I have this sick feeling that in the past year, Apple is experiencing a brain drain and again the assholes with the spreadsheets (the bozos as Steve Jobs called them) are showing up and starting to chip away at things like privacy or in-app purchases for an extra .5% of profit.
My son was surprised to see an ad or in app purchase in an Apple Arcade game. But I still have to verify whether that’s what he saw.
But the rest of the games on the App Store are so disgustingly sly in how they prey on their users to buy more more more.
And Tim Cook doesn’t do anything while talking about curation. Where’s the curation?
Yes, they do this! I called support and they agreed that it was in opposition to their website description of Apple Arcade, but that there was nothing they could do.
It pops up on the top of the screen every time you open the game.
They were very cagy about it, but their excuse seemed to be that it was up to the game publisher whether to include it, and that I should complain to them (even though it was sent as an Apple Arcade notification).
So it seems, there is a market right now, for quality adfree phones, since Apple has given up on that? Or rather they feel too secure in their entrenched space. I hope they are wrong about it.
It's the same market at adfree cities, ad free news sites and ad free movies.
The niche is well established and commercial entities proved viability at some scale. But there's a wall that stops it from ever becoming a prominent model.
IMO going past that wall won't happen organically. Perhaps if ad exposure (including brand and product placements) could be accepted as social level health issue we might see more realistic progress. The same way some districts just banned billboards and ad panels by decree.
This is a recommendation for another Apple Arcade game. The only gain for Apple if you click this notification is if you get the game, like it, and continue to pay for Arcade. This is like taking a screenshot of Netflix's "Top Picks for You" list and saying they are ads. This notification is not from the game you're playing but directly from Apple. There's no way to ship a game for Apple Arcade if it includes ads, interstitials or in-app purchases, that's the whole point.
Apple failed to “obtain the consent of French iPhone users (iOS 14.6 version) before depositing and/or writing identifiers used for advertising purposes on their terminals,” the CNIL said in a statement.
Apple claims they were using a previously approved process and their search ads on the AppStore prioritizes user privacy and will appeal.
we reserve the right to change the terms and conditions...
blah, blah, fucking blah.
I'm very firmly of the opinion that an ad on the street, a billboard, or in a newspaper or magazine, or even a website (under certain conditions) is public and not private (as much as they are annoying), inasmuch as you can be filmed in public - it's a public space.
An ad on your phone is* private as it is 'yours', your number, your unique id, your puk etc. It is sent only to you, as the owner of the phone.
Unless you share your phone with several (quantity/ number to be debated) persons, which would have to be declared. But if Jenny or Jimmy from finance are looking at spicy underwear and I get the ad for more of the same when I'm on duty - then so be it! It would have had to have been declared a public phone (for such behavior to be acceptable/ accepted).
There was never a thing like "privacy" in Apple roadmap. All that buzz was to take users' private data away from Facebook and Google and bank on it exclusively.
Sure, since they made most of their money from paid products, they had the advantage of telling consumers we won't collect your data, and it was a powerful attack on FB and Google's business models. It was a powerful differentiator, and it worked with people like me.
It's a case where a business motivations line up with their customers (like how FB and Google's motivations to collect data lined up with their customers motivations to get free stuff).
But if they're breaking that now, that's a huge problem.
> Apple is experiencing a brain drain and again the assholes with the spreadsheets (...) are showing up
> And Tim Cook doesn’t do anything while talking about curation.
Tim Cook is THE asshole with the spreadsheets. He's shown time and again that he's an accountant with absolutely no vision other than "squeeze more money from users".
"With iPhones running iOS 14.6 and below, Apple’s Personalized Advertising privacy setting was turned on by default, leaving users to seek out the control on their own if they wanted to protect their information. That violates EU privacy law, according to the CNIL. It doesn’t cross the Europe’s GDPR, though; the violation falls under the more obscure ePrivacy Directive of 2002."
They had the wrong default setting. They changed it after 14.6
One of the concerns I have, and I believe Steve shared, is the dilution of their offerings. I'm frankly having a hard time navigating their iPad and Mac offerings. It isn't clear where each of their products sit, and it's certainly going to be very confusing to non-enthusiasts who have the grit to swim thru it all. Similarly, someone explain the 13in Macbook Pro? Why is it still here and getting updates? It seems to me that they are just making all possible combinations of their products, and Steve hated that.
I'm with you on that, but it's very far from how bad it could be - just take a look at the other computer manufacturers.
And the trend of making the product lineup more convoluted doesn't seem to be steep (it happens slowly and over time), so I'm not too worried. It seems there is time to steer it back before it gets too ridiculous.
