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the group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the limited ability to customize it

Read: the limited ability to add page after page of noise to it that the actual option to opt-out is buried where the user will never find it
 
I can easily tell you what I don't like about permissions.
I don't know what I'm saying yes to.

Let me explain.

Say I wish to use a camera app, or a photo editing app.
The phone will say something like "permission required to access your photo library"

Now, someone may say, of course, it needs to be able to write to that area, and read from that area.

What I don't like and don't understand is what does that mean?

Does it mean by giving it access I am saying yeah sure, go and scan/look-at/download every photo I've ever taken?
Or does it mean, only save files there and only load files I ask you to.

This is what I have never understood, so perhaps someone can explain?

In my mind, it scares me, as me saying YES, you have access to my photo library, basically means they can go thru all my photo's as I've just given them permissions to them all.

But does it? And how do I know what they are doing if I do give them such access?
 
All this does is show how scared these companies are about Apple bringing even a bit of awareness about what happens behind the scenes. Most people are totally unaware of what really happens. If enough people become aware and motivated for change, perhaps the course of digital society may change yet again.
 
I wonder if EU government regulators will step in on Apple's behalf?

Damn, I shouldn't say stuff like that while drinking milk.

Most likely they will step up on Apples behalf. The EU is out to protect its citizens, not destroy American companies. If there is a side clearly in the wrong or suspected of wrong doing then it is investigated.
 
I don't like tracking or data collection any more than anyone else, but we as an Internet society have decided that "free" is what we want.
The workforce and infrastructure to maintain the free services you enjoy (google, facebook, twitter, etc.) require money. Since we've repeatedly caused "subscription based" companies to fail, it's obvious the free model is the preferred on for consumers.
You have a choice: pay with your wallet, or pay with your privacy. If you don't want to do either then you can't have the nice things that you enjoy.

I'm NOT siding with the advertisers at all, I love the explicit requirement for acceptance. But don't go using free services all the while bemoaning the advertisers that pay for your access to all those free services. You chose to be the product long, long ago, don't whine about it now.
 
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I recently moved to UK, and I find that whole cookie warning for each website genuinely frustrating. Reading what I am enabling or not is not at all a straightforward thing. I used to read and allow bare minimum option. But it quickly got really onerous. I am not sure certain if whatever regulation that has led to the whole situation is really effective. This allowing of "customization" only leads to websites customizing it for the ways that good for the website/app and not for the users.
The legal rules are: They can ask for consent to cookie use, and the page where you would give consent must be clearly designed so that you can refuse consent _with one click_. And they are not allowed to restrict your usage of the site in any way due to lack of consent.
 
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Before anyone pipes in that ads pay for content. Sure they do. But you don’t need to be tracking us to display an ad.
There's a free market for advertising so prices vary depending on how valuable the ad space is. To maximize income the advertising aggregators need to form a profile of you to get the most money for showing you ads.

The alternative is more ads of lower quality. You choose: a page with more ads than content and no tracking or few ads tailored to you, specifically, because you're tracked.
Again, the consumer as spoken and doesn't like the page full of ads; those businesses tend to fail while the ones that use tracking tend to succeed as they have more content to consume.
The more germane the space to the product being advertised the higher the price, this has pretty much been true throughout the history of advertising on all platforms.
 
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As a consumer I'm very glad they do this! It's upsetting THAT those companies violate privacy; and even dare to criticize Apple for informing and educating us users what's going on (behind their backs)
 
There's a free market for advertising so prices vary depending on how valuable the ad space is. To maximize income the advertising aggregators need to form a profile of you to get the most money for showing you ads.

The alternative is more ads of lower quality. You choose: a page with more ads than content and no tracking or few ads tailored to you, specifically, because you're tracked.
Again, the consumer as spoken and doesn't like the page full of ads; those businesses tend to fail while the ones that use tracking tend to succeed as they have more content to consume.
The more germane the space to the product being advertised the higher the price, this has pretty much been true throughout the history of advertising on all platforms.

That's a very strange idea. I prefer no adds. And I don't want one web site to know what I do on another. This is very simple.
 
This is one of the iOS 14 features in most looking forward to.
I’ve been hoping that the tide will start to turn against Facebook and Google for a long time. Hopefully this will finally be the turning point.
 
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I can easily tell you what I don't like about permissions.
I don't know what I'm saying yes to.

Let me explain.

Say I wish to use a camera app, or a photo editing app.
The phone will say something like "permission required to access your photo library"

Now, someone may say, of course, it needs to be able to write to that area, and read from that area.

What I don't like and don't understand is what does that mean?

Does it mean by giving it access I am saying yeah sure, go and scan/look-at/download every photo I've ever taken?
Or does it mean, only save files there and only load files I ask you to.

This is what I have never understood, so perhaps someone can explain?

In my mind, it scares me, as me saying YES, you have access to my photo library, basically means they can go thru all my photo's as I've just given them permissions to them all.

But does it? And how do I know what they are doing if I do give them such access?

It’s a good question.. unfortunately, the answer is that permission to access the photo library is exactly what you fear. It does provide full access to your photos. This is not to say every app which requests permission to use your photo library intends to use it for some malicious intent or do anything more than add new photos you take in a camera app. But.. apps with this permission could.

This is why Apple’s push to add visibility into privacy policies in the upcoming iOS 14/Big Sur App stores is critical. Hopefully, this will help us, as the users, differentiate between a camera app that keeps everything local and doesn’t share any of your data (e.g. Halide) with an app that may attempt to scan through all your photos and share that data somehow (e.g. Facebook).

EDIT: Actually, it looks like Apple did add separate Read/Write permissions in iOS 11. Permission will ask to “Add Photos” or “Access to your Photo Library”. But the point still stands, if you provide access to your library, an app can do anything with it. Similar with sharing Contacts or anything else like that. An App could use it just for local device purposes, or it could immediately upload all your contacts to some service.
 
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I don’t believe in the level a tracking that currently is in use through out the web so any hinderance of that is welcome.
 
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