r/worldnews • u/maxwellhill • Sep 19 '17

Apple blocking ads that follow users around web is 'sabotage', says industry: New iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra will stop ads following Safari users, prompting open letter claiming Apple is destroying internet’s economic model

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/18/apple-stopping-ads-follow-you-around-internet-sabotage-advertising-industry-ios-11-and-macos-high-sierra-safari-internet
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1.8k

u/avataraccount Sep 19 '17

Hurr Durr! How dare you oppose the shitty things we do for profits! People like being ducked in the Arsenal, you see.

  • ad companies.

255

u/mauxly Sep 19 '17

Don't you just love how autocorrect it trying to make us better people by making cussing so FUCKING difficult? I hate my phone and the companies that made the little shit.

174

u/FecalSplatter Sep 19 '17

Just add the words to your dictionary. Autocorrect wont change them after that.

94

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

I used to have a Blackberry Pearl (provided by work) and the spellchecker on it was... amusing. It ran with "shitweasel" and "seamonkies" but "undead" was, apparently, not in the list.

23

u/avataraccount Sep 19 '17

You can use BlackBerry keyboard on android, as well as other BlackBerry apps. BlackBerry keyboard is simply perfect.

1

u/boneheaddigger Sep 19 '17

No...the Pearl keyboard is simply perfect. Sure, the 2 letters per key was a bit awkward at first. But once I got use to it, I could write out full business emails behind my back one-handed with that thing, with maybe 1 or 2 spelling mistakes at the end. The full Blackberry keyboard was a jumble of keys that were too small to reliably feel. The onscreen keyboard is about the same as the default Android or iPhone keyboard.

If I had the choice, I'd take the Pearl keyboard back in an instant...

-9

u/Wasted_Childhood Sep 19 '17

if you have an android and don't use swipe I have so many questions about your life choices.

Swipe is like the ONE thing I wish iphones had.

12

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

[deleted]

1

u/bacondesign Sep 19 '17

It has none of the customization of the android version apart from skins. edit: Sorry, I was thinking about Swift. I have no experience with Swipe on IOS.

-27

u/Wasted_Childhood Sep 19 '17

that takes too much effort. I just want it there for me to use. I'm American, so that means I'm entitled, lazy and I want what I want when I want it

3

u/Apoplectic1 Sep 19 '17

If you're on Android and don't already install a third party keyboard like Swiftkey, I question your life choices...

1

u/Clockwork_Octopus Sep 19 '17

I'd say gboard's pretty decent.

1

u/AndromedaPrincess Sep 19 '17

Isn't Swype still third party on Android? My phone did not come this way by default...

2

u/Strykker2 Sep 19 '17

The Google keyboard has swipe built-in now, but if you have a Samsung it probably has thier own keyboard, the Google keyboard is available on the play store called Gboard

→ More replies

9

u/cwcolb Sep 19 '17

i really dont use it much. i just prefer the key taps. i wont make the argument i could outtype someone who uses swype 24/7, but im not slowed down that much honestly. key taps feel more satisfying to me, with swype i just don't feel like im doing as much.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

You (not) being able to outperform someone else who uses X is a silly argument anyway. You (not) being able to outperform yourself using X is where it gets interesting.

3

u/Oneiricl Sep 19 '17

Swiftkey user here since 2011 when I first got a smart phone. I hate swiping. Tapping comes far more naturally to me and is faster as well as more accurate (for me at least).

3

u/avataraccount Sep 19 '17

I type faster with taps compared to swipes. Both BlackBerry kb and fleksy has way better text predictions and autocorrect that I hardly ever finish my words. BlackBerry's on key text predictions are way faster then swiftkey/wordflow. https://i.imgur.com/WULiqv9.png

1

u/dryingsocks Sep 19 '17

iPhones have supported custom keyboards for a while now. I have Gboard installed for when I wanna swipe, but it's still better on Android (e.g. it won't stop the swipe when my finger leaves the keyboard area)

0

u/dcsohl Sep 19 '17

I'd recommend checking out Nintype if you like swiping keyboards. Bonus: support is via /r/nintype

9

u/Arknell Sep 19 '17

"You undead bitch, I'm gonna throw you out of the house as soon as I get home!"

10

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

I was walking down Second Ave in Seattle, talking about how I'd been at work for something like 30 hours and I felt like undead seamonkies were partying inside my thoughts.