It seems to be mostly a case of, as various product sets evolve, you sometimes end up with adjacent products that are probably too similar. This has happened with the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro at various times. In general, Apple seems a lot more guilty of being slow to upgrade niche segments (smaller laptops, high-end desktops, smaller phones) than the other way around.
Steve repeatedly vetoed any kind of expandability on the original Mac[0]. And he tried to sabotage the memory layout because he thought it looked ugly[1].
There was never any "good" Apple, it was rotten from the very core. And that's just from a user perspective, nevermind what a toxic and abusive employer he has been shown to be over the years.
I think Tim seems like the type that would be a bozo but he is really admirable in that he recognizes what he’s good at and what he isn’t. And has been willing to change the leadership to find the right people.
There have definitely been product missteps and the typical nickle and diming of storage but it hasn’t seemed like the quality has suffered too much as you’d expect if he was a true bozo.
Why would this be downvoted? It’s genuine personal testimony about his character — certainly more reputable and meaningful to hear than what the news says about him.
$8.5M is just expenses to Apple, as would be to many others; certainly not working as a deterrent.
To give a figure of the money involved: Vizio made more profits during Q3 2001 by selling advertising and users data than by selling TV sets: $57.3M vs $25.6M.
Like it or not, users data is the new oil. I don't expect any related business to resist the temptation soon or later to jump to the dark side, if not because in a saturated market you either adapt or go belly up.
This is a nothingburger. I'm surprised to see such shallow responses here.
A giant company made a small regulatory misstep in one country. Laws change constantly, missteps likely happen all the time. It's a tiny fine for a small mistake.
It’s such a small amount because it’s a small infringement (incorrect default for a privacy-related setting that was corrected, I guess fairly rapidly because of the height of the fine)
“Meta suffered a major defeat on Wednesday that could severely undercut its Facebook and Instagram advertising business after European Union regulators found it had illegally forced users to effectively accept personalized ads.
The decision, including a fine of 390 million euros ($414 million), has the potential to require Meta to make costly changes to its advertising-based business in the European Union, one of its largest markets.”
Even ignoring that it is including a fine, I would think $414 million is large enough for some fairly high-up managers at Meta getting flak for it.
Exactly. "Illegal with a fine" is "Legal for a price." If the fine is less than the profit, then it's just another cost of doing business.
Edit: What's controversial about this statement? It's patently obvious, especially when you factor in the odds that your behavior will go unnoticed or unprosecuted. Do you people think I'm advocating this?!
> The fine should be equivalent to profit plus a hefty penalty on top of that.
So this was a toggle in an obscure preferences setting toggled incorrectly and therefore a minor infringement of EU law - but you want the court to fine Apple their entire profit? plus some random extra amount?
Wow. Aside from this being completely stupid to anyone who doesn’t share your irrational level of Apple hatred, how would you deal with a really serious offense?
They should be fined the profit that they made from the feature. All of it, plus an additional percentage as punitive damage. Nobody said they should have their entire annual profit garnished, their corporate charter revoked, their CEO arrested, or their headquarters raided by the Wagner Group. Sheesh.
The problem is that the threatened fine is nowhere near the anticipated profit. So there is a rational incentive to ignore the law.
> Nobody said they should have their entire annual profit garnished, their corporate charter revoked, their CEO arrested, or their headquarters raided by the Wagner Group. Sheesh.
Read the other comments here and you will see a number of people saying those things should happen (ok maybe not the one about the Wagner group...).
When you rob a bank, you're presumably getting at least a few thousand dollars. If the fine were actually $100, then the ROI is on the order of 10x-100x. How much money do you think apple got for "illegally harvesting iPhone owners’ data for targeted ads without proper consent"? Do you think apple made $85M to $850M from it?
I don't use Stocks or News and I don't use the App Store for discovery so I don't see ads. I am fully bought into the Apple ecosystem. The second I see an ad, I am dumping all of it.
I'm surprised every time I see an ad somewhere. TrackerControl seems to be an accidentally fantastic ad blocker (I got it just to block trackers) and it's super rare that an app doesn't use one of the known ad networks. It probably also helps to use apps from F-Droid whenever possible, which is surprisingly often (most of my apps are from F-Droid, some are stock like camera, dialer, and home screen, and then there's a couple like Spotify and NS/DB that are required for valid digital national rail tickets and I unfortunately can't get outside of Google Play).
