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Discussion (52 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Apple gave itself better dialogs for the permission prompts, which they will now equalize (perhaps just in the EU?) with the prompts they use for their own apps.
My understanding of ATTF is that first-party tracking needed no disclosure other than the information declared in the app's App Store privacy section about the information gathered. If you made a suite of 20 apps, you could track usage across all of them without issue, as long as you didn't also share that info with a third party.
The German regulator settled because the facts are simply on Apple's side. Apple settled because at the end of the day it's no skin off their back if the EU now wants to weaken privacy protections to benefit ad-tech.
It’s a bummer (albeit an expected one) to see Apple reducing the burden for third-party publishers to collect personal data, rather than increasing the burden for themselves to collect it, thus overall raising the floor of user privacy. This is to say, when a regulator requests “everyone be treated equally to ensure competition” maybe they should also take into account how users are impacted and instead request something more nuanced like: if there are unequal standards, they must be equalized in a way that maximizes user benefit.
I also delight in this highlighting Apple's hypocrisy
Apple, That's Privacy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9vJq4gQOw
https://medium.com/@krvoller/how-iphone-violates-apples-acce...
1. The competition law people are not the data protection people. From the perspective of competition law, they only care that the playing field is leveled, they don't care if you equalize down or up.
2. The EU has fumbled the ball on GDPR by not enforcing it on the tech giants that it was intended to regulate[0], to the point where a tech company enforcing the intent of the law and not the letter of the law feels like singling out competitors.
[0] In particular, the Republic of Ireland is a rotten borough for Facebook, who has all their EU offices there.
Apple's own apps are still blessed with permissions that other apps have to ask for. This needs to be addressed too.
They are doing nothing to stop the endless ads, and the pop-ups in the browser I want to kill turn them off not them grant equal access to have even more ads.
Another problem is the onward, march towards renting leasing, owning nothing endless upgrades for price, in the end I don’t expect a bunch of lawyers and bureaucrats to do anything about that. They have been paid off long time ago.
Recently in the last couple of years in particular it’s gotten to be completely out of control. I’m glad I bought a super drive before Apple discontinued it soon the way things are going you won’t even be able to have a large drive or even big memory you’ll be tied to that remote data center…
I don't even care if they make the dialogue look a little different since they're system apps you need to use the features of your phone, but the "extras" they support should default to "Ask First" in an ideal world that is.
Same with the Camera App. It can ask "Camera App wants to access your Camera" and you can say "No" and then download some other camera app and make that your default and grant it camera permission.
Ah, it was OpenHaystack: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack#installation
Mail plugins are kind of a special case, they're REALLY "legacy", so they work by sharing process memory and being able to access way more than they should, like all your messages, possibly even passwords if the developer is clever enough.
Also notoriously difficult to build, since the Mail internal API breaks from time to time, so they're a rarity these days.
Also notoriously difficult to install.
Maybe you'd like to use a competitor to the Photos app and don't want to use the one Apple provides?
But what does the "Access to photos" permission really do here? It's not like not having that permission would stop Apple from accessing them against your will, as they have access via the OS anyway. And it's clear, that when you open the Apple Photos app, that it will access your photos.
On the other hand, when you open a third party app, it may not have been clear to you that it wants to access your photos, and the company did not have prior access to them.
I still think apps should only be pre-blessed sparingly. For example, the camera app should not have GPS permission by default, as many people probably aren't aware that camera apps use that information.
This is a strange position imo. Why would we expect third party apps written by totally unknown people with unknown goals to have the same permissions as apps written by Apple itself?
Considering that ATT was about sharing an identifier to “track across other companies' apps and websites” (text definition of the ATT setting), I don’t believe this ruling is a good move for anyone on informed consent or privacy. In the name of improving competition, sometimes regulators may end up making things worse for users.
> ... Apple's own apps are still blessed with permissions that other apps have to ask for. This needs to be addressed too.
In the case of operating systems, I simply select a different operating system, and the same principle applies to AI models. It is amusing that Microsoft and Linux are available to consumers, providing them with a choice. However, simply because the decisions made by one or the other are superior/better does not imply that everyone should be reduced to a similar low level.
Apple is not even close to being the dominant operating system or hardware platform, globally, yet you still expect them to be mediocre, akin to most of their competition.
> Under the commitments that have now been declared binding, Apple will align the consent prompts for its own offerings and for third-party apps much more closely.
> In contrast, Apple’s own personalised advertising is subject to different conditions. Apple itself does not use the IDFA and cross-company data combination, but draws on user data from its own ecosystem – a wealth of data that is not available, in particular, to the large number of smaller app publishers.
In other words, third-parties selling your data to anyone can make up for that. I was surprised by how pro-advertising their whole press release is, you would think they wouldn't give away the game like that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952
Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com)
161 points by Logans_Run on Feb 14, 2025 | 69 comments
I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily.
There are whole classes of applications that are not possible unless low level device data is exposed via APIs.
And since Apple doesn't provide the apps, the apps won't exist until Apple creates them.
Sometimes transparency and honesty get weaponized. Especially by actors with centralized power.
(Not arguing against transparency, but against misinterpreting it as always being used in good faith.)
I keep hearing from people that they’re awesome to use so why do people care about the smallest system available worldwide? Why does anyone care what Apple does or anyone else if they decide to make their own operating system?
You want to handle device rotation smoothly in your in-app browser?
Tough luck, WebKit's _beginAnimatedResizeWithUpdates is private, and only Apple gets to use it in Safari.
Good luck with the animation and scroll position handling. You better hope WkWebView's default behavior works for you, because you don't get to customize it and fix edge cases or the tab previews, like Apple did for their browser.