Its proponents will tell you this doesn't have any tracking in it. Fully anonymous. Only the advert's ID gets passed along to track conversion.

Who knows who could have clicked this advert, with the ID "Advert-presented-to-ugh123"? Could have been anyone. We've successfully masked out any tracking, hooray for Apple.

Also I don't know enough about in-app and app-to-app advertising, but I'm surprised if the mechanisms described are sufficient to keep everybody honest.

The way I understand this: doing this in your application requires you to have network access, which means you have to convince your user to give it to you.

This gives you a way to count installs (and almost nothing else; you probably can assume arrival times correlate with time of installation and learn something about your global user base from that, but that’s all I can think of) without getting any permission from the user.

Applications can still use the old approach, but that’s more work and won’t produce accurate install counts. Apple thinks the end result will be that fewer apps will do it, making the dialog asking for network access rarer, and users more wary of giving the permission.

the difference is: with facebook sdk, facebook has all the user data. with google sdk, google has all the user data. with apple new sdk, apple has all the data.

besides that, with the 2 previous sdk, advertisers know if the install was from a good user vs a abandoned user/bot that installed it once and vanished. the new apple sdk conveniently will not let advertisers make that distinction.

> Apples fake privacy concerns.

Apple has been a loud, proven advocate and supporter of Privacy. This comment is all snark and nothing factual.

Do you want less or more user control? Or should Apple control everything? I'm certainly not a fan of Apple but I respect their ability to mostly just stick the to basics of you give me $100 and I give you this product of equal (sic) value.

Apple willingly permits any application to subvert user control. You can't record your iPhone screen trough the lightning connection while using Netflix app. You can't send a fake GPS signal to apps, give fake contact files, or lie to your software. And you can't play background audio, because fundamentally Apple doesn't put user freedom first. I find it bizarre that an application on my phone could choose to not play my audio in the background.

If you can't lie to your software, then it controls you, and you have no power. Apple could do more in this aspect for control.

A gay man raised in Alabama.

See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/08/15...

He's gay.

My thoughts exactly. When I don't like something an app is doing I don't install it. I remember when I'd try free games on Android that requested every permission under the sun I would not install those apps. I've even seen some apps share in the description "Removed the crazy permissions due to complaints, sorry guys did not mean to upset you" or something along those lines. So sometimes it's not malicious, but it is scary that an offline only game needs so much access to your phone.

Apple can just change Safari so it doesn't automatically open the App Store on redirects or from javascript. That way you'd have to direct the user to a tracking page and then he'd have to click another link to open the App Store. I doubt their tracking would be worth enough to put up hoops like that for the user to jump through.

What attack? The Adtech Ecosystem is incestuous, corrupt and penultimately complicated. jwegan is technically correct and savvy enough to understand one of many problems with this kind of fluff announcement. The least of these problems is a strawman reaction that anyone who dismissed it, is a bad actor. New SDKs are born every day. Apple CANNOT PRESENT a new technology that isn't a variant of what already survives in the ecosystem (i.e. insufficient other than to add another paid product that doesn't work any better). If Apple wants to go outside the IAB standards, it's another attempt to "take over" or can only be used as an Apple "internal" tool.

Here's a disclaimer: I worked at multiple Adtech companies in senior engineering positions.

I'm not trying to hide it. Like you said it is right in my HN profile.

I don't work on Pinterest's ads business and I'm not very familiar with that side of the company. I'm speaking as someone who runs ads on other sites to try and drive traffic to Pinterest.

Also, like the other poster said, an ad-hominem attack is a classic logic fallacy. You are criticizing who is saying it and did not bring up a single critique of my actual argument.

Please be less ad hominem and speak to the merits of the conversation. Does it matter if the OP has skin in the game if the merits of the argument have real value?

> I have never seen an app that doesn't allow to completely deny location access.

That's because Apple explicitly tests for that during app review, and will reject apps which crash or refuse to work if they're denied access to Location Services or other APIs (photos, contacts, microphone, etc).

This is a new feature in iOS 11.

Based on your previous reply I thought that the lack of apps that require location was due to Apple’s review process and not the fact that the “Never” button can’t be disabled.

Telling the FBI to bugger off when they came and asked apple to crack their own encryption isn't enough of an example, exigent as it may very well be, whatever your personal opinions of due process are?

Is there ANY evidence that they don’t do what their privacy policy says they do?

Well, that isn't nearly all of the information. That is what they say, just like FB says they they don't abuse your privacy.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

They have already shown that they are willing to violate people's privacy. That is useful information.

And?

A privacy violation via legal means is still a privacy violation. I fully acknowledge that we don't know what Microsoft does with our data either.

Technically speaking, they have the option. Practically speaking, they do not have an option.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. Prioritizing your users is completely an option. This is simply a choice in which Apple chooses money over it's users.