Depending on your bank, Anbox or Waydroid may help you run your bank's app on your Linux device. Probably a no-go for most banks, but worth a shot to see if it'll work. You can just try it out on a Linux computer/VM first, no need to actually buy a Linux phone just to end up disappointed.
> Depending on your bank, Anbox or Waydroid may help you run your bank's app on your Linux device. Probably a no-go for most banks, but worth a shot to see if it'll work. You can just try it out on a Linux computer/VM first, no need to actually buy a Linux phone just to end up disappointed.
I use LineageOs and without Magisk magic I couldn't use contactless payments (still no Google Pay, but regional Blik contactless is good enough)
> Apple failed to “obtain the consent of French iPhone users (iOS 14.6 version) before depositing and/or writing identifiers used for advertising purposes on their terminals”
>With iPhones running iOS 14.6 and below, Apple’s Personalized Advertising privacy setting was turned on by default, leaving users to seek out the control on their own if they wanted to protect their information.
>The newer versions of the iPhone operating system corrected the problem, presenting users with a prompt before the advertising data was collected.
So they fixed it without government pressure or not?
Always impressive and a bit saddening seeing the Apple shills crawl out of the woodwork when news like this hits the airwaves. What is it about apple that turns people into such rabid fanboys?
Apple getting into ads is not what Steve would have wanted. And all teh "well wall st." responses can stop typing because Steve didn't give an f about wall street.
> Who is held responsible if a company gets fined or sued? Does someone get fired?
In the past shareholders were loosing money because their shares lost some value. Then they could fire CEO/take actions to put some pain on people responsible. But now shares don't loose value or even gain it, because how absurdly small fines are. CEOs have golden parachutes and only people who get fired are nameless minions who were forced to do it. Everyone above is blameless because every decision is made by committee, so no single person is responsible for anything.
I think the only justification for the outrageously high pay CEOs get should be personal liability for corporate malfeasance. We should put CEOs in prison.
So in an obscure settings toggle, in one version of iOS that was immediately fixed, some developer probably unknowingly set a toggle default to a setting that contravened an EU law… and you think Tim Cook should go to prison??
I just finished reading a book where one of the chapters was about factories in north New York where the executives covered-up systematic leaking of dioxin into the local environment for decades.
But sure - Tim Cook should go to prison to appease your Apple hatred.
I'm responding from an iPhone, as it happens. I'm not super fond of Apple, but there are far worse actors out there.
This specific case may not warrant prison, but CEOs are in a problematic space: They get massively well paid to make decisions that they suffer no ill effects for. They reap the rewards of success but do not face any repercussions if they do something wrong. They won't get fired, and they won't face penalty for illegal actions. Even if they make a decision that hurts the business financially, it tends to be other employees who get let go.
We should hold CEOs personally liable for the violations of the law of their companies, because it's the best way to ensure CEOs are motivated to ensure their companies behave legally, not just profitably.
CEOs being held personally liable might not fix anything - one goes to jail, the board hires the next. And before you say “CEOs just won’t agree to do risky things”, if they won’t, they get fired, and some other CEO will. Same as what happens with programmers that refuse to do unethical work. They’ll just get replaced.
The company goes on as normal. The issue is harder to solve than “just arrest the CEO”. But I’d like to see it solved, too.
If CEOs reliably expect to go to jail for doing illegal things, boards will have a hard time finding a CEO who will do it. If you still feel this is not a solution, perhaps we add holding the board personally liable for the actions of the company, and see if that helps. :)
Everyone's focussing on the small fine but the bigger story here is it's Apple. They've gotten the reputation for being the user privacy company, for protecting you from ad companies like Google/Alphabet or Facebook. Turns out they're acting like another invasive ad company themselves. The fine may not be big but the symbolism of it is.
This was an opt-in issue in one OS component (albeit an important one) in one version that has since been fixed. For sure apple should not have let this happen, but I don’t see this as indicative of some evil anti-privacy plot. Apple made a mistake and paid a fine for it.
They chose to use tracking tokens in the first place. By default a computer does nothing, someone was tasked to write this. Apparently they did something wrong, maybe it was an honest mistake, but I find it a stretch to just assume or expect they are necessarily choosing what's best for users (and leaving money on the table) without more info than is public.
maybe strict but arcane? It's pretty much the same "law" that apple put facebook under: Make personalization of ads optional and turn it off by default or at least make it equally easy to opt out and opt in (=forced choice).
And this "arcane rule" is pretty much 50% of everything you read about GDPR (heard of cookie dialogs? they are not just banners anymore due to GDPR). Hardly arcane to me.