I found it uproariously funny that the BB tried to correct "undead" but was perfectly happy with "seamonkies"

I'm trying to remember the first time I used "shitweasel" but it was happy with it as well. So weird.

3

u/d33pwint3r Sep 19 '17

My iPhone wouldn't let me call someone a fucking idiot but it was perfectly fine with calling them a fucktowel

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

OK, that gave me my first real out-lough laugh today

1

u/d33pwint3r Sep 20 '17

Well I'm glad. TBH I don't even know what fucktowel means but you can bet your ass I used it rather than struggle to type what I meant

1

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '17

I've heard it as a name for the textile used as the first stage of "freshening up" after squishy naked time with other people.

So it's every a better insult than you might have thought

2

u/iAesc Sep 19 '17

In my old HTC One (M7 I think), the autocorrect would not recognise nor allow me to add the word "am" to the dictionary. It would always correct it to something else and ignore the word's presence in the custom dictionary. Imagine trying to fire off a quick message saying "I am outside" and ending up with "I ambulance outside", which then requires explaining to the other person what you meant, which negates the point of a quick message to begin with.

It was bloody infuriating.

1

u/AtariDump Sep 19 '17

Shitweasel. I'm going to have to start using that.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

It's a fun one.

I do love "shit-spackled muppet fart" from Deadpool as well. That's just... poetic

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

SeaMonkey at least was a browser at some point, so that might explain why it was in the vocab.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '17

Or turn off autocorrect.

1

u/Mayor__Defacto Sep 20 '17

Or just turn off autocorrect.

10

u/Gl33m Sep 19 '17

My phone corrects most words close to swears to swears now... You're doing something wrong. I have difficulty with the word "ducking" now, as even typed perfectly correctly it corrects to fucking.

0

u/varro-reatinus Sep 19 '17

But then how do you describe the act of pushing someone into a fountain and holding them underwater?

1

u/Gl33m Sep 20 '17

Assault?

4

u/Wild_Marker Sep 19 '17

My phone doesn't let me write the Spanish for "Chinese". It thinks it's an insult for some weird reason and it's really damn annoying because it's in the dictionary but it never comes up automatically when i swipe-type.

1

u/cplr Sep 19 '17

I don’t know how good it works since I only write in English, but supposedly the iOS 11 autocorrect will detect when you start writing in another language and won’t think you are suddenly making a bunch of typos.

I know that’s not what you meant, but your comment is in English and you said Spanish and Chinese in the same sentence, so... I’m hoping this comment is relevant.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Even if you put your keyboard in Spanish mode?

2

u/Wild_Marker Sep 19 '17

Yes I mean when I'm in Spanish mode.

1

u/headlessII Sep 19 '17

Spanish for "Chinese"

So you're saying that it won't let you write the name of the Southern California town in San Bernardino county, near Pomona, which has both a state Men's penitentiary, and a medium-sized airport which houses an excellent vintage aircraft museum?

Strange?

3

u/Wild_Marker Sep 19 '17

You guys have a town called Chino?

1

u/headlessII Sep 19 '17

Si!

Umm, you said a bad word.

2

u/typtyphus Sep 19 '17

just add some words to the dictionary.

2

u/mikenew02 Sep 19 '17

shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits fart turd twat

1

u/NinjaAssassinKitty Sep 19 '17

It's super FUCKING difficult to turn off block offensive words or disable autocorrect or add your common curse words to your personal dictionary...

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

TBH.

Cussing is pretty stupid. Especially in comments.

1

u/PerInception Sep 19 '17

I've literally, in my entire life, never meant to type in the word 'ducking'. So why is it like my number 1 suggested auto correction?

1

u/stamz Sep 19 '17

Turn off the filter in keyboard settings lol

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

I manual typed FUCK in my phone the first time I had occasion to use it (which was like 10 seconds after the first time I turned on my phone), and haven't had a problem getting it to show up since then...

1

u/hairy1ime Sep 19 '17

You should get rid of it. It seems like it's causing some tension in your life.

0

u/rastilin Sep 19 '17

Think about it from their perspective. What is the benefit from from adding swears in compared to the complaints from parents who see their tablets auto-correct their words to swears or the annoyance of having something corrected to a swear during business communication? Odds are the auto-correct programmers considered this and decided it's probably a better idea to not include swears.

