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Tim Cook Says Ads That Follow You Online Are 'Creepy' (cnet.com)
In a wide-ranging interview with MSNBC and Recode, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that everyone should know how much data they're sharing and what can be inferred about us from that information. He added that privacy "is a human right" and said he's worried about how advertisers and others can abuse access to our data. "To me it's creepy when I look at something and all of a sudden it's chasing me all the way across the web," Cook said. "I don't like that." CNET reports: The comments came as part of a wide-ranging interview between Cook, MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Recode's Kara Swisher. MSNBC broadcast the special, named "Revolution: Apple changing the world" at 5 p.m. PT on Friday. The interview was taped the day after Apple's education event in Chicago, where the company introduced a new 9.7-inch iPad and tools for teachers. The two publications released some early clips and comments from Cook over the past couple of weeks. That included remarks he made about Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cook noted that Apple purposely chose not to make "a ton of money" off its customers' data and that Facebook failed to effectively regulate itself, prompting a need for government intervention. Along with Facebook and its privacy issues, Cook talked up DACA and immigration, tax reform, the changing job landscape and the need for everyone to learn coding, among other topics.
Just imagine: -
You see an interesting video but when you click the link, you're "welcomed" by an uninvited ad! What I do in this case is to mute the sound, an occasionally close my eyes for a few moments. It works most of the time.
Trouble is, even when you forward the video, you'll be confronted with an ad!
I hate ads but will also not pay up in order to avoid them. I know I am not alone.
We'll put you in a nice padded jail where you won't have to mix with the more uncouth inmates in our prison system. Apple's ecosystem is still a panopticon, but it's like the jails where they send Wall Street criminals as opposed to the jail where they send violent inmates.
Every time you use a Facebook or Google service... that's what you vote for. Online surveillance capitalism.
Every time you allow your computer to load and run a tracking javascript from some web site... that's what you vote for.
Every time you load a "web bug"... that's what you vote for.
Every time you buy a device where someone else has more authority over it than you do, which may restrict your ability to exercise control over what the device is allowed to do... that's what you vote for.
If you've ever clicked on a banner ad, you helped us get here.
We didn't get here via foul magic, we got here because billions of people allowed things others of us see as flat out unacceptable.
Stop voting to turn the net into a shitfest of surveillance capitalism.
why do they think that if I see the ads for a giant razor to shave my back enough times that I'll eventually want one ? Let them waste their money, it's become a joke now. I might even deliberately go looking for more ridiculous products and collect the ads as webpage bling.
Nullius in verba
"Why didn't you design Facebook from the beginning to honor requests by users to have files deleted instead of just hiding the files someplace and pretending that they'd been deleted?"
Good, inexpensive web hosting
While Tim Cook is certainly right that being tracked for advertisement purposes is creepy and should not happen, it is just as creepy if there is one company that decides what software my hardware is allowed to run, even taking a third of revenue made with it, if it is commercial.
So, Tim, as long as Apple puts its buyers under tutelage, you are just as creepy as the stuff you criticize.
Despite my criticisms of Tim Cook using Apple as his personal political platform, he and the company been vocal advocates of user privacy and rights. Compared to the rest of Silicon Valley and how they view users, Apple has been truly fantastic.
HOWEVER, I agree with you that here are a lot more things, some fairly simple, that Apple should be doing to back up their words with actions. Here's just a few:
1. Loosen restrictions on VPN protocols in iOS. Everyone knows the industry standard is OpenVPN, but Apple basically restricts VPN providers from implementing OpenVPN natively in their iOS apps, forcing users to resort to L2TP or IKEv2 (or set up their cknnectjkn manually using the OpenVPN app). This is cumbersome and gets in the way of good security.
2. Set StartPage as the default search engine in iOS Safari (rather than Google). StartPage returns Google results, but securely and privately. Adding DuckDuckGo a few years back was good, but most users stick with defaults and most users want Google results. So give them Google results securely and privately by making StartPage the default search engine.
3. Let alternative browsers on iOS submit DNT headers. Currently only Safari can do this. In fact, Apple needs to signicsntly lessen restrictions on alternative browsers, including letting users set a different browser as default over Safari. At least do this with browsers that have proven security credentials, like Firefox, Ghostery and Brave. But the way Apple has handled iOS browsing has been very anti-security. They took a long time to get around to fixing the HSTS supercookie bug in Safari, and then in iOS 11 created a HUGE WebRTC leak issue in most every other browser that is still unpatched. Why isn't this a priority?
4. The first four were easy; this one is going to hurt. Cook, it's time to start open sourcing some of Apple's code. The amount of simple but critical bugs found in OSX recently is insane. At the very least, start by implementing a policy that once an OS major version number is two or three years old, it's published open source. This will build trust amongst users and help researchers find bugs, while also protecting your most current developments as proprietary.
"Why didn't you design Facebook from the beginning to honor requests by users to have files deleted instead of just hiding the files someplace and pretending that they'd been deleted?"
"Mr. Senator, we are all about connecting people. In order to better connect people we need to better understand them. Sometimes, people inadvertently delete things that would help us to better understand them, and better connect them well. So it's better for them if we save stuff that they think they should delete."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Oh fuck off. You're not required to use iCloud at all. You can attach as much storage as you need. You can use FileVault 2 to encrypt locally. You can sync your iOS devices easily to local storage.