Eh, this is a massive false equivalence. Yeah, it'd be really preferable if Apple didn't do ads. They also are the hot dog stand of ad vendors; everyone else is way, way bigger.
The difference is so obvious: Apple Maps doesn't even associate locations or directions to your Apple ID. Google stores your location at five minute intervals. The difference in privacy attitudes is vast.
You're right, but in the grand scheme of things whataboutism is irrelevant. As per some analysis in a paper of this on android & iOS (the name of which i don't recall, but can search for it), the main difference between the collection is not that big: Google collects more quantity whereas Apple collects every kind of data, but not as frequently.
People talked as if Apple did not and would not ever do such things, which was obviously false. Both companies profit by the fact that we keep pointing fingers in this sadistic duopoly and not look at the actual issue of privacy. I wished people showed more interest when in was more "fashionable" to talk of such issues, but back when snowden/assange/smaller individuals did it, the discussion always ended up with ad homiminems and irrelevant points directed to the messenger. The only difference between back then & now are the perpetrators: it used to be the governments, nowadays is companies (and governments colluding with them, which is arguably worse as corporations cannot be as easily held accountable).
Wow, that's going to teach them a lesson! A whole $8.5M - That's literally only 23 minutes of 2022 revenue lost (I did the maths). I'm sure they will never do it again, despite the fact that they likely made way more than $8.5M from doing it.
If we want companies to stop doing illegal things, then the punitive consequences need to be so high that they prioritise not doing it. If a person steals $100, they could spend a decent amount of time in jail for it. Time that is worth a lot more than then $100 benefit they received. Companies want all the benefits of being a "person", so let's apply the same principles to them.
It will cause more damage to their brand than $8.5M ... Apple has been positioning themselves as "privacy focused" for years. They're obviously still better than Google in this respect, but it will hurt them more than $8.5M.
> They're obviously still better than Google in this respect
Are they? Google is probably the most open company about what they collect and how they use it and I've never seen any evidence whatsoever that they ever sell you out ie. do more than simply link you to contextual ads.
All their apps and services also ask for permission pretty explicitly.
It seems like they bend over backwards to be open and precise about their data collection and the risks you incur by accepting it. And gives you tools to view and manage the data (at least some of it).
Meanwhile everyone else is doing similar or worse, while just staying silent -- in Apple's case hypocritically seeming to position itself as a leader of the "privacy" movement, when it really appears to primarily be about Apple's privacy first, then yours (maybe).
But how IS your privacy really better under Apple's control versus Google's? One could argue it's worse under Apple because you're left in a state of not knowing what they're collecting, only reading about violations in court judgments and such. Although it would be prudent in that case to just assume the worst, instead it seems we often prefer not knowing, and living in blissful ignorance.
People really hate on Google but I don’t think a lot of people separate what something or someone does from how they do it
Google collects a lot of data but I know they’re not going to sell it, they’re not going to let it leak (probably at least — their security engineering is on another level), and in all of their years, the only thing they’ve done is shown contextual ads or suggestions in extremely mundane places. They’re also such an extremely slow moving ship so it makes them extremely predictable, which is the most critical requirement for trust
Google doesn’t need to sell your data to anyone else because they also run the business which can extract the most (legal) monetary value from your data.
This. I have a home full of Google Home devices. I have been thinking about switching to Apple (a fairly expensive proposition given the payoff) but this sort of news makes me rethink the value prop of pouring more money into Apple products.
people like news stories that reinforce their perceptions, not news that tells them they're wrong. this isn't going to be widely reported on, because "you were wrong to like that company that everybody likes" isn't a nice story.
if the fine was huge, it would be news. but this fine is an amount that's easily ignored, so it will be.
Repeated anti-privacy moves, like CSAM scanning, haven't affected public discourse yet. And I'd imagine that a small fine would instead convince people that it wasn't a serious violation.
Apple's branding and marketing are too powerful for that to happen. An obscure court ruling matters to people on HN. To the average consumer, it never happened.
It needs to hurt more than just costing the company money.
Finally people from high management need to land in jail on a regular basis for the missteps of big companies. Because those people actually don't care if they loose money they don't own themself anyway.
^^^this. Apple illegally collected data. How many kids did they just commit that crime against? Jail time for c-suite management needs to happen. This whole crime is the cost of doing business is gross af.
> Finally people from high management need to land in jail on a regular basis for the missteps of big companies
Amazing number of people baying for prison time for this pretty trivial mis-step.
