Max Schrems is back... and he's challenging Apple's 'secret iPhone advertising tracking cookies' in Europe Privacy activist Max Schrems is back, and this time he has filed complaints against Apple for privacy violations over a cookie it places in iPhones for some advertisers. His digital rights group Noyb has targeted the tech giant in Germany and Spain, claiming Cupertino's “Identifier for Advertisers” (IDFA) tracking ID, which is …
I remember clicking on a "don't track me" button somewhere, and as a last-ditch effort, the website showed a message on the lines of: "Are you sure? We're going to show you ads anyway, we might as well try to show you something you're interested in instead of random crap"
I had one of those recently. My experience of targeted advertising is throwing ads at me to buy more of the long lasting consumer durable I have just purchased. It’s witless.
Just like predictive text. I’ve had my phone for about 4years now and it still can’t predict what I’m going to type. Some of the suggestions are not just laughable they are utterly ungrammatical. The correct part of speech for what precedes is the LAST option which comes up when I just have one more character to type.
I only allow suggestions in the bar below, I cannot handle words writhing on the screen as I’m trying to type them and don’t get me started on autocorrect in places you can’t turn it off. Messages I get from family and others with autocorrected mistakes just confirm me in this.
The algorithms are clearly still a work in progress. Wake me up when they work properly and can cope with someone who actually has a good vocabulary and knows how to use it.
This stuff is still very much a work in progress.
My experience of targeted advertising is throwing ads at me to buy more of the long lasting consumer durable I have just purchased. It’s witless.
I get that from Amazon, which is bizarre, because they're not even trying to guess what I'm up to from arbitrary web trackers - they literally know what I've bought. A couple of years ago I acquired a Linx tablet, case and some styluses. The next two months of amazon emails were offering me... more tablets and cases. Because obviously having bought a tablet I'm immediately going to buy another, or a collection of cases for every occasion.
Bizarre.
A few days ago SWMBO was trying to look up Pears Cyclopaedia on Amazon. I don't know if that actually came up but she was complaining about all the junk; I think there was even a girlie calendar on there. It doesn't bode well for this idea of Alexa trying to double-guess users the product.
Yup. I bought a shaver...
...and got spammed with adverts for shavers.
Somebody really needs to understand the difference between consumables (like coffee pods and printer ink) and one offs (like shavers and tablets).
More logical, even, would be to suggest spare shaver heads, cleaning kits, etc. But no. Just the dumbest lamest thing possible.
What's even more interesting is that at least for a time, Amazon's various groups had to bid to make that suggestion to you--it cost them if you did not buy. Such a system should have eliminated such nonsense very quickly. The fact that it appears to persist implies that they no longer are using that system.
"Just like predictive text."
For a long time I've contrived to get auto-suggest out of the Google search. That no longer seems to work - an no, even if it gets rid of it I am not going to sign in to Google. So now the browser home page is DuckDuckGo. In the long run pissing off users doesn't do you any good.
I have tried every different type of approach to root trackers out of my mobile devices and, when I get to the core, when I get the chance to opt out - they all say the same thing "If you do that, you'll get ads that are random, as opposed to ones that are customized to you. Are you sure you want to opt out?"
I propose a new, radical option that should be included that will allow me to respond to the message that I'm going to be bombarded by ads anyway: "Instead of opting out of custom ads - I really want you to go fuck the right off."
Nevertheless I wonder what proportion of those in the advertising industry, including the actual advertisers don't block ads in their own browsers. I'm sure they all find ads annoying but don't actually connect this reaction to any possible audience response to what they do for a living.
But they failed to explain "why this is beneficial" - forgetting to explain for whom. I'm sure it's extremely beneficial for their pockets, not beneficial at all for those who are tracked - since the very reason to do that is being able to extract as much money as possible from their pockets, when not something worse.
If they can explain why it's beneficial, it should also be simple to make it to be opt-in, right? People will see the benefits and will opt in in droves, right?
not beneficial at all for those who are tracked
Worse yet, it's not even beneficial for the advertisers or the content providers.
