When I install a third-party app and use it, I’m making an active choice to be their user too.
When that third-party app embeds the Facebook SDK which tracks me, I don’t know about it and do not have the ability to consent to Facebook tracking me.
ATT brings Facebook to the same level as Apple and the third-party app developers by giving me the visibility and choice I would otherwise be deprived of. It should be possible to opt out of being a Facebook user. Being silently opted-in without consent is what ATT fixes.
Why not apply them to their own ecosystem?
Just because I might be a one-time user of an Apple product definitely doesn't mean I've made an active choice to be enrolled for marketing across their entire ecosystem, indefinitely.
Hell - I'm literally typing this on a Macbook that my work requires I use, I didn't make an active choice there at all...
>Why not apply them to their own ecosystem?
OP is only claiming that warnings for third party tracking is valuable. I'm not sure you go from that to "we should have warnings for first party tracking (ie. GDPR-style cookie banners)".
If you need to know the details of what is done inside the third-party app, then that third-party is not trustworthy. Or you also need to know what is done inside iOS.
The problem is that in today world, we don't know who we can trust, and that the context might change over time. We all believe that Apple doesn't do shady stuff today, but has anyone proof? and will that change some day?
Why is trust an all or nothing proposition? Why can't I trust an app to do whatever it wants within its sandbox, but not to get an unique identifier that can be shared between apps? It's not any different than sandboxing, where I trust the app to do whatever it wants in its sandbox, but not mess with my documents or OS.
That’s not true, Facebook’s business model is inherently privacy invading.
> When I install a third-party app and use it, I’m making an active choice to be their user too.
Are you properly notified of exactly what they record, and where they record it? In a form an average user can easily understand and control? Can you opt out of changes in something you are locked into?
I disagree. I’m choosing to be a user of the specific device that I bought, nothing more.
At the time of the purchase, at best. If Apple changes their tracking after that and you don't agree with it, what will you do, sell the phone?
There are two decisions:
1. To be a user.
2. To have data tracked.
Installing from the App Store is decision #1 but #2 is made separately.
Is buying a phone both #1 and #2 together? If so, why?
No, I'm making an active choice to have a device capable of SMS, voice and video calls, and recordings.
With sensible data protection regulations, like GDPR, you must be informed and consent to it. We can talk about implementation details for months, but that's the gist of it.
Money.
That's very wide and obscure. Even the bullet points for how the OS can track you go past what can be considered informed consent. If that consent covers every 1st party app that will ever run on the phone then it's a guarantee nothing in about it is really informed.
If you think a vague, blanket consent is all it takes then every company will get one in a jiffy. Just touch any company's real estate in any way whatsoever, get a prompt that "you consented to being tracked in any company related app forever", profit. You "consented".
Remember when Disney tried to get out of a wrongful death lawsuit by citing some agreement the family of the victim accepted for a Disney+ trial years before? [0] Well you're describing the same principle. Consent should be granular.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
That case was wildly mischaracterized. The restaurant that allegedly caused the wrongly death was not owned or operated by Disney, but Disney was dragged into the lawsuit anyways on the basis that they listed the restaurant on their website. Disney retorted that if they could be on the hook for a wrongful death under such tenuous circumstances, that they should be let off the hook on the basis of the tenuous waiver the plaintiff signed years before.
It's not "obscure" to anyone who takes 5 minutes to ask for it. Apple will happily send you all the data they have about you.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/apple-data-and-privacy-how...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r...
Isn't that sentence by itself kind of insane? Tracking at the OS level used to be unacceptable.
Nobody should expect their OS to track them like this in the first place.
Someone in the 90's would be imagining bonzi buddy when you say tracking when it's actually pendo.
Was the Candy Crush developer getting paid for inserting these trackers, or did they only get paid where they also showed ads?
Google Analytics, Facebook share/login integrations, etc.
I mean thats the main value proposition for Apple these days, no? At least for more tech users.
It is not obvious to me that Apple is doing this, at least in any meaningfully industrialized sense. The biggest third party advertising platform Apple runs is App Store ads, and I think it would be surprising indeed if Apple were using any data to influence these ads beyond "what have I downloaded from the App Store" (actually, they might not even use that, I seem to recall at some point they spoke on the extreme privacy of these ads. they might just be related search term ads).
The other major one is Apple News, which is such an underused, weird service that I can't bring myself to care about it.
There's a few other minor things that sometimes look like third party ads, like... the banners on Apple TV sometimes advertising an Apple TV+ show that might have been made by a non-Apple Studio? I've never gotten the sense that is personalized, at all, its always just some new show. Maybe there's some incentive payments on the backend of Apple Music that surface certain artists, like Spotify does? Grasping at straws.
First party advertising is a bit more prevalent, but I don't feel this is what the article is speaking on, because at the end of the day the ATT system is designed to stop the proliferation of personal data. For example, the ad in the Settings app to upsell customers on AppleCare+; the Fitness+ notifications some customers get; the Apple Store app recommending accessories for products it knows you own. I'm also not going to lose sleep over any of these things.
Weak argument. I don't see any evidence of Apple not holding themselves to an even higher standard than ATT and most other companies when it comes to security and privacy. The EU just hates American tech.
I'm not particularly old-fashioned as I had a 12 year career in FAANG mostly working with sensitive PII and business data which is quite boring if you're not a criminal. But I understand that there is no real way to enforce the kind of privacy standards people seem to assume exist.
What it doesn't mention is that ATTF is a voluntary program with no enforcement mechanism, currently.
My roomba is 10 years old and has no wifi
...yes. Apple defines "tracking" here as sharing your data with other companies, and then doesn't do that itself. Because that's the opaque and objectionable thing.
If you launch an Apple app then you probably expect Apple to know what you're doing. If you launch a Meta app, similarly you expect Meta to know what you're doing. But you might not expect Meta to immediately go and tell, say, some random company called Cambridge Analytica everything you're doing.
Meta absolutely could do exactly what Apple's doing without needing to warn users -- collect user data across its various apps, and use it to advertise its own products.
I do agree that Apple has carefully chosen a thing to object to that aligns well with their own business model. But I also think the thing they're objecting to is worth disclosing to users, so: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> As one programmatic ad news outlet pointed out, Facebook was actually hit the hardest by the 2022 first-party rules because its software development kit (SDK) "plugged into so many outside apps and ... its attribution pixels [were] littered liberally across the web."
The article they link to there about the 2022 rules is from 2021, incidentally, and is just talking about other apps embedding Facebook tracking -- i.e. third-party stuff. There's a lot of talking about how "first-party data is valuable to Facebook", but it's all referring to how Facebook wants to use the data from other people.
How else could they repeatedly fuck up the basics? Every second release has awful battery life because half the daemon processes are running wild in 100% CPU parties. The only reasonable explanation for this nonsense is that Apple doesn't know about all the problems (or cannot fix them) because they refrain from collecting the required data...