As I said in another comment, just finished reading a book where one of the chapters was about the Diamond Alkali works near Newark, where executives knowingly covered-up the intentional leaking of dioxin (the most lethal chemical known to man - the smallest dose will cause cancer) for decades.
But people on HN want to put Apple employees in prison for some trivial, minor EU law contravention.
Something worth at least $8.5M is a minor trivial "misstep"?
What do you need to do as a private person to get fined at least $8.5M? Kill somebody by accident? No, that does not cost so much usually (even if you would count all your time lost in jail).
My proposal would be: Calculate the daily rate of an average Apple employee (this includes the poor people in some Chinese factories), divide the fine by that, and this will result in the days the responsible C-level staff gets jailed. This would be simple and very effective.
> Something worth at least $8.5M is a minor trivial "misstep"?
For a company with probably ten million affected customers within the relevant jurisdiction, yes. The fine itself categorises this matter as a trivial misstep.
Also your logic is weird. You’re using the assessed punishment as justification for why the assessed punishment is insufficient.
> this will result in the days the responsible C-level staff gets jailed. This would be simple and very effective.
I really recommend you transfer your hatred and sense of injustice to companies that are right at this moment poisoning environments - even in the US - and actively covering-up chemical leaks, or the pollution of people’s drink-water, or allowing workers to use carcinogens that executives deny are dangerous.
Some pathetic technical contravention of a trivial rule by Apple here is not worth your energy and passionate hatred.
Rant: I'm so sick of the Apple App store. It absolutely pales in comparison to app stores like Steam, Epic Games or GOG. On those stores, you can buy a license, and then use that license almost anywhere. (Except, of course, on Apple Devices.) These stores compete with eachother, so they also sometimes have very good deals. (Hello actually good free games from Epic.)
On the horrible Apple App store, you buy a piece of software and you can only use it on some Apple devices. If a developer stops updating their software, odds are you'll no longer be able to use the software at some point in the future.
Even worse, most apps are listed as free, but of course, they're not free. They charge you for them, but only in some way that is completely hidden to everyone who doesn't download and install the software. Either that, or they are free, but you're overwhelmed with huge numbers of ads.
I've come to resent our overpowered iPad. I'd love to install games that I own on other devices, but Apple has chosen to make this impossible. That's extremely disrespectful to me, their customer. They sell me a device that is completely locked down. It's horrible, and in no way the dream of computing that almost everyone had when I was growing up.
Any firm making more than zero in advertising revenue is automatically untrustworthy when it comes to privacy and data collection. Apple is no exception, and their stance is more hypocritical than most.
> In 2021, the company made $3.05 billion from ads in the US, and that figure is expected to grow to $4.24 billion in 2022, according to Insider Intelligence.
I hastily misread the page. Where it says "How to Prep Your Apple Devices to Sell Them" in text-only browser, no HTML tables, this appeared right where a date for the article would usually be, and it looked like the date of the article was September 17, 2021. Sorry about that.
Equivalently every time you forget to pay for a parking ticket, and every other equivalent law infraction, you should be fined your total annual disposable income?
Maybe with some punitive disincentive on top I guess. If you have a ten percent chance of being caught, then fine you 10 years of your “profit” seems a good appropriation. Just make it a year’s salary - that is a fair approximation that everyone would understand. You certainly would learn to pay more attention to the many thousands of minor laws you need to personally adhere to.
Edit: I especially want to see some of those rich-ass software devs working for letters from ACRONYMS get taken down. I’m safe: I live in New Zealand and I can’t easily work at a letter of an ACRONYM.
IIRC Sweden (or one of the scandis) does exactly that, a parking ticket is based on a percentage of your gross yearly wage (or something to that effect, maybe the sticker price of the car?) rather than being a set cost, since otherwise those kinds of fines disproportionally target lower income individuals while it becomes a small hassle that the wealthy pay off and forget about.
Corporate fines should work similarly, any infraction no matter how small should be fined at a % of their cashflow. I think Apple, with their 2 Trillion(!!!!) Dollars can hire a lawyer or two to make sure they're not breaking any silly privacy laws, after all :)
I have this sick feeling that in the past year, Apple is experiencing a brain drain and again the assholes with the spreadsheets (the bozos as Steve Jobs called them) are showing up and starting to chip away at things like privacy or in-app purchases for an extra .5% of profit.
My son was surprised to see an ad or in app purchase in an Apple Arcade game. But I still have to verify whether that’s what he saw.
But the rest of the games on the App Store are so disgustingly sly in how they prey on their users to buy more more more.
And Tim Cook doesn’t do anything while talking about curation. Where’s the curation?