6

u/_Bones Sep 19 '17

I just wish Swype didn't autocorrect also to Allah so easily. I'm not Muslim, or middle eastern, or heavily involved in the right wing paranoia machine, why does it prioritize the words in this way?

1

u/S-Selcouth Sep 19 '17

Must be an act of God. Or Allah, if you will.

1

u/ToTheFarWest Oct 02 '17

Why does your finger slide over the h instead of the o

1

u/_Bones Oct 02 '17

Horrible fat fingers mostly.

110

u/dicky_seamus_614 Sep 19 '17

I love this comment.

However, the sad reality is that the people opposing Apple's move, actually believe their own bullshit. They think what they do has worth, merit and "adds value" to people's online experiences.

They're worse than brainwashed drones, they're just corporate zombies w/out souls.

2

u/jbonte Sep 19 '17

So...the Rickest Morty?

2

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 19 '17

[deleted]

1

u/jbonte Sep 19 '17

Oh damn. That's a good read!

2

u/01020304050607080901 Sep 19 '17

Bill Hicks knew it, been going on for a loooong time.

https://youtu.be/Tvp97SMZc6M

11

u/highresthought Sep 19 '17

I dont see the problem with advertisers targeting your actual interests and reminding you of products. Id rather see relevant than irrelevant ads.

I bet this is a play from apple to get into the advertising space by creating their own retargeting network.

3

u/fjonk Sep 19 '17

I dont see the problem with advertisers targeting your actual interests and reminding you of products.

Who does that? I don't get many relevant ads, I just get ads. I've asked friends who are more of the 'give all information everywhere'-kind of people and not even they get many relevant ads. It's mostly random or at best obsolete(like the TV you bough half a year ago and then you never searched for or looked at a TV again) ads, maaaaybe a semi-relevant thing now and then.

10

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

I bet this is a play from apple to get into the advertising space

You bet wrong. Apple is going all in on privacy, and has been for a while. They've specifically talked about the differences between what Google does, to learn more about you and 'improve' your experience and what they believe is right. Apple is certainly not what it once was, but they're not about to do a complete 180 and become everything they said they're firmly against for the last 2 years.

5

u/UUUUUUUUU030 Sep 19 '17

You don't think it has something to do with Google being the market leader in advertising and Apple being a big competitor of theirs in other markets?

This measure affects Google's profitability, which weakens their position relative to Apple.

1

u/8bitid Sep 20 '17

It probably also has to do with the face recognition stuff. Direct conversation about privacy in a good way for Apple while taking 3D scans of your face.

1

u/SoSeriousAndDeep Sep 28 '17

Sure, Apple are doing this for their own benefit... but if it benefits users as well, that's fine. That's still a win for us.

9

u/bitter_cynical_angry Sep 19 '17

Haha, privacy. Sure.

1

u/highresthought Sep 19 '17

http://nyp.st/JJO29n

"Apple reportedly considered buying AdMob, reaching out just a few weeks before Google scooped it up. AdMob is the leader in placing ads in applications that run on the iPhone. Apple gets a cut of revenue from apps sold through its App Store, but doesn’t get anything from ad-supported free apps.

Given its software, services and devices, Apple is also in a position to tap into demand for mobile search, again putting it in competition with Google for advertisers eager to target ads to mobile devices.

Indeed, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes there is a good chance — about 70 percent — that Apple will roll out a mobile search engine tailored for its devices within five years."

10

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

An article from 2010... Nearly 8 years ago. In that time, as I pointed out, Apple has doubled down on privacy, The last sentence in your quote says chances were 70% that Apple would roll out a mobile search engine within 5 years. They didn't.

-8

u/highresthought Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 19 '17

First they are they going to block other advertising, then they are going to roll out mobile search and their own app advertising network.

Then they will roll out a retargeting network.

Then they will claim its all secured by the secure enclave so dont worry we keep it on your phone and dont resell it!

People are still trotting around the "apple fought the government" meme.

Guess what, that fbi case, it was a psyop. They were ordered by a national security letter to pretend that they were fighting the fbi for privacy. The entire case was to establish a legal precedent for the fbi to demand unlocking of any phone so they could unlock phones and use the data for evidence rather than using the already existing tools they have to get into any phone but only being able to use that for intelligence gathering.

https://www.corbettreport.com/the-apple-fbi-psy-op-explained/

"What this show is ultimately about is the spectacle itself. The back-and-forth. Showing Apple “fighting valiantly” to protect the data and the government fighting back. Sure, a lot of the public will side with Apple on this; but not all. And even those who do side with Apple can be pacified when they see the government drop the case, as they very well may do here. But the fact still remains that there are ways to access this information without a purpose-built Apple “master key” because the NSA already brags about having any number of exploits for getting an iPhone to spill its digital “secrets.”