NPO (the Dutch BBC) ditched targetted advertising in 2018 and went back to contextual advertising where you bid for ad space based on page content (e.g. a story about food or cars), the same as you would place an ad in a relevant paper or magazine. By not advertising to a user ("this person likes cars") they cut out a whole swathe of middle-men data brokers.
The advertiser pays less per impression and NPO keeps more of that money. Their site loads faster and doesn't track users.
Everybody who matters wins.
> contextual advertising
That's the only halfway rational advertisement: If you read an article about cars, chances are you're somewhat interested in them. You read an article about babies, chances are you have some, or somebody close to you does.
Problem is, what do you show to people visiting (for instance) a weather website? Ads about umbrellas or suntan lotion?... That's probably why they invented the "let's track said car fan across the internet" malarkey, and why they will never renounce trying to track their victims.
Outdoor gear? Other gear based on the fact it's sea/lake/mountaints/etc. and season? Touristic ads about the location shown? Do they really believe people trying to understand if there is enough snow to sky next weekend (let's leave Covid aside for the moment) or if it's sunny for sailing across the lake are interested in buying a car?
> Outdoor gear?
That might be an option, but much like touristic ads it would only work during vacations.
Most people live/work in a big city (or at least in an urban environment), and just check the weather to know if they need to pack an umbrella and/or a heavy coat for those short walks between their car and some building.
Also, in more rural settings, is the visitor a tourist wanting to know where to go and what to do, or is it a local inhabitant wanting to know if he needs to water his plants or shelter the garden furniture? Very different profiles, interested in very different things.
I find a nice irony in the fact that the biggest suckers to buy a product as a result of advertising hype, are advertisers themselves.
I doubt that targetted ads are ultimately any better than good advertising in general, the companies who benefit most from targetted advertising are those who sell it.
"As an advertising industry, we’ve done a very poor job of communicating to the end user as to why we’re tracking them, and why this is beneficial."
Let me have a go - it's beneficial (to the advertiser) because it allows them to make more money by using personal data to profile individuals and target advertising at them.
The problem is, that if you explain this to the "end user", who in this case, is the person about whom you are collecting personal information, they are, quite rightly, going to want you to get their consent first, and if they do understand what you're up to, they won't consent. If your whole business model is based on doing stuff behind people's backs and hoping they won't notice, I'm going to push the boat out here and suggest that maybe you shouldn't be in business.
Let me have a go - it's beneficial (to the advertiser) because it allows them to make more money by using personal data to profile individuals and target advertising at them.
No, as it turns out, it's not even beneficial for the advertisers (much less the content providers).
NPO (the Dutch BBC) ditched targetted advertising in 2018 and went back to contextual advertising where you bid for ad space based on page content (e.g. a story about food or cars), the same as you would place an ad in a relevant paper or magazine. By not advertising to a user ("bid to advertise to this 20-30yo male user who likes cars") they cut out a whole swathe of middle-men data brokers.
Advertisers swarmed to them. The advertiser pays less per impression whilst NPO keeps more of that money. Their site loads faster and doesn't track users.
Everybody who matters wins.
"Let me have a go - it's beneficial (to the advertiser) because it allows them to make more money by using personal data to profile individuals and target advertising at them."
No. It's beneficial to the advertising industry because it enables them to sell these targeting services to advertisers. As we're all aware this results in advertisers being charged for adverts and the targeting service to punters who've either (a) already bought what the advertiser's trying to flog and don't need another or (b) are being targeted with something quite irrelevant because of the quirks of the AI/ML algorithm whose results are irrelevant but can't be explained because it's a black box.
The advertisers are the mugs in this game.
I recently had occasion to buy a new toaster, after one of the elements burned out on the 25-year-old one I had from when I was a student (it wasn't economical to fix). After shopping around to find a suitable replacement at a decent price, I settled on one and purchased it from a well-known web retailer.
