Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in the Safari Browser (adweek.com)

The biggest advertising organizations say Apple will "sabotage" the current economic model of the internet with plans to integrate cookie-blocking technology into the new version of Safari. Marty Swant, reporting for AdWeek: Six trade groups -- the Interactive Advertising Bureau, American Advertising Federation, the Association of National Advertisers, the 4A's and two others -- say they're "deeply concerned" with Apple's plans to release a version of the internet browser that overrides and replaces user cookie preferences with a set of Apple-controlled standards. The feature, which is called "Intelligent Tracking Prevention," limits how advertisers and websites can track users across the internet by putting in place a 24-hour limit on ad retargeting. In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as "opaque and arbitrary," warning that the changes could affect the "infrastructure of the modern internet," which largely relies on consistent standards across websites. The groups say the feature also hurts user experience by making advertising more "generic and less timely and useful."

Comments

Can ads get any less timely and useful?

[TheCastro1689]

I bought a motorcycle helmet years ago, I still get ads for the helmet and others I researched. Fucking ads suck.

Re: Can ads get any less timely and useful?

[alvinrod]

That reminds me of the story about Target's initial foray into targeted ads where they could tell based on search history when a user was pregnant and had some data to suggest that if they could get a new mother to start shopping at their stores she'd likely be a good longtime customer. They were worried about it appearing creepy for them to start displaying sales ads for diapers or other baby products that people hadn't looked for yet, so they through it some ringer results (like golf clubs or scotch glasses) that would make the advertising appear more random.

Perhaps they're selectively feeding you some ads that are more relevant, but tossing in some crap like that so it doesn't appear too obvious. Or maybe someone else temporary had that IP and was making different searches with it that are influencing the results.

Google, please get on board with this!!!

[turp182]

Unless Apple has a patent on it...

I have to manage enough other stuff and generally ignore cookies.

That said, cookies do show me what my wife is shopping for on Amazon, but I don't need to see that (it is funny to call her and implicitly talk about what's she's looking at, but that only worked a couple of times).

Targeted Ads?

[in10se]

If I have to see ads on a web site, my preference is that they are "generic and less timely and useful" since I'm going to ignore them anyway.

Re:Targeted Ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't click on ads as a matter of principle. At the same time, I recognize that ads are highly engineered to distract me and grab my attention, and that this engineering is not without success. So, even though there is a 100% chance that I am not going to "bite", I know that a good ad will be able to distract me.

As such, wishing for less effective ads is perfectly reasonable and respectable.

Re:It must be good then!

[suutar]

or maybe someone who can make those decisions just got pissed at cookies for some reason and they don't see any harm to Apple in using their 800 pound gorilla status.

Re:Block third-party cookies, done...

[mellon]

I don't see the problem here. How much do you think that page impression is earning the site? The reason micropayments have never taken off is that advertising is easier. Make advertising harder, and maybe I'll finally get a mechanism that supports the sites I visit without demanding that I be exposed to brain viruses when I visit it. This is a win for me, and it's a win for the site—ask any web designer how much they love making space for ads on their pages.

Re:It must be good then!

[Dixie_Flatline]

This is really significant in a few ways:

1) This isn't something Google can do, because obviously Google's bread and butter is ads (though, let's be real—I bet Google could do better, less disruptive advertising if they wanted to)
2) Apple's users are disproportionately represented in online purchasing. When you see stats for online Black Friday sales, most mobile sales are on iOS devices. This makes Apple's decision hit twice as hard despite having less market share.

I'm sure it won't be long before ad agencies come up with some other irksome method of ruining my online browsing experience, but I'm so happy someone is trying *something* to mess with these guys.

Your ads hurt my user experience.

[Macdude]

To the Interactive Advertising Bureau, American Advertising Federation, the Association of National Advertisers, the 4A's and two others:

Your ads hurt my user experience.
Your tracking hurts my privacy.
Your infected ads hurt my computer.

Basically, you hurt people. If you disappear that will be a good thing.

Re:Oh noes!!!

[JohnFen]

It will be when most sites will become paywalled. More high quality sites will go down the drain because of the lack of funds, so they'll either have to block completely (there are some already doing this) or devolve into clickbait.

Fine by me. Most sites -- and especially sites that rely heavily on advertising -- aren't exactly indispensible to me. The ones that are, I'm already paying cash money to.

I think it's high time for the web to break its addiction to advertising. There are other, better, ways to pay operating costs, but none of them will be adopted as long as it's easy to do ads. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the overall quality of web offerings dropped when advertising became the predominant revenue model.

Re:A good start

[infolation]

^^^
This really needs modding up. I am surprised the advertisers are even slightly concerned about cookies anymore when browser fingerprinting is a far more insidious and (currently) difficult to overcome privacy invasion for the end-user.

Since Google has persuaded almost everyone and their kid brother to run adsense code on the page, they have a canvas-fingerprint-trackable record of clickstream from page-to-page/site-to-site.

Tools like panopticlick and ipduh can give you an immediate sense of the problem, but trying to reduce it is tricky.

To sidestep fingerprinting pretty much means running the Tor browser or Firefox with Random Agent Spoofer, Decentraleyes, and a custom user.js set up with something like pyllyukko's prefs.

Re:The varnish is off

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely anyone who has ever had even the slightest brush from a cluestick?

My head is still spinning that apple would actually make a decent decision like this with their users' best interests at heart: it just runs so counter to everything I've come to expect from big tech companies.

Re: The varnish is off

[Cyberpunk Reality]

I think there is a legitimate market niche for advertisitng. Letting people gain awareness that things of interest to them exist is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Lots of people go and watch movie trailers of their own volition, for example. But there is absolutely a line, beyond which advertising becomes parasitic. How much time do we collectively lose, how much wealth does our society spend, in order that some people may become wealthy selling to some other people? Where, ethically, is the line between robbery, extortion, fraud and an advertising campaign or sales pitch? I do not know exactly where the line is for responsible advertising, but as a society I think we are very far on the wrong side of it.

Re:The varnish is off

[amicusNYCL]

What's the Latin phrase, about "who benefits?" It applies here. Who benefits from online advertising? Among others, Google, one of Apple's main competitors and the single major threat to the IOS ecosystem. Hurting online advertising hurts Google, and Apple thinks that benefits them.