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"That means we could still get relevant ads"

Ugh, if you're an advocate for privacy, please don't perpetuate the delusion that users actually want "relevant" ads, or that these ids are solely used for that purpose.

Well I would actually prefer if ads were relevant. Relevant to whatever it is they're next to though, not necessarily relevant to me (because frankly that's no-ones business).

Same with youtube's recommendations. At this point over half the recommendations are almost entirely irrelevant to what I'm watching, and usually only have a vague connection to something I once watched, except for the ones I'd actually already watched.

I like relevant ads, click them, and usually get really happy when I find cool stuff with them. I've bought at least a handful of things off of instagram ads that were relevant to my interests. I also discovered a dog carrier backpack I now use to cycle with my dog to the beach every weekend from a Facebook ad that I got while browsing a dog owner Facebook group.

I'm just leaving enough data to support my assertion because I'm tired of this meme that "nobody looks at ads" or "all ads are bad".

I also deliberately do not use any ad blocking even though I know they exist and would save me bandwidth because I do get value from personalized ads.

People literally pay money to see relevant ads.

Fashion magazines are basically vehicles for ads. Even if you exclude sponsored content, a major draw of such magazines are the full page ads.

Secondly, Mozilla are not blind to the idea that tracking won't go away completely.

I agree, I think people should start thinking more often what garbage would they not have bought if they hadn't seen that ad.

"Do I really need that dog backpack? How many times will I ever use it? Would I actually have needed it if I didn't know it existed in first place?"

Personalization of everything (ads, products, content of any kind) is at an all time high and driven completely by demand. Relevance is the most requested feature by every user and the #2 complaint about ads.

There is no gain or advantage in irrelevance.

> please don't perpetuate the delusion that users actually want "relevant" ads

This seems really short sighted. Why wouldn't folks prefer relevant ads? I certainly do.

you pay nothing for the vast majority of your web resources you use every day.

More relevant ads = more money = better free services for you.

Would you rather you be forced to watch C.O.P.D medication pre roll ads and ads for meselthelioma ?

Are you suggesting people would prefer ads that are completely irrelevant to them?
The posturing is quite strong with the Mozilla Foundation. It is quite laughable that the Mozilla Foundation would take this "holier than thou" position, considering that they (Foundation + Corporation) are pushing : tracking (telemetry), ADs (Pocket), malware (studies), MITI[1] (Ministry of Truth) and DRM (EME) in Firefox. The sad part here is the fact that the Mozilla community does not seem to care one bit about these issues[2].

At this point, I trust Apple more than I trust the Mozilla Foundation or the Mozilla Project (the bar is quite low for Apple). The Free Software / "Open Source" community has a critical problem with project supporting organizations pushing for things that undermine privacy, security and freedom to make a little bit of cash. If we don't address these issues now, it might not be possible to fix them in the near future.

[1] Mozilla Information Trust Initiative : http://archive.is/jcJWg

[2] For those who say : "you can turn these things off", this is not an excuse! Telling a new user that they have to fiddle with `about:config` settings out of the box is not acceptable.

> For those who say : "you can turn these things off", this is not an excuse!

The telemetry is opt-in, the setting pops up once on first run. Ads are not tracking, you may disagree with their very existence, but they're not a privacy concern. Calling studies "malware" is just disingenuous. I don't see what MITI has anything to do with the rest. DRM does suck, but _not_ having it would be literal popular suicide, and in the current browser landscape, would literally mean letting Chromium take over even more than it already does.

I think you need to rethink most of your definitions.

> telemetry

is not tracking. please think about this rather than outrightly dismissing it.

> ADs

Ads are a legitimate way of making money on the Internet. I don't like them, but many services we use online are available because of them. Google is what it is because of Ad revenue. Firefox needs ads, there is no other way of surviving. It is laudable however that they are leading the movement in making ads transparent and building a framework of not having intrusive ads.

> malware

This is laughably innacurate. Mr. Robot was a terrible mistake, but it was not malware. Neither does Moz peddle actual malware.

> MITI

what does that have to with any of the above? Also the EU and many other orgs are thinking about the same thing. The Internet is new and we need to think about controlling the spread of misinformation. I'm going to make the best assumptions about you, so I'm hoping you can see why experiments in that realm can be advantageous.