Cue several emails from eBay over the next month or so asking if I'm still interested in toasters, as well as ones from Wayfair touting their range of bread-heating devices. Now, it might be fair to class me as a weirdo, but I'm not the sort of weirdo that collects toasters.
So even though I'm using an ad-blocker, and NoScript, these fuckers are still using tracking cookies, none of which I recall opting into - I generally try to decline permissions for these as much as possible.
Quite often I'll see adverts on Facebook for things I've recently been looking at on other sites as well. Facebook is notoriously sneaky with its adverts, and seems to be able to sneak them into your "feed" despite using an ad blocker.
Firefox has a really great add-on.
Containers (with one specifically for facebook). The facebook container prevents scripts from facebook running and dropping cookies on you unless you are specifically on facebook so all those facebook share icons (which have scripts behind them) are effectively neutered.
The newer containers is a more general extension of that.
I think, for eBay at least, their thinking is, "you looked at it once, so you must want to buy it."
The thing is, for most page views, I'm either not going to buy it, am going to buy it elsewhere, or have already bought one. Quite often it will be when looking for the best price to buy something for someone else, so profiling my "preferences" for musicians I don't like, or for women's clothes* isn't exactly going to help them.
*Insert appropriate "only at weekends," "call me Sandra," etc. etc. joke here.
I had the misfortune to use a colleagues PC recently - it was like suddenly finding myself in the 90s! Ads on every bit of whitespace, crawlers blocking the article I was trying to read, even popunders yelling at me invisibly!
I was forcibly reminded of the horror that my blockers are protecting me from, and it wasn't pretty.
"they should have the option to be able to OPT-IN"
Precisely.
I look at this from the perspective of a real set of shops and articles.
I can go to a library and read a few articles; now I head to a newsagent. How would you feel if they said to you "We know you have been reading <list of books at library> and we might suggest <x>".
Now the only way they could know this is if either the library told them or someone was watching my every move. User profiling is, by far, the latter.
If someone did that in real life (followed me around shops watching my every move) it would be classified as stalking.
On that subject, El Reg, it is really none of your business that I occasionally browse electronics component vendor sites (see name) so quit serving ads that show their products (or quit using the ad spamming service that does so). I deliberately keep those specific cookies for ease of login, not so an ad spamming service can sling an ad at me that is a total waste of money because I am going to ignore the ad as I get the newsletters anyway.
I have no problem with a site serving ads that have products that pertain to the site main contents; I have a real problem with a site serving ads based on what other sites I visit.
Of course, if sites were forced to adhere to that rule, a lot of people might actually have to get a real job.
I have no idea who this guy is in real life but he definitely has a King Kong sized pair. ( insert your own definition of a pair )..
Max is punching them where it hurts and they apparently don't have a leg to stand on without making fools of themselves...
Three cheers for Max.
Dear advertising industry, it's this sort of bollocks below that makes us all feel as though you are a lower form of life than pond scum...
"As an advertising industry, we’ve done a very poor job of communicating to the end user as to why we’re tracking them, and why this is beneficial... Few consumers understand how any of this works, and with lack of understanding it’s simple to just say no and block it. Importantly though, they should have the option to be able to opt-out."
1. Please explain who it is beneficial to. It is certainly not beneficial to me and I will continue to block all ads using all tools available.
2. The reason few consumers understand it is because it has been designed to be as opaque as possible.
3. I'd like to point out that I should have the option to opt-in. Not that I would.
Thanks.
Dear advertising industry, it's this sort of bollocks below that makes us all feel as though you are a lower form of life than pond scum
Pond scum is just the relatively benign stuff that floats to the top. They're the stinking oozing stagnant mud at the bottom of the pond, where the crawling and writhing things live.
I have a longstanding policy NEVER to buy goods or services from ads intruding where I don’t want them. Take that advertising industry. I HATE ads, take steps not to see them and regard ads as reasons NOT to buy things. I’m capable of doing research before buying things and even if triggered to look by an ad I am not going to take your word for it.
