Apple Shares New 'Tracked' Ad With Humorous Real-World Analogy of App Tracking Transparency

[31 Flavas]

Oh my god, all the small businesses being crushed though, it's a real tragedy.

Oh, and it'll be a real tragedy (for Facebook) when they decide to make good on their threat to charge for access....

 

[coredev]

This, on top of all the other settings, alerts, dialogs, and notifications one encounters on daily basis. For all the great things our devices can do, you have to battle a constant barrage of settings, and it just becomes noise. Slows me down as much as it slows down a hacker.

With this switch however, it get's rid of all those popups like "App x wants to use your id to give you a better user experience". So less noise. I like it.

 

[darkslide29]

I would have loved for the example at the end where the actor pulls out their phone to block tracking, for the offending app asking permission to have been Facebook, and a Zuckerberg lookalike goes *poof* into thin air.

 

[darkslide29]

I don't really buy Apple's whole super-duper privacy claims. The problem is that what they call "privacy" is just more hidden settings and buried features to manage — and half the time they get inadvertently reversed. This, on top of all the other settings, alerts, dialogs, and notifications one encounters on daily basis. For all the great things our devices can do, you have to battle a constant barrage of settings, and it just becomes noise. Slows me down as much as it slows down a hacker.

On another note, I don't need MacRumors to tell me that an ad is "humorous" or some other quality. I'll decide for myself. So annoying.

It’s on by default. Leaving it on by default makes it so that one switch keeps you from aren’t getting all of the pop ups for permission. Really is a set it and forget it feature, except Apple already set it for us in iOS 14.5

 

[kcfrankjr]

Great, now if they could just make my phone more private from the lock screen!!

 

[Jandalf]

Why doesn’t it say „Tell app not to track“ instead of „Ask App not to track“?
Who‘s to choose?

 

[grjj]

I would have loved for the example at the end where the actor pulls out their phone to block tracking, for the offending app asking permission to have been Facebook, and a Zuckerberg lookalike goes *poof* into thin air.

If you're signed into Facebook (or any other online service) there's nothing these settings can do to block tracking. By signing in you've agreed to and enabled a level of tracking that I think most people can't even begin to comprehend the scale of.
Apple's IDFA helps prevent cross-site/cross-app tracking only if you don't need to sign in. But if Facebook and, say Amazon, both know who you are because you sign in to them, then there's nothing you can do that will stop the creepy other than leave.

 

[grjj]

Why doesn’t it say „Tell app not to track“ instead of „Ask App not to track“?
Who‘s to choose?

Because there are many ways to track you. As I mentioned in another post, if you sign into apps/sites and they decide to trade information then they'll trade information. Nothing Apple does on the device can prevent that or stop independent 3rd parties from doing legal business with each other. Until and unless there are laws against this tracking then if it's profitable it will be done. It's an example of unrestrained Capitalism right up there with dumping your toxic waste in the fresh water supply.
There's also other ways these companies are working to track you including device fingerprinting.
All Apple and end users can do is make the hurdles high enough that the tracking companies decide it's just not worth the cost, and advertisers on the web decide they have to settle for the same "broadcast it and hope for the best" that every physical world ad has used for, what, centuries, millennia? This whole tracking thing was enabled by devices, the Internet and people's desire for "free".
Remember when the App Store first came out? You had two choices for a tic tac toe game: a) was $2.99 worked well and had no ads or tracking. b) was free, showed ads when you launched and tracked where you were, how long you played and reported back to several tracking companies.
Most people chose b), and app store average selling priced dropped, ads got put in, tracking got put in... we did this to ourselves.