> DRM

Again, a necessity. You cannot watch most news online without DRM. Supporting DRM is not the same as campaigning for DRM, which brings me to the biggest surprise I found in your comment of all the others...

> I trust Apple more than I trust the Mozilla Foundation or the Mozilla Project

...seriously? Apple? Apple is your privacy company? And you were just complaining about telemetry and pushing updates and DRM. Ugh.

> malware (studies)

Uh huh.

> MITI[1] (Ministry of Truth)

"Coral is a Mozilla project that builds open-source tools to make digital journalism more inclusive and more engaging."

"Mozilla will develop a web literacy curriculum that addresses misinformation, and will continue investing in existing projects like the Mission: Information teaching kit."

"Later this year, Mozilla will be releasing original research on how misinformation impacts users’ experiences online."

"Imagine: an augmented reality web app that uses data visualization to investigate misinformation’s impact on Internet health. Or, a virtual reality experience that takes users through the history of misinformation online."

Terrifying, really. They want to make an ~educational pamphlet~.

> DRM (EME)

Very reluctantly joining other browsers is 'pushing'?

Mozilla seem to think that being just slightly less evil than Google is good enough. No, no it's not.

I don't trust Apple, either — they seek to pull everyone into their walled garden and don't respect their users' freedom.

I don't even get why Apple supplies this functionality anyway.

Instead of rotating they should just do away with it; it's not like this functionality is to their users benefit.

They provide the functionality for people like my friend who loves to see bass guitar ads and does because he is tracked.

They also provide the ability to turn it off (set the ID to all 0s) for people like me who spend a little bit of effort to avoid ads.

If you are in one group stop pretending the other doesn’t exist. (Also more generally applicable life advice)

> If you are in one group stop pretending the other doesn’t exist. (Also more generally applicable life advice)

I'd argue your friend would be better off not being tracked and just Googling bass guitars whenever he feels the need.

Let's not pretend ads provide any benefit to humans, they manipulate us psychologically with the intent to part us from our hard earned money. In addition, they often drain our batteries at extreme rates and can contain malware and or lead to outright scams.

Your counterpoint to this is you know a guy who likes to see new bass guitars?

Feel free to argue with him. He’s not ignorant of all the harms, trust me... I’ve brought them up when we’ve talked.
(We could probably discuss which default is better, though I bet that opinion correlates to the group one is in)
Because it used to be worse, from a privacy standpoint. If Apple doesn't supply it, app builders / ad agencies will employ scummier tactics. It's a compromise.
That doesn't seem to make sense. If the ad agencies have better methods for tracking than Apple's Ad-ID then they would be still using those, surely?

Which makes Apple's Ad-ID redundant in addition to useless.

>If the ad agencies have better methods for tracking than Apple's Ad-ID then they would be still using those, surely?

Remember that Apple does in fact wield a level of coercive control here. They can ban any app or entire developer they wish at any time. But they do want a solid amount of development going on overall, despite individual exceptions. So just like a real world legal system, there's a dynamic set of cost/tradeoff equations, and practicality/reasonableness really matters. If Apple provides nothing and insists on nothing, the economic incentive to either cheat or simply leave entirely may move to near-requirement for too many developers. If Apple left it as "do whatever" and then slowly added requirements, it's still much harder to police and drive solutions that compromise best.

Offering something official that is less effective then the previous ones but still of enough use to be valuable and also has the advantage of official support and sanction, then blacklisting anything else raising the economic risk, is a fairly tried and true strategy that can be reasonably effective overall. Cheating is disincentivized for those who are legitimate and the search space is reduced, making it turn easier to further enforce. Apple's exact compromise could use more tweaks from the sound of it and evolve better, but the basic concept of "better to have someone troublesome inside the tent pissing out then outside the tent pissing in" seems to apply here too doesn't it?

Furthermore if many users are also more alright with it that too by itself can be a positive, preventing an arms war. Sometimes situations like these can fall into a vicious spiral left on their own: there could be many devs or even advertisers who would prefer to go with less obnoxious and creepy practices, in turn provoking absolute counter attacks, but can't disengage unilaterally when their competitors don't think as long term. Having a higher entity step in and force uniformity won't even make them all unhappy.

