Facebook v. Apple Inc.
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Not sure how the Inc. magazine’s profit motive is aligned, but it just came out with a series of articles that is pro-Apple and critical of Facebook.
https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/tim-cook-may-have-just-ended-facebook.html
My personal philosophy on a internet related privacy issues align better with Apple than with Facebook. Still, it seems the Inc. magazine is rather unambiguously taking side. Makes me wonder if that’s really how their writers and editorial staff feel or if there is some other profit motive that I’m not seeing yet.
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With Apple you are the client and with Facebook you are the product. For me that tells me all I need to know.
Free is never free, and the extent of exploitation of users is unknowable and one has assigned any rights to privacy away not only for what’s possible and understandable today but whatever can be even more monetized in the future.
I would never get nearly enough value from Facebook to do that deal. Also on principle I hate shitty deals.
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If I understand correctly, all Apple does in the OS update is to change a default, namely that, by default, apps can't access the ad identifier whereas it used to be the case that the default was that they can. In previous versions of the OS you could also disable it.
I wonder how, technically, the ad ID stuff works. Are ad IDs the same as cookies, except that they also work for apps? How, concretely, are these IDs used?
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@klaus said in Facebook v. Apple Inc.:
If I understand correctly, all Apple does in the OS update is to change a default, namely that, by default, apps can't access the ad identifier whereas it used to be the case that the default was that they can. In previous versions of the OS you could also disable it.
I wonder how, technically, the ad ID stuff works. Are ad IDs the same as cookies, except that they also work for apps? How, concretely, are these IDs used?
The ability to block has already been there but most people don’t bother. Opt out vs opt in is an existential threat as most people don’t change the default. Ad revenue could crater.
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@klaus said in Facebook v. Apple Inc.:
I wonder how, technically, the ad ID stuff works. Are ad IDs the same as cookies, except that they also work for apps? How, concretely, are these IDs used?
In an iOS device, you may have App-A by Company A and App-B by Company B. Each app run in its little sand box and most people assume that one app does not know anything about the other app, i.e., Company A cannot figure out that if you are doing anything with Company B at all. You may be registered as KlausA@fakemail.com with App-A and browse a lot of midget porn using App-A, you may be registered as KlausB@gefalschtepost.de and do a lot of research on sexspielzeug using App-B. Company A and Company B don’t really know that KlausA@fakemail.com and KlausB@gefalschtepost.de are the same person.
But if the App-A and App-B can read a common ID from the device, then they have a way to figure out that KlausA@fakemail.com and KlausB@gefalschtepost.de are indeed the same person, and can use that information to more accurately target the ads they serve to both KlausA@fakemail.com and KlausB@gefalschtepost.de. This is made even more convenient if both Company A and Company B both use the same app monetization platforms. It’s quite common that mobile apps use some third party advertising platform rather than deploying their own. Facebook and Google are among the biggest of these advertising platforms. If App-A and App-B both use Facebook as their ad platform, then it would be easy for Facebook to figure out that KlausA@fakemail.com and KlausB@gefalschtepost.de are the same person if both apps read the same ID from the device. (Apple has its own mobile app ad platform too, but apps can choose not to use Apple’s ad serving platform and can in theory encrypt data in their own sandboxes such that Apple itself cannot read user data stored by individual apps running on the device.)
It is different from “cookie” in that “cookie” is something deposited by the website/service you use, while the advertising ID is a property of your user account on the device you use. Modern browsers have “do not track” features that prevent one website from reading the “cookies” deposited by another website. “Cookies” stored by one browser are typically not visible to “cookies” stored on another browser. Advertising ID is not so well isolated. One phone, one account, one advertising ID.
Technically, I think iOS and Android would work just fine if they never implemented anything like “advertising ID” to begin with. But in the early days they made decisions that they figured were needed to attract developers, and developers do want a way to monetize via advertising. Apple has long given the user a way to “reset” the advertising ID, but it’s not something that the casual users bother to do. Not sure about Android.
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Thanks, @Axtremus . Do you know how exactly the IDs are transmitted?
For instance, HTTP cookies are transmitted automatically in a http GET request, e.g., it would look like this:
GET /spec.html HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.org Cookie: theme=light; sessionToken=abc123 ...and the server can similarly ask for cookie storage via a HTTP response.
But how does this work for ad ids? Is this also be dealt with on the HTTP level? Or some kind of JavaScript API?
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@Klaus The host OS, be it iOS or Android, provides a system API that an app can call to ask for the advertising ID. If you're an app developer, you'd just call that system API and read the advertising ID. Apple just add some access control on it such that the user gets to decide whether that system API returns a valid advertising ID or returns an error code that indicates lack of access permission (depends on which app makes that API call and whether the user has given permission for that app to read the advertising ID).
If you also have a cloud/server component to your app, how you transmit that advertising ID between your app (your code) and your server (also your code) is entirely up to you.
If you're Facebook or if you use Facebook's code to handle the advertising aspects of your app, then it would be Facebook's code running from within your app's context reading that advertising ID, and it's Facebook's code running on Facebook's servers. In this case it would again be entirely up to Facebook to transmit the advertising ID between its app code and its servers.
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h/t wtg:
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-apple-feud-over-privacy-internet-future/
WIRED article on the Apple-Facebook feud over privacy and the future of advertising on the Internet.