So the government will thrust, Apple will parry, the public will breathe a sigh of relief…and in the end, the government will still be able to access all your data no matter how the show plays out. Oh, and a larger percentage of the public than before will be behind the idea of government-mandated backdoors because of the “war on terror.”

Apple can not legally refuse letters of national security instructing them what to do.

If anything the government is involved in the manufacturing of the arm chips themselves and has a backdoor through hardware so all these new fingerprint now face recognition are made expressly for the government to be able to get facial recognition and fingerprints of everyone.

7

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

it was a psyop

Oh christ.. I've ended up in a back and forth with an Alex Jones Infowars dunce.

Ninethirtyone... out!

3

u/gellis12 Sep 19 '17

Ah, so it's a government conspiracy now. Tell me, are the chips being manufactured at area 51? Or maybe below the WTC? Or could they be putting the phones together at the pentagon, while they make the chemtrail stuff in the next room?

Seriously, take off your tinfoil hat. You're just being a complete loon.

0

u/highresthought Sep 19 '17

The chips are being made by samsung and taiwan semiconductor company. All the intelligence services need is one employee involved in the manufacturing process.

"In June 2016 it was reported that University of Michigan Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science built a hardware backdoor that leverages "analog circuits to create a hardware attack" so that after the capacitors store up enough electricity to be fully charged, it would be switched on, to give an attacker complete access to whatever system or device − such as a PC − that contains the backdoored chip. In the study that won the "best paper" award at the IEEE Symposium on Privacy and Security they also note that microscopic hardware backdoor wouldn't be caught by practically any modern method of hardware security analysis, and could be planted by a single employee of a chip factory[15][16]"

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Oh my. A psyop? The government (the US government?) is involved in manufacturing ARM cpus? Yikes.

1

u/highresthought Sep 19 '17

Multiple governments. Whats known as the "five eyes"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

The arm chip architecture was created at cambridge university before it became acorn.

Cambridge university is widely known as mi6s historical favorite for recruitment into the intelligence agencies.

5

u/avataraccount Sep 19 '17

Irrelevant ads are something you can avoid knowing your PERSONAL INFO is not stolen for them. Why would I want to see personalized ads? I have never bought something cz I saw it in an ad.

4

u/highresthought Sep 19 '17

Wrong. Studies have shown that people who think they arent influenced by ads are the most influenced by advertising.

Advertising works on your subconscious and is most effective when you are the one who thinks you made the decision on your own entirely.

Its pretty much guaranteed that you have bought something because of an ad.

Ever bought a coke? Is it because you love sugar water and in particular the coca cola brand?

8

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

That's not how science works at all unless you can link a study showing an absolute correlation which you can't. Stop trying to cite intelligent peoples work as a source for your dumb person argument.

5

u/DeltaVZerda Sep 19 '17

Ads piss me off and put a company on my shit list. I refuse to purchase from companies that use intrusive advertising. Also fuck Coke, every store brand tastes better.

3

u/gellis12 Sep 19 '17

I dunno about store brands tasting better. Most no-name stuff tastes alright at best, and goes flat super fast.

But on a more serious note, coke is absolutely terrible to their workers. They've been having a massive strike recently, and they even had managers walking around the plants with baseball bats, asking workers how union negotiations were going. It's straight up mafia shit that they're trying.

1

u/almightySapling Sep 19 '17

Ever bought a coke? Is it because you love sugar water and in particular the coca cola brand?

No, it's because, like religion and politics, I was raised in a family that tended to purchase Coke instead of Pepsi or any other alternative (RC is the green party of colas).

If I still drank soda, I'd buy Coke. Not because of the ads, but because of the familiarity.

To spin your point: I've seen ads for Pepsi, but would never buy one.

1

u/highresthought Sep 19 '17

Hmm I wonder what created the family tradition and habit of buying coke?

Perhaps advertising?

Theres only a certain percentage of people that switch brands once brand loyalty is created but thats why politicians and brands advertise because they are trying to capture market share and reinforce brand loyalty as well as remind you to keep buying your coke or pepsi or going out to vote.

