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As an user this second time a Social network bit off it own hands besides itself, anyone Romberg MySpace! Facebook won the war because MySpace decided to audio place for huge RIAA companies come in take over users pages!

Facebook real enemy is not Apple, it’s Parler!
 
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Sure they can, the rule is... not to track, whether that is with old methods or new, makes no difference.
Block the Dev from the Appstore after violations, whether or not Devs find new ways or not.
The communication is between the user and Apple. If Apple phrased in a way that implied they guaranteed the app would no longer track the user, they user would be pissed at Apple if it later turned out the app found another way to track that Apple couldn't yet block. There's no reason for Apple to make that guarantee to the user, so instead they use softer language with the users.
 
Yes, and if that is the case, I hope this does not turn into a cat and mouse game of app vendors trying to find means around it, causing Apple to have to respond and make corrections. If that is the case, hopefully Apple can make changes to the methods being used so that it is a definite control, either on or off.

I am certain this will become a cat and mouse game. However, I am confident in Apple having the upper hand throughout the battle. iOS and the whole sandboxing architecture was designed from the ground-up for winning these kinds of battles.
 
They can't, because they never get access to server-side part of the application, so they cannot code review it.

Maybe the part that runs on your phone conforms to the "do not track" request, but Apple can't promise the server-side code will. They might use other methods to identify the user (especially if you have to log in to use the app).

It already puts a big hindrance on the ad networks, since apps will lose access to an unique ad identifier that can be shared across different apps. But Facebook will know "you are you" whenever you use Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and any app/website with "login with FB" or maybe even the FB pixel.

The only way to not be tracked by FB is to not use the Internet, as they have their claws in everything. All other solutions are only making it harder for them, but rarely impossible.

I think Apple does know what data is sent to the server-side part of the app. So while they don't know what the server-side does, they know what inputs it receives. That may be sufficient to police other methods of tracking.

At the end of the day, you're right about Facebook being everywhere. PiHole and tracker-blocking browser extensions are pretty good at blocking trackers, but at a certain point it begins to break a lot of functionality. So it's always a balancing act, and a very user-unfriendly one at that.
 
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As an user this second time a Social network bit off it own hands besides itself, anyone Romberg MySpace! Facebook won the war because MySpace decided to audio place for huge RIAA companies come in take over users pages!

Facebook real enemy is not Apple, it’s Parler!
Had a lot of friends who were MySpace developers near the end when FOX bought them.

funny how they sign on to work for MySpace and ended up former Disney Employees
 
If I ask not to track, does that mean tracking is blocked, or is it up to the developer?

It’s impossible for apple to block it using technical measures, because apple cannot access the source code of the servers these apps are using. That said, good chance that if Apple finds out an app developer is not abiding by the user’s choice, they kick the app out of the App Store.
 
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"Ask app not to track." Shouldn't that be "Block app from tracking." Is it blocking or not?

THIS is what I want!

More importantly I hope this is persistent going forward with ALL future iOS & iPadOS (MacOS as well) updates! So with new installations we don't yet again keep getting prompted, but I'm fine with that if it occurs.
 
It definitely should read Allow/Deny. After everyone decided to ignore the Do Not Track header - that wording along with asking them is not very reassuring. It is your device - you should have the choice to just deny.

I think some people may interpret this as an "ad blocker", which it is not. And Apple has no control over what an ad network does with the information that they acquire. It's an honour system, and honesty doesn't mix well with an industry built on desperation (ie. advertising).
 
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„Ask App Not To Track“ sounds weird and too polite? Like sure ask them but they may or may not stop?

It’s also not quite clear what kind of tracking it would actually stop. There r so many different kind of SDKs and APIs to track
I believe before now that was the furthest they could go. Apple actually started blocking things to a degree on their side after Google famously hacked Safari to get around the blocks. This will make it so the customer has to agree to it while knowing what it is doing. Even before downloading from the store too.

The reason Facebook is fighting in public is because they were finding ways around Apple’s policies to keep doing what they wanted. Now Apple has made it clear. If you don’t follow these rules you will be booted from the store.
 
No thanks,I have the best wireless headphones: Sennheiser Momentum 3,one of the best professional wired headphones Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro (connected to headphone Amplifier) and also original Airpods.I’m good.
I also think these look super ugly.
 
When I first heard Apple were bringing in this feature I didn’t intend to use it as I’m not very concerned about these companies tracking me. If they want to see my searches for warhammer, rugby league and Asian women my original instinct was for them to have at it.
However with Facebook playing the victim in all this they’ve just pushed me to enable the feature out of spite.
 
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Is this the same as this?
If it does, wouldn't it be easier to just not turn this thing on? It is disabled by default, at least on my iPhone 7+ iOS14.3
fullsizeoutput_2c20.jpeg


And from the explanation, it seems better to just leave it off as it automatically opts you out from tracking.
fullsizeoutput_2c21.jpeg
 
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Sure. There are still a lot of unknowns on what the full effects will be, but I'll explain what I know so far. The issue with a lot of the sweeping statements that Apple and Facebook make is that there is a whole lot of nuance. I imagine most people won't read much of what I write, but here goes. I run a three-person company and we make iOS and Android card games. We make money by showing ads or letting people pay to remove them (spoiler alert: nobody pays to remove them) in our apps and we get users for our games by paying for advertising to get users into our apps.