Scummier tactics are still used. The tracking and surveillance density of a typical iOS app – including screen recording – is shocking.
Because relevant ads are actually good for users and developers.

If you're served an ad for something you genuinely like and will use it benefits you. If you're able to bring a user to your service/product that will engage/purchase it benefits you.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Previous (lively!) discussion from _this morning_: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19670024
Windows just asks user if they want an advertising ID during "out of the box experience". Why not petition Apple to do the same?
Because Windows is complete garbage from a privacy standpoint. Even disabling every metric visible to the user Microsoft still allows their own ad network to track you. I do not believe they are honest in the user privacy sphere.
Nice rant, but how is this relevant to GP's comment?
I think the point of the ID is (partially) to reduce the chance that ad agencies will use scummy workarounds. If the ID isn't guaranteed to be there, I can see them using the scummy ways instead.
I can't help but think that initiatives like ad-id and DoNotTrack are a diversion at best than actually addressing the real problem of user-tracking and malvertising. This is simply Shirky's Principle at work [0].

Some people argue for tougher regulation and laws-- sometimes regulations have resulted in solidifying hegemony of established players (telecom industry, for instance), and laws have worsened the situation when government has its skin in the game (key disclosure laws, for instance).

Can't leave it up to the free markets either, but, they seem to get things right. Privacy oriented alternatives to existing tech today are facing a hard battle given the growth opportunities they leave on the table. I guess, we are poised for a tech breakthrough that'd settle it in favour of the users [1]: I hope when WASM goes non-web and cross platform, all kinds of apps are compiled to WASM and something like uBlockOrigin would simply shut all the trackers down on all platforms at the application layer. Of course, there are problems at other layers, for instance baseband on mobile phones that are known to track location, and ISPs that keep tabs on traffic flowing through their pipes...

[0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrun_(decryption_program)

This is a foolish idea. Rotating IDs on a slow basis like a month would mean that big players can still easily create statistical cross-device graphs based on traffic and activity patterns and link your rotated IDs (or link them probabilistically). Small players who can’t afford this effort would lose or shift business to Android-only.
So if I go into Srttings -> Privacy -> Advertising and click “reset advertising identifier” once a month does that accomplish this manually?

It’s not a perfect fix but adding a once a month calendar todo seems like a good short term fix for the privacy conscious.

Yes. Technically speaking, it does what the Mozilla author proposed.

You’ll end up getting a lot of ads for apps and services you potentially already own, which is the “downside”.

FWIW: Worked in mobile ad tech for five years so I know this space.

>You’ll end up getting a lot of ads for apps and services you potentially already own, which is the “downside”.

Thanks for the clarification.

I don't mind that. I usually get product recs from things like Wirecutter. I much prefer the model where a site I trust recommends a product, then get a referral bonus when I buy it on Amazon than tracking my web history to "nudge" me.

Since iOS can't let me use extensions, many of the tools I use to protect my privacy (adblocker, JS whitelisting, etc) aren't doable on iOS. So even small hacks like this are interesting to me.

I don't have Advertising option. Is this only available in certain jurisdictions?
I’d pay extra $100 for the iPhone where unique ID is editable. Even manually, no schedule needed. Win win for Apple and for customers.
You can reset the identifier already. I assume you are not looking to supply a particular value?
How do I do that?

I used one app that banned me arbitrarily by iPhone ID. I’d want to reset it

Sure, why not? E.g. I would set it to a shock site URL.
This seems strange to me.

If we're going as far as to advocate cycling tracking IDs each month, that means that at each switch, we've lost our "relevant" ads until we rebuild them up. So why not go full on no tracking IDs?

With Apple pushing privacy as being the factor that separates them from their peers, I don't see why they wouldn't have privacy on by default in this area. Apple Ads are gone now, right? So no skin in the game?

Apple seems to have a vested interest in privacy. I hope that this petition falls on the right ears.
Interesting to find out more options, I didn't know about "location-based ads" setting which was in a different place than the "advertising" menu. Plus, I always wanted location-based ads, so wanted to enable it, but it was already enabled.
Not terribly relevant for those of us who use safari only for everything, because content blockers.
Can websites read that ID? Or is this about apps?
Oh no, one more JOIN. That will show them!