What in holy fuck are you on man?
No they don't. They started iAd in 2010 to piss off Google, but shut it down in 2016. It sucked because it required a huge upfront investment, required giving Apple some control over your own ads, and Apple took 40% of ad revenue. Apple made a big deal about how iAds would be more secure for customers and less annoying. Thing is, advertisers want to be annoying and they don't give squat about customers of the host site.
No, I'd say it's also wrong, but it's not as creepy.
There's two creepiness factor differences here. (1) Apple's walled-garden is not clandestine. You buy an iPhone you're buying into that garden. Internet tracking happens without your even implied consent. (2) Apple's hegemony has a clear limitation: Apple's mobile devices. That makes it trivial to escape: you just use a different vendor's phone. Internet monitoring is pervasive; you can't escape it no matter where you try to go with your browser.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The point Cook is making is that even if you mute that video and close your eyes, you'll still see that same ad (or at least one for that some product) on an entirely different site. That is the creepy part, that sites across the internet suddenly seem to know what you have been looking at.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't like any of the cloudpushing companies. Not Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google. My point is that they're all crap in different ways. Apple is better as far as privacy, but worse as far as being able to escape their padded prison cell.
Pot? Kettle? Anyone?
If he's using an apple mobile device, they can folow him using the unique advertising identifier that apple devices apparently helpfully send to advertisers. He can "reset it" periodically via a 3-deep system menu option, but there isn't a menu option to opt out.
Every time you allow your computer to load and run a tracking javascript from some web site... that's what you vote for.
Hence my use of the Tracking Protection feature in Firefox. Hence my use of AllTheTropes.org instead of TVTropes.org.
Every time you buy a device where someone else has more authority over it than you do, which may restrict your ability to exercise control over what the device is allowed to do... that's what you vote for.
So how would I go about voting against computing devices that restrict the owner, other than not buying any computing device at all and thereby not having my business needs met? I tried buying a subnotebook PC that respects my freedom as best I could, only for others to outvote me, leading to the discontinuation of the entry-level subnotebook PC segment.
I've coded in over a dozen languages from vax macro and 6502 assembly languages to cobol and fortran to ada and java.
Everyone does not need to learn to code any more than everyone needs to learn calculus or everyone needs to learn music.
I've had a computer science degree longer than some (many?) people posting on slashdot have been alive.
It's a dumb concept.
Coding doesn't teach you how to think and be a decent human being.
Philosophy and logic courses teach you how to think and be a decent human being.
And actually, learning to read music and play a musical instrument does more for you as a human being (and your ability to think) than learning to code.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's creepy that advertisers ask me to accept cookies so they can track me around the web. If someone walked up to you in the street and asked you to carry a GPS tracker so they could better target their advertising at you, would you do it?
Third party cookies should be blocked by default in all browsers. There are no non-abusive use cases that can't be replaced by first party cookies.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's more than encouraging and being nudged hard - iCloud notifications are straight-up nagware. I refuse to sign in, and I get random pop-ups to sign in every couple of hours. Sometimes while doing nothing. I've disabled everything cloud related, and it still persists. Short of identifying what processes are triggering this and killing them, or writing a script to auto-kill them, there's no way around the nagware that I can find, other than signing in.
That MBP is now gathering dust, however, because I got pissed enough to switch to a ubuntu laptop from Dell. Still has some quirks, but nothing as irritating as that.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Coding doesn't teach you how to think and be a decent human being.
I mean, experience from this site suggests to me that it gives a moral superiority and unearned certainty that actively harms the ability to be a decent human being.
Took a private Dr. consultation. There were two humans present. Three hours later " Flonase" ads start streaming in on my cell phone Safari browser. We talked specifically about Flonase Rx. I'm not a conspiracist.
Last week watching Sports Channel an advertisement ran. Minutes later a news article flows into my feed. You guessed right if you reckon this coincidence was too close for comfort. It beyond uncomfortable. An injected ' news article' didn't pass as news nor coincidental.
There's a problem with cellular technology. Its not enough to put it away in a pocket. Its probably not enough to turn your wireless off. Cellular handsets listen when I think they should not even be capable of it. Its Apple's problem, every phone manufacturer and it's every developer whose software that runs on those phones.
So fake news be it whatever no matter I live in a free world. I have options. I don't have patience when it comes to a Right to privacy.
You may not label yourself a conspiracist; but you do realize that all of our brains spend an incredible amount of processing-power searching for patterns. And if that Flonase ad showed BEFORE you wen to the Dr., it wouldn't have even "registered"; but since it was AFTER...
In iOS 10.0 and later, the value of advertisingIdentifier is all zeroes when the user has limited ad tracking.
In case anyone is wondering, these wonderful options can be found in the Settings app in Privacy -> Advertising. Personally, I appreciate that the privacy and data protection features of my phone are so extensive that they have to be split up into 15 separate subpages within the main Privacy page.
What is the default ? An overwhelming majority of users are not going to change anything in the Settings app in Privacy -> Advertising.
While it is wrong to say there isn't a menu option to "opt out" of sending a unique advertising ID, Tim Cook's Apple is allowing a lot of creepiness.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.