More than likely it was done to protect the users privacy while keeping the exact same user experience. The protections were made behind the scenes with additional options made available to the user, but disabled by default.
The transitions from guid had the potential to break many apps so encouraging users to disable it would have likely caused many unintended side effects in addition to cluttering the ui and annoying users with unknown options.
And how does this solution achieve that better than putting the option in the Privacy menu, labelled "Disable unique identification (this may break some apps)"?
Near as I can tell, he's saying that the advertisement tracking toggle (located under General > About, down past the version numbers, MAC addresses, etc.), named "Limit Ad Tracking" and defaulting to "Off" is actually another brilliant example of Apple's premier, user-centric interface experience design.
But I've never really figured out the "double-negative, Newspeak is good for you!" thing, so I'm not sure.
>I've read this three times now and I'm still not sure I get it...
For about ten years now, every time I use Paypal for an eBay payment, I'm interrupted to choose a $10.00 off opt-in for setting up credit, I have to click-thru this every time. By now, I've done this several hundreds of times.
I'm just a fish trying to stay out of their double-trap dark pattern slippery slope trammel net.
I've been on google+ since the beginning (2nd half of 2011).
For the whole 18-20 months whenever I have gone to google+ on the web it has first had an obstacle "Find your friends" page asking me to spam all my contacts about google+.
It still does it even today. There is no opt-out or "stop asking me to do this" checkbox. Even though I am an active plus user with posts and comments, it still treats me like a first timer.
I'm trying to get into google+ but there is no way I'm going to spam my friends.
That it has been doing this to me hundreds of times for nearly two years is unbelievable.
Another one. HN subject titles often link to the New York Times. Not having a subscription and offended with their offensive dark screen blinding pop-up `dark pattern' `hook'
--free, or otherwise-- I now only read the respective HN comments.
NYT coverage is usually good, I miss it, but now BBC, Reuters, Guardian, rt, Der Spiegel, HN, are my primary news feeds.
The transitions from guid had the potential to break many apps so encouraging users to disable it would have likely caused many unintended side effects in addition to cluttering the ui and annoying users with unknown options.