Apple Letter on App Tracking Transparency

I'm a huge fan of Apple's anti-tracking initiative and I was disappointed when they announced it was going to be delayed until 2021.

Facebook and Google have abused their position as advertisers this past decade and as a commodity we're being squeezed for every single penny they can make from us.

Part of Facebook's response via MacRumors:

"Apple is being accused of monitoring and tracking people's private data from their personal computers without their customers' knowledge through its latest update to macOS - and today's letter is a distraction from that. They have a history of this. The same happened when it was revealed that Apple had violated people's privacy and allowed millions of people's private audio to be accessed without their knowledge through a vulnerability in FaceTime. In that instance, they enforced against our internal business apps to change the topic. Sadly, we're not perfect and it worked.

A couple of points:

• Apple were not tracking private data, it was an issue with app verification and they clarified what it dos under the 'Privacy protections' section of their docs.
• The FaceTime issue was not a good look for Apple who like to tout their privacy credentials but when they fixed it (and other issues) and took out Facebook's internal apps because they were being distributed against App Store guidelines is an issue on Facebook's side.

I'm not saying Apple are perfect, they just make some really nice products and seem to be able to achieve things no-one else can. Even if you perceive Apple's take on privacy to be even a little bit hypocritical, then you have to concede that Facebook's stance on privacy is that they just don't give a shit.

Google too, in all honesty. It really is a shame because advertising on the web up until a decade a go was fairly fair and beneficial to everyone. Google's Adsense was a brilliant tool. It analysed the content and served relevant ads. What more can a publisher and an advertiser ask for?

Well publishers want more revenue and advertisers want better targeting of ads. The result? Adverts have taken over the web and they're all just too invasive.