So just sling dough at Google searches so I’ll see your site. Though I’m very price conscious at the moment so if you aren’t cheap, sorry, no sale.
Ads themselves are not bad as long as they are not intrusive. Tracking and data gathering is always intrusive. I don't mind about sites who have ads here and there as long as they don't track me. I'm not interested in targeted ads, they have really no clue about what I may need, and as in financial ads, my past performance are not indicative of future results. Show me a random ad and you may have better chances to make me interested. Or just use the context - I'm here on The Register, so maybe I'm interested in some topics?
I purposely wipe out all traces of local storage, cookies, browsing history, ... before I go shopping just to prevent the industry trying to leverage anything aabout me in the prices of goods. It's really interesting the change that makes in the prices I see. I'd definitely not shop using an Apple device given the existence of this identifier.
I purposely wipe out all traces of local storage, cookies, browsing history, ... before I go shopping just to prevent the industry trying to leverage anything aabout me in the prices of goods.
Even better: run up a virtual machine and go shopping in a clean browser.
This is what I do when I am comparing prices. See what there is (eg hotels) using a price comparison site and then book a room with the hotel directly -- which saves them the 20% that a comparison site would extract.
A VM is not enough to protect you. With canvas fingerprinting, you'll have the same result on your machine whether in or out of the VM... I was quite impressed. Obviously you can also be betrayed by your IP address or other things. If you always use the same browser in your VM, it's also easy to fingerprint. A better defense would be to start a Linux live ISO, the more popular the better, in your VM, so that it resembles any other person running the same Linux ISO... apart from IP, canvas fingerprinting, etc...
The techniques of advertisers and responses of browsers (at least freedom conscious like Firefox) seems like an infinite race.
I do wonder what the advertisers would make of me. I'm not that knowledgable about data privacy but seem to avoid most targeted ads - I don't use my phone to buy stuff and was able to turn a lot of the google stuff off. On my comps I use Brave as my preferred browser and rarely see ads - if any - for stuff even vaguely interesting to me - maybe I'm going to the wrong (or right) sites?
I think the advertising world is wasting a lot of money and doing it all wrong - or maybe it works for the 98% of the population who would happily click 'Kill my children' to get a pop up banner out of the way.
Maybe not being on facebook, twitter etc helps.
How often do we have to say this: The only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising.
They sell it to advertisers. Providing they can sell that successfully they're home and dry. As far as they're concerned it doesn't matter if the advertisers waste money because that wasted money ends up in their pockets.
And the other side nobody ever really considers is that the advertisers bake the cost of advertising into their product/service, so ultimately we (collectively) and up paying the advertising industry anyway.
The fact everyone get 50 useless ads for toasters after they just bought one contributes towards the price of toasters all round.
I keep finding myself driving an amazing hybrid car over a very long bridge into a desert where I bury something random then collect a gorgeous girl with lovely long ringlets in her super-luxurious hair. All while staring at a blackcurrant.
No. Their not wasting their time.
This is what I do. I don't like the idea of ads being thrown at me left, right and centre even more than I don't like the idea of being tracked across all of space and time. I try my best to contribute to the content I consume on a regular basis, but ad networks are flat-out blocked.
Some sites have fallen back on an old form of advertising, where they directly negotiate with the advertiser and place a banner or link directly on their site. By and large, I don't have a problem with this. The adverts are usually more reserved in how they are implemented and some effort has usually been taken to integrate them into the site in a sensible way. These ads usually slip through an ad-blocker's net and for the time being I'm happy for that to continue.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have sites that refuse to show anything if you've got an ad-blocker. Which to me, as a web developer, is just cute.
Which to me, as a web developer, is just cute.
I'm all for helping non-technical users with how to use the console to inspect page elements to set their properties to hide those "ad blocker" banners.
Usually involves setting "display:none" on the top element, and possibly removing properties that disable scrolling.