Apple's changes basically will get rid of the identifier that lets people measure how effective their ads are because they can't match up someone who installs an app with the ad that brought them to the app. This is Facebook's argument. They have some statistic about how much less effective ads will be able to targeted. There is some truth to that. I suspect our ad rates will go down and we will earn less money. We will also have a have a harder time time figuring out which ads are the most effective. If I run an ad for my app on Facebook, Apple Search, and in a bunch of other apps, I won't know which ad brought in the good users (ie ones that spend a lot of time in my app) -except Apple Search, because Apple is allowed to track still.

But WAIT - Apple announced a fix for all of these privacy issues - at WWDC they said they had a privacy friendly way that ad networks could use that would allow them to still do ad measurement (what I've been talking about above) in an anonymous way. This "privacy friendly ad network" that Apple has created is called SKAdNetwork. The problem is Apple's implementation is very buggy and has all sorts of weird limitations - like any measurement has to happen within the first 24 hours after an ad is tapped on. What you are going to see is within a few months of Apple's enforcement of Advertising Tracking Transparency - is that as apps switch over to using SKAdNetwork, which doesn't require the ATT Prompt and goes through Apple, apps will become very aggressive to try and get your to "convert" in your first 24 hours of using the app. They'll also be more aggressive about trying to collect e-mail addresses or another login so that they have another way that they can keep track of you now that they can't use the old tracking identifier.

TLDR:
How am I, a small business owner, caught in the middle (we make card game apps that are advertising dependent)?
Our revenue will likely go down and our ability to be able to acquire users will become harder to measure. We also need to switch over wait for all of our ad networks (Facebook, Google, etc.) to update their code to use Apple somewhat buggy ad tracking tool that wasn't super well thought out. Our business will survive. We've had a boost this year with people shifting their attention to using our apps during the pandemic to kill time. But when people get back to normal we could see a significant drop-off of users in addition to the issues I talked about above.
Thank you for the detailed response! Not only did you inform me about what I asked about but you brought up some really good points.
 
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It blocks the only method of cross-app tracking at the system level on iOS — the IDFA — by returning a UUID that’s all zeros instead of the real per-device IDFA. Apps can still do quite a bit of first-party tracking in-app, though (think of all the data Facebook associates with an account just from interactions within Facebook and Instagram), and without auditing the frontend and backend source code there’s really not much Apple can do about that. Also using Facebook as an example, there might also be other avenues for cross-app tracking that involve, say, Facebook SDKs that go into other apps.

Thanks for the detailed info.

I guess if one uses login w Apple it would circumvent more of the tracking. Although I find it 'easier' to just stick with login with google as it's much more widely available.
 
I always thought that 3rd party iOS app can’t communicate between each other. I always believed that every app you’d download, that was not from Apple, operated in it’s own sandbox. I knew an app interacted with the OS through the permissions system and that’s it. Basically: no permissions granted to an app = the app is fully isolated / sandboxed.

Apparently all this is false. From this article I understand that all our iOS app have always interacted between each other for commercial tracking purposes, and only now Apple is giving us the option to block an app from “infiltrating” other apps.

Could someone give a proper technical explanation of this?
 
EFF is just bringing this to the attention because Apple wants it to be one...

Facebook, and others knowingly track people, but no one bursts a blood vessel until its bought up front and center...

You could even argue weather people are now only aware of it by the fact of Apple telling you with a warning, MAY put people off using services like Facebook on iOS 14. Don't think for a second you can bypass this on Mac's cos knowing Apple, that will be the next thing. (easily done via an update)

We only squeal when we know something, not when we don't know.
 
I always thought that 3rd party iOS app can’t communicate between each other. I always believed that every app you’d download, that was not from Apple, operated in it’s own sandbox. I knew an app interacted with the OS through the permissions system and that’s it. Basically: no permissions granted to an app = the app is fully isolated / sandboxed.

Apparently all this is false. From this article I understand that all our iOS app have always interacted between each other for commercial tracking purposes, and only now Apple is giving us the option to block an app from “infiltrating” other apps.

Could someone give a proper technical explanation of this?
No, your current understanding, that every app is sandboxed and cannot access other apps is completely correct.

This feature is all about identifying users across apps. By default, iOS creates and stores an unique identifier (IDFA) which, currently, can be accessed by every app. This IDFA can be used to identify you across apps.

Let’s say you use Facebook and the Facebook app on your device. The Facebook app can get the IDFA and ‚attach' it to your profile. Now you use another app (that is not from Facebook) which implements the Facebook SDK to access things like Facebook Login. The SDK also collects the IDFA and sends the information to the Facebook servers. Now Facebook knows that you use app xy without them being the developers of that app. Therefore they were able to identify you across apps. Now every information that the SDK gets can also be attached to your Facebook account.

The new feature / permission limits the access to the IDFA, so Facebook (Their app and sdks) cannot use the IDFA to identify you anymore (except you grant permission to).
 
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