Web Excursions 2022-06-28
Data and Definitions
[EU disparages Apple’s ad rules because] these rules apparently do not affect Apple when using and combining user data from its own ecosystem.
While users can also restrict Apple from using their data for personalised advertising,
the Bundeskartellamt’s preliminary findings indicate that Apple is not subject to the new and additional rules of the App Tracking Transparency Framework.
John Gruber disagrees at Daring Fireball:
Apple’s privacy and tracking rules do apply to itself.
Apple’s own apps don’t show the track-you-across-other-apps permission alert not because Apple has exempted itself but because Apple’s own apps don’t track you across other apps.
Apple’s own apps show privacy report cards in the App Store, too…
if Apple actually cared more about maximizing Search Ads revenue than it does user privacy, wouldn’t they have just engaged in actual user tracking
The distinction comes down to definitions.
Apple has benefited as well; the Financial Times reported last fall:
Apple’s advertising business has more than tripled its market share in the six months
after it introduced privacy changes to iPhones that obstructed rivals, including Facebook, from targeting ads at consumers
in the context of Amazon specifically:
all of Amazon’s data collection, ad targeting, and conversion happen on the same platform — Amazon.com, or the Amazon app.
ATT only restricts third party data sharing, which means it doesn’t affect Amazon at all…
Apple’s advertising platform does not track you,
meaning that it does not link user or device data collected from our apps
with user or device data collected from third parties
for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes, and
does not share user or device data with data brokers.
“Tracking” is not a neutral term
For these folks I would imagine tracking means exactly the collection and use of data to target ads.
That certainly seems to align with the definition of “track” from macOS’s built-in dictionary:
“Follow the course or trail of (someone or something), typically in order to find them or note their location at various points”.
However, this is not Apple’s definition
according to Apple’s definition, collecting demographic information, downloads/purchases/subscriptions, and browsing behavior in Apple’s apps, and using that data to deliver targeted ads, is not tracking,
because all of the data is Apple’s
(and by extension, neither is Google’s collection and use of data from Safari search results, or Amazon’s collection and use of data from its app; however, a developer associating an in-app purchase with a Facebook ad is).
This definition conflates two very different things: linking and sharing.
The distinction between the two undergirded a regular feature of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s appearances in Congressional hearings
Meta doesn’t sell data; it collects it, and the third parties that leverage the company’s platforms for advertising very much prefer it that way.
The way Meta works is that its collective advertising base has effectively deputized the company to collect data on their behalf;
that data is not exposed directly, but is instead used to deliver targeted advertisements
that are by-and-large bought not by targeting specific criteria,
but rather by specifying desired results: app installs, e-commerce conversions, etc.
Everything user-related is, to the companies buying the ads, a complete black box.
this is completely invisible to the developer or merchant;
technically they are sending data to Meta,
since the conversion data was collected in their app or on their website,
but in reality it is Meta collecting that data and sending it to themselves.
The reason why developers and merchants are happy with this arrangement is that advertising is a scale business:
you need a lot of data and a lot of customers to make targeted advertising work, and
no single developer or website has as much scale as
Apple’s definition, though, lumps Meta’s approach (which again, is representative of other platforms like Snap) in with the worst actors in the space.
One would assume that “our” means Apple-created apps, like News or Stocks
The actual definition, though, is much more expansive;
go back to the Epic trial and the exchange I recounted in App Store Arguments:
Apple doesn’t particularly care about or claim ownership of the content of an app on the iPhone, but:
Apple insists that every app on the iPhone use its payment system for digital content
Apple treats all transactions made through its payment system as Apple data
Ergo, all transactions for digital content on the iPhone are Apple data
The end result looks something like this — i.e. strikingly similar to Facebook, but with App Store payments attached:
when it comes to digital advertising,
particularly for the games that make up the vast majority of the app advertising industry,
transaction data is all that matters.
That is the data that Apple cut off with ATT (by barring developers from linking it to their ad spend), and
it is the same data that Apple has declared is their own first party data, and thus not subject to its ban on “tracking.”
This, needless to say, is where legitimate questions about self-preferencing come to the forefront.
Developers who want to link conversion data with Facebook are banned from doing so,
while they have no choice but to share that data with Apple because Apple controls app installation via the App Store
targeted advertising is an essential ingredient in a new Internet economy
that provides opportunities to small businesses serving niches
that are only viable when the world is your market.
What is frustrating about the debate about ATT, though, is that Apple presents itself as a representative of the latter,
with its constant declarations that privacy is a human right, and
advertisements that lean heavily into the (truly problematic) world of data brokering,
even as it builds its own targeting advertising business
What has changed is not just Apple, but also the data that matters:
when iAd launched in 2010, digital advertising ran like people still think it does,
leveraging relatively broad demographic categories and contextual information to show a hopefully relevant ad
Being Boring
Could better presentation tools help change the culture of neverending boredom?
It’s not PowerPoint’s fault that we spend half our lives pretending to speak and pretending to listen.
At the same time, PowerPoint is not entirely innocent: “…responsibility for poor presentations rests with the presenter.”
But it is more complicated than that.
PP has a distinctive, definite, well-enforced, and widely-practiced cognitive style that is contrary to serious thinking.
PP actively facilitates the making of lightweight presentations.
It’s designed to make us design slides,
pretend that we know what we are talking about, and
make others accept boring, empty speeches as normal
PowerPoint gets us started—
with a procrastination bonanza, by delaying the decision on
what we want to say and
how we structure it in favor of picking fonts and colors.
No matter how experienced you are as a speaker, designer and typographer,
you will never quite know what you’re supposed to do with a slide.
Is it a picture? Is it an index card? Is it a page?
Outside of presentation apps we don’t use slides to communicate, so they feel a little awkward and unfamiliar.
Slide apps encourage us to play, to focus on the visuals, the layout and the fancy transitions.
but the result is often a chaotic delivery that fails to connect.
Bullet points also seem to be a gateway drug to slides stuffed full of text.
When we start reading from the slide, while our audience is trying to do the same, our voice clashes with their internal dialogue and for them,
it’s like listening to two people at once.
The audience gets bored when our presentation isn’t moving them towards their personal goals.
If we were being boring in a conversation, they might just interject and change the topic.
But in a presentation, audiences have been conditioned to sit quietly until the end, and this just makes things worse.
It turns the room into a prison.
Speaker notes are supposed to help, but they can be hard to read with “adrenaline eyes”.
That’s why the bullet points sneak into our slides.
Bullets are great in theory, but in practice, they trigger a lot of umms and errs as we fumble to expand them.
And they are hard to process for spectators, too.