I'd rather do that than have advertising gunk spewed in my face.
True, but it can be fiddly. Most sites have a couple of layers for the "ad-blocker blocker" notice (the lightbox itself and the dimout layer behind it). A lot of them also set the overflow property of the main site container to hidden rather than scroll, so you have to dig around to find out which element is being limited (most often the body tag, but not always). And then there's the continuous niggle that you have to repeat the process every time you refresh the browser or navigate to a new page.
I'd say it's useful knowledge for getting one thing off a website (a product review or news report), but otherwise it's best to avoid sites like that.
Indeed. What you have described pretty much exactly matches what the Independent's current "ad-blocker-blocker" incarnation does. They should stop kidding themselves that complaining about ad-blockers will magically make people decide that they both want to see the adverts, and that they will deliberately follow them.
I, for one, wish there was an easy way to save such edits as a domain specific stylesheet that the browser would then use in subsequent loads. If there is such a thing, it's well hidden, in Firefox at least.
"They should stop kidding themselves that complaining about ad-blockers will magically make people decide that they both want to see the adverts, and that they will deliberately follow them."
They're not interested in that. All they're interested in is getting money from the advertiser for shoving the ad in people's faces. If the advertiser loses money by that it's not their problem.
First, I don't like Advertising tracking. TBH, I don't really believe it benefits the consumer. I know that theoretically, the tracking allows the advertisers to try and sell you stuff you might want, but guess what? It rarely works, and if I am looking to buy something, I'm more than capable of searching for it it myself. Where I do allow tracking, the ads, more often that not, try and sell me another of an item I have just bought or searched for. They ignore the fact that if I want or need more than one of an item when I buy it, I will buy more than one. They also ignore the fact that just because I am searching for an item does not mean I am planning (or even able) to purchase that item. Thus presenting hundreds of ads for similar items isn't likely to persuade me to buy one of them.
However, I don't block the adverts. Why? Because I run a small forum site. We have a couple of thousand users, and while I don't handle the finances, I know that the Google ads on the site pay for the site's costs, with a tiny profit (about £100 a year). There are a lot of small sites financed like this, and if I use one, I don't want to deprive the site owner of potentially much needed income. I do, however, ignore the ads. Even the big sites have costs
If there were no ads, you won't have "free" stuff like: search engines (without which the internet is pretty useless), e-mail service, etc...
Are you too young to remember times when e-mails service had to be paid for. It is still current practice to have this service with your ISP, and you pay for it with your subscription. Now you see, you have Proton Mail that "sells it" with the benefit of encryption. Of course encrypting your e-mail (with the likes of PGP) does not work with ads, that's why it has never been made widely available by any of the GAFA, and why Proton mail can sell it!
So yes, ads is a "business model" for those things that are almost "basic commodities" (like e-mail) but still have a cost: machines, storage, network, programs...
"There is no such thing as a free lunch"
So you should honestly ask yourself if you prefer some "free" service in exchange for a "reasonable" amount of ads, or prefer to pay for it and have no ad at all.
The whole debate in fact is in the "reasonable" level of ads. Once they ad makers are in, greed tends to become less "reasonable".
I stopped reading your comment after the first sentence, because it is demonstrably wrong.
The "main" search engine that people use didn't used to spew adverts at you, back in its early incarnations, and other search engines exist that don't advertise, or track you in any way, for instance DuckDuckGo. To claim that the internet "couldn't exist" without advertising conveniently ignores the counter-examples.
And it wasn't making money either. So investors sent Schmidt in to start making real money. Google had no real business model to sustain its search engine growth.
DuckDuckGo AFAIK piggybacks on another search engine, so it can reduce costs. Sure ads are not the only source of revenues, but are an easy one - look at how large and rich both Google and Facebook became selling ads places to advertisers, while offering very simple products, mostly built with someone else's technology.
There's a reason I run my own mail server and yes, I pay to run it. Without advertising companies the Internet would still exist, but would be quite different. Probably even better. More expensive, though.
