Guess not so private: Apple fined 8.5M for illegally harvesting iPhone user's data for ads

[mr moose]

34 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Tracking what a user does within an app (yours or a third party) were they are signed in to an account was never restricted and did not require the user to agree to the prompt. 

Maybe that's something that either should be restricted or at least a better attempt at educating users should happen.  I am constantly shocked at how deceptive the language is in privacy policies from all companies (but one in particular just boils my blood).  It's like common decency was never given a seat at the table let alone just ignored.

 

 

[hishnash]

9 hours ago, mr moose said:

Maybe that's something that either should be restricted or at least a better attempt at educating users should happen. 

Yer it's difficult to consider how one would restrict this as actions the users does while signed in tend to have an effect on server side state that is shared between apps. I you were to forbid tracing between apps even for these shared states then it becomes a nightmare server side how to do the tracking.

For cource for ads my personal feeling is we should just be being served content based ads.  Eg adds that are targeted based on the content we are consuming (or the search term etc) rather than based on the past content or search terms.  Ads based on the content do not need to make any use of users info and do not require any trakcing of user activity. They can be provided to apps alongside the content.  

Or if you want behaviour based ads that should be done local on device. eg the device could be provided 10 possible ads based on the content and then localy on device the app could select what add to show based on local user history and then just report back to teh server that an ad was shown without specifics as to which one.  For things like ads in search results i feel this might be the best option to preserve user privacy while allow ad networks to still target users some-what.  

[PocketNerd]

Apple's Cash-on-hand: roughly $48 Billion

Revenue from Ads: $5.4 Billion

Fine: $8.5 Million

 

Making a (massive) profit while getting a slap on the wrist for being a "baaaaaad boy": Priceless

[mr moose]

13 hours ago, hishnash said:

Yer it's difficult to consider how one would restrict this as actions the users does while signed in tend to have an effect on server side state that is shared between apps. I you were to forbid tracing between apps even for these shared states then it becomes a nightmare server side how to do the tracking.

If they can't restrict the function then apple should not be advertising that they are stopping people from that exact function.

 

13 hours ago, hishnash said:

 

For cource for ads my personal feeling is we should just be being served content based ads.  Eg adds that are targeted based on the content we are consuming (or the search term etc) rather than based on the past content or search terms.  Ads based on the content do not need to make any use of users info and do not require any trakcing of user activity. They can be provided to apps alongside the content.  

I wholeheartedly agree, if I was on a tech website and got served ads for tech because of it that would be fine. But serving me ads because they know what I have been searching the last few days and what apps I have installed etc is not o.k.

 

13 hours ago, hishnash said:

 

Or if you want behaviour based ads that should be done local on device. eg the device could be provided 10 possible ads based on the content and then localy on device the app could select what add to show based on local user history and then just report back to teh server that an ad was shown without specifics as to which one.  For things like ads in search results i feel this might be the best option to preserve user privacy while allow ad networks to still target users some-what.  

That could work too, but I feel it might become another process that is open to fraudulent behavior,  not that I would lose sleep over google ad services being rorted by the porn industry or malware servers.

[hishnash]

7 minutes ago, mr moose said:

If they can't restrict the function then apple should not be advertising that they are stopping people from that exact function.

 

Apple are not advertising that they stoping people from cross app tracking were the user is logged int to the same account on both apps. What Apple are advertising is them stoping cross app tracking were the user is not logged in to the same account on both apps (even even logged in at all in one app and yet FB knows what you were doing in the other app...) 

All apple did is randomise the device-id that the system api returns when an app requests it. This means the simple way of joining users between apps has been removed. 
 

9 minutes ago, mr moose said:

That could work too, but I feel it might become another process that is open to fraudulent behavior,  not that I would lose sleep over google ad services being rorted by the porn industry or malware servers.

There are a few Indie-devs that have put the work in to implement their own ads network for their apps. Overcast https://overcast.fm comes to mind. That have done this. It is also of cource content based since the ads are restricted to be ads for other podcasts. But the dev does not want the overhead (and server cost etc) of tracking exactly what you listen to to target ads to you server side so instead sends the app a bundle of possible ads every day and the app selects client side what add to show. 

But yes I would not realy trust vendor like Google or even worse vendors like FB to do this. 

 

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, hishnash said:

Apple are not advertising that they stoping people from cross app tracking were the user is logged int to the same account on both apps. What Apple are advertising is them stoping cross app tracking were the user is not logged in to the same account on both apps (even even logged in at all in one app and yet FB knows what you were doing in the other app...) 

The ads never mention any of the specifics. They show someone walking around with the apps they use following them logging everything they do and sharing that data.   Any normal person with no tech education would take it that all tracking does not happen on iphones because you can just hit a single button.

 

 

[jagdtigger]

On 1/20/2023 at 2:28 PM, Commodus said:

And Apple never actually implemented the photo feature

https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/

[Lightwreather]

4 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/tests-confirm-macos-finder-isnt-scanning-for-csam-images

 

[jagdtigger]

6 minutes ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/tests-confirm-macos-finder-isnt-scanning-for-csam-images

 

"As part of testing, macOS 13.1 was run within a virtual machine and the application Mints was used to scan a unified log of activities on the VM instance."
Yeah, using OS logs is very trustworthy and shows everything..... /s