Interesting People mailing list archives
Re What's Apple Up To?
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2017 18:47:24 -0400
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From: james.morris () cmu edu Date: October 23, 2017 at 5:45:03 PM EDT To: "David J. Farber (E-mail)" <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] What's Apple Up To? This is indeed interesting, especially the part after the [snip] where Apple's motivation to disrupt Google's business is discussed. Aside from Apple vs. Google, I sense that Apple aims to serve people who prefer a more walled garden that protects them from the raw internet. I began to think this when they fought the FBI about decrypting an iPhone. I think there are a lot of people seeking refuge....On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 5:25 PM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote: Begin forwarded message:From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: October 23, 2017 at 3:29:19 PM EDT To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] What's Apple Up To? Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com [Note: This item comes from friend David Rosenthal. DLH] What’s Apple Up To? By Josh Marshall Oct 22 2017 <http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/whats-apple-up-to> Apple is in the process of introducing a series of features (or perhaps better to say, restrictions) to its Safari browser, along with the new version of its operating system OSX High Sierra, which promise to put serious obstacles in the way of advertisers tracking you across the web. There are countless ways this happens. But you see it most clearly when you go check out a new suitcase to purchase at some online vendor and then see suitcase ads following you around the web. Some people find this creepy and annoying. Others find it amusing and don’t care. Probably few consumers would mind seeing it go. But there’s some deeper stuff going on. What Apple is doing is placing restrictions on persistent cookies that live on your web browser. These are tiny files, little snippets of data that do all sorts of things. One of the simplest and most helpful is that they keep you logged in to your most favorite sites and keep certain levels of customization in place. You probably would find it annoying not to have those benefits. But they are also what makes that tracking possible. Having ads for a store you visited tracking you across the web is only the most obvious. There’s lots of other stuff going on that isn’t visible to you. The buzzword for this is what Apple calls Intelligent Tracking Prevention. You need to know a decent amount about advertising and browser architecture to understand the specifics. I haven’t read all the documentation. And even fairly familiar with these things, I probably couldn’t fully understand them myself. I’ll try to provide a general but accurate overview. The gist is that Apple is trying to drastically curtail the use of “third-party cookies.” That’s cookies that aren’t from sites you visit everyday but third parties that are sort of along for the ride and there pretty much only to track you. The big way Apple will determine what we’ll call “good” and “bad” cookies is through a mix of machine learning to learn how “tracky” the cookies are and how often you visit the site that ‘owns’ the cookie. Let me try to make this a bit more concrete. If you visit a site every day, Apple will give pretty much free rein to that site’s cookies. If you visit less frequently or never, Apple will clamp down hard. The big time factor dividing line is 24 hours. This makes a lot of sense. If you visit a site everyday you are probably gaining some customization, ease of use benefits from that cookie. If you’ve never heard of the site, they’re tracking you without your explicit permission and you’re probably getting nothing in return. So here’s where it gets interesting and more than just arcana of ad-tech. The digital ad industry is flipping out over this. A month ago basically every major ad industry trade group published an open letter to Apple saying its heavy handed approach was threatening to destroy a whole segment of the digital ad industry. This is from a month ago in AdWeek … In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as “opaque and arbitrary,” warning that the changes could affect the “infrastructure of the modern internet,” which largely relies on consistent standards across websites. The groups say the feature also hurts user experience by making advertising more “generic and less timely and useful.” “Apple’s unilateral and heavy-handed approach is bad for consumer choice and bad for the ad-supported online content and services consumers love,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by Adweek this morning. “Blocking cookies in this manner will drive a wedge between brands and their customers, and it will make advertising more generic and less timely and useful. Put simply, machine-driven cookie choices do not represent user choice; they represent browser-manufacturer choice.” [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzpArchives | Modify Your Subscription | Unsubscribe Now-- James H. Morris http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhm
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- Re What's Apple Up To? Dave Farber (Oct 23)