"Are you too young to remember times when e-mails service had to be paid for."
I got as far as this. I pay for an email service on which I can set up and tear down email addresses as needed for anything important. I still have an old Hotmail address and that's the one that gets the genuine* phishing attempts - although MS are fairly good at trapping most of them some get through and a surprising proportion are those pretending to be from themselves.
*My bank, building society and even local council keep arranging to have what look like phishing emails sent by 3rd parties impersonating themselves. The closest thing for authentication is that they arrive at the correct email address.
Let me correct that - I can exclude the bank because I told them a few years ago that if they wouldn't authenticate emails I sent to their address for reporting phishing I'd close down the address. They didn't so I did.
or prefer to pay for it and have no ad at all
Funny you should mention it. HBO started as pay a little see no ads. Then it was pay a little more see some ads. Now it's pay even more and see more ads with the benefit of crappier selection.
As long as they can shovel ads in our faces they won't stop.
Now if you mention the early days of the Internet, yes there were ads but not this obsession of tracking every move you make, every breath you tke etc.
I have nothing against ads (although YouTube has just become extremely obnoxious these days) but no way in hell I will accept this tracking without fighting back.
Surprised no one has mentioned the excellent use of a Raspberry Pi hooked into the router and blacklisting all the annoying advertising crud that litters up so many web sites. I am currently setting up one which makes use of a dust gathering 2B.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-hole-raspberry-pi/
https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/pi-hole-ftl-v5-2-released/36964
Bit tongue - in - cheek the FTL (Faster than Light)
After regularly going through the opt out of advertising that now seems to appear on every sodding page, only to find out that you can opt in all, but need to de select each one separately, they have now come up with "Legitimate Interest".
Look I've already told you to piss right off that means your DON'T HAVE ANY legitimate interest to me or my data. I don't care what you think you want, that appears on a quick read through to be almost exactly what you would have got if I'd opted in for your crap.
Can we not just enforce an API that you can set on your browser to choose at a browser level if you want to opt in, if you want to opt in for a specific company and the data you're willing to share.
Then No means No. and you can't have any sneaky tricks like making it hard to object to the legitimate interest by killing the pop up box after you've opted out of the targeted, but without being able to see if the legitimate interest has opted out too.
After layers and layers of digging, I found out that opting out doesn't stop the ads.
So, I created my own "Go Fuck Off" message to send over to any advertiser who sends me shit I don't want. Which is almost all of them. I go to an advertiser's webpage, find the appropriate email address for info on a specific product. I log the address and when the ads for women's clothing from Golily keep showing up on my iPhone and iPad, I pull up the email I have for them and auto generate this:
"I'm a middle aged man and though I am quite fit, I do not believe I would look good in any of your clothes that are in the ads you keep sending me. So, Go Fuck Off."
It doesn't stop the ads, but I think someone might see my message, and that makes me smile.
As annoying as the privacy implications are, I really don't see them as the biggest concern.
Code that compromises the integrity of my system is far, far worse. That's not a theoretically "is my tin hat working" kind of problem, that's a real, live, someone is about to give me a REALLY bad day kind of problem. And ads have become a (or the?) primary vector for badware getting on my machine. The reason is (mostly) that these ad platforms are architecturally unpolicable.
I don't mind ads, and I don't even mind a website aggressively keeping up with what I'm doing on that particular website. But I cannot have the badware. So I run uMatrix. And I very, very rarely see ads. Which makes me feel bad for sites like El Reg. But there is a simple way for them to get past uMatrix--and it involves them taking direct responsibility for the ads that I see.
So many claims on here that advertising does not work made by no doubt very clever people who can sidestep most of the tracking. You must all be so much smarter than those dumb business people who buy ads.
Yet many of those dumb business people make an awful lot of money selling stuff. And they keep buying the ads too.
Advertising doesn't work? Really? Who are the people being dumb now?
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