about this, although it will hurt their privacy USP (unique selling point).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

denkmoon 4y ago

Please no. There is no refuge from the ads. Not for all the money in the world, apparently. This is the worst timeline. Can I pay 2x to get an ad-free iPhone? 3x? Surely there is some point where it makes sense to sell an ad free phone for those who _need_ to not see ads. They won't even take my money ;_;

shrimp_emoji 4y ago
The only way out is buying devices on which you can flash and use OS/software that was built without profit as a goal (e.g., free software). Anything short of that and you're just sitting under the Sword of Damocles of value extraction, ripe to be used and abused (within personal tolerance or otherwise).
- reustle 4y ago
  It sounds similar to movie streaming vs piracy.
- denkmoon 4y ago
  I know you are right, but I've tried doing the de-googled Android thing (when I was an Android user even). It sucks, hard. Android is a pretty bad UX platform to begin with, and trying to make it work with free software is just... awful. I can't contribute because I only have so many hours in a day. I'd rather pay. I'd pay a boatload for an operating system that replaces Android with something that has a good user experience and has no ads.
  - calciphus 4y ago
    I pay for a lifetime license on adguard, on Android. It is vanishing rare to see ads and the audit logs show how often and which apps are having their telemetry and other trackers blocked. It blocks a lot of Google stuff. That's the reason I stay with android. The Apple version of the app (which has to come through the app store) is not allowed to block anything for Apple apps or services. This they exempt themselves from user control.

stephc_int13 4y ago

With an accountant at the head of the company, what would you expect? They also have too much power, too much money, not enough competition and a deteriorating company culture. But aside from their dominance, they also have a few gems, their bet on ARM is paying off big time.

ml_basics 4y ago
> a deteriorating company culture Could you elaborate on this? Genuine question, because how Apple is so successful is a complete mystery to me. I worked there during the pandemic and my experience was that there is no company culture, it's just a bunch of totally siloed small teams. Culture grows as a result of people speaking to each other, which I didn't really see happening. Could be that I was in a particularly siloed part though.
- NBJack 4y ago
  Silo'd teams that don't talk to each other? That sounds like a sign the culture is already deteriorating, or the lack of communication is inherently part of the culture. I'd be curious as to how the iOS team would be independent of the hardware team or the app dev experience teams. I suspect your team experience was a corner case.

frankjr 4y ago

Who is clicking on these ads? Or do companies pay for the ad to just show up? I have never in my life intentionally clicked on an ad.

seaal 4y ago
I just recently clicked on an App Store ad for the first time. It was on a desperate search for an IPTV that didn’t suck. I was hoping it might be good considering the dev was paying for ads, it was not.
asadotzler 4y ago
Not all ads are about click-through. Impressions can be a goal by itself for some who are seeking brand recognition benefits in addition to or even as an alternative to clicks or installs.

jcadam 4y ago

I wish they would spin off their hardware business. Or at least their Mac business.

secretprocess 4y ago

Funny, if you make it to the end of the article the entire thing is an ad for Proton.

ViceCitySage 4y ago

Apple's "privacy" is really just data protection from other competing companies. It was just another marketing campaign to maintain their positive image.

yarg 4y ago

It's the carcinisation of the modern corporation.

noizejoy 4y ago

Lovely free advertising for Proton. Very smart blog post, since numerous employees and fans of Apple competitors, as well as anyone who dislikes Apple for whatever reason, has plenty motivation to upvote this post. Also: Calling someone an ad company when approximately 1% of revenue seems to be generated by ads would seem quite a stretch. Also: Being tracked while on someone’s property isn’t exactly the same as tracking someone across unrelated properties. Also: Every company with a decent CRM system and culture has been tracking all kinds of (often personal) details about their (potential) customers gathered from their interactions and whatever sources they could get their hands on. This has been going on since before the Internet was widely used. But while this blog post (attack ad?) doesn’t seem to have that much meaningful substance, it’s also kind of just doing the same to Apple as Apple often does to others.

politelemon 4y ago
Also: Yet I see many comments rushing to perform mental gymnastics on their behalf. There are several attributes here that match up exactly with other companies that are somehow vilified. The blog post is on point, the user have been in denial for a long time and will continue to be.
- noizejoy 4y ago
  > Also: Yet I see many comments rushing to perform mental gymnastics on their behalf. There are several attributes here that match up exactly with other companies that are somehow vilified. The blog post is on point, the user have been in denial for a long time and will continue to be. I’m all in favour of calling out Apple on their crap. But Apple’s evils aren’t the same as Google’s and Meta’s evils. I just prefer my conversations and criticisms to be more nuanced, rather than brushing everyone with the same simplistic brush. Also: Calling users to be in denial is a cheap attack. The reality is, that all of us users live in a world filled with nothing but imperfect choices. — So all we can do is pick our poison according to our personal priorities and preferences at any given time.
paulryanrogers 4y ago
> Also: Being tracked while on someone’s property isn’t exactly the same as tracking someone across unrelated properties. Do you consider Apple-made devices property of their buyers or do they forever remain property of Apple?

mrmister00 4y ago

Proton mail doing a little advertising of their own through a blog post. lol

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]