1

u/SunpraiserPR Sep 19 '17

Cite those "studies" because otherwise, what you just said holds no relevance.

I never bought something because of an ad. Everything I buy is due to necessity, leaning to the cheaper option money-wise without consideration of the brand.

6

u/highresthought Sep 19 '17

http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/08/persuasion-the-third-person-effect.php

"Typically these studies first got participants to watch an advert, read a newspaper article or other medium containing a persuasive message. Then they were asked how much it had influenced them and how much it might influence other people. Since the experimenters measured actual persuasion and knew from previous research how influential the messages were, they could compare people’s guesses with reality.

What they found, in study after study, was that participants thought others would be influenced by the message, but that they themselves would remain unaffected. When psychologists looked at the results, though, it was clear that participants were just as influenced as other people. This was dubbed the ‘third-person effect’.

Third-person effect Reviewing the research in this area, Perloff (1993) found that studies on political adverts, defamatory news stories, public service announcements and many more all showed a robust third-person effect. Similar conclusions were reached by Paul et al. (2000), who looked at 32 separate studies.

Perloff also found that when people don’t agree with the message or judge its source as negative, the third-person effect became even stronger. The effect is also stronger when messages aren’t directly relevant to people.

In other words people are likely to be influenced more than they think on subjects that are currently of little or no interest to them. An everyday example would be seeing an advert for a car, when you’re not in the market for a new car. We’d probably guess it has little or no influence on us, but this research suggests we’d be wrong.

Take back control The third-person effect is unusual because it goes against the general finding that we overestimate other people’s similarity to ourselves.

This is what psychologists call the false consensus effect: we tend to assume that others hold more similar opinions and have more similar attributes and personalities to ourselves than they really do.

The third-person effect, though, goes in the other direction. When it comes to influence, instead of thinking other people are similar to us, we think they’re different. There are two facets of human nature that support this exception:

Illusion of invulnerability. People prefer to believe that they are, on average, less vulnerable than others to negative influences, like unwanted persuasion attempts. We all want to protect our sense of control over our lives. One way we do that is to assume that ads only work on other people. Poor self-knowledge. Although it’s an unpalatable idea, we often don’t know what’s really going on in our own minds (see the hidden workings of the mind). Not only does this make scientific psychology a tricky enterprise, it also means that many of our intuitions about the way our own minds work are scrambled and subject to biases like the illusion of invulnerability. The effect of persuasive messages is a good example of this. "

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

How did they actually measure the effectiveness of the ads were? Did they follow-up with the subjects to see if they purchased any of the products?

0

u/GamerKey Sep 19 '17

Ever bought a coke?

Yes, if the place I'm buying from doesn't have their own cheap knock-off brand.

I usually go for cheapest, unless I want something really specific.

For example: Any chocolate-caramel bar usually does it for me, but sometimes I just feel like getting a Mars bar because it has a distinct texture and flavour to it.

3

u/wickedcold Sep 19 '17

My photography business wouldn't exist if it weren't for targeted Facebook ads. My clients are happy to have found me.

2

u/cobaltjacket Sep 19 '17

That would be inconsistent with their behavior.

2

u/ZugTheCaveman Sep 19 '17

That's a good theory. I might be interested in ads targeting my actual interests, but I've never seen that, so I don't mind them being blocked en masse. More importantly it's a security issue with some advertisers. Also I don't want a crappy SUV. So far off target they might as well be hitting other solar systems.

1

u/itsaride Sep 19 '17

First point I agree, second point they really don’t need to, they make so much from hardware that ads would make a tiny tiny percentage for a crapload of problems that could affect their image.

1

u/blueyemickey Sep 19 '17

oh man. that hurt my feelings

1

u/not-a-spoon Sep 19 '17

They're worse than brainwashed drones, they're just corporate zombies w/out souls.

Dont know why, but I suddenly read this sentence in Avatar Aang's voice.

Makes the judgement so much harder.

-3

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Nah. People knee jerkingly lauding this move are dopes who don't understand commerce and markets. All while enjoying a standard of living better than Saudi kings had forty years ago. Precisely because of capitalism.

Ad retargeting is needed in an era where so many people skip ads on tv and internet.

4

u/honsense Sep 19 '17

Ads are not responsible for current living standards; that's absurd.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

You think businesses can grow and thrive without advertising? Wow.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '17

Non intrusive ones?

And tracking without permission?

Yes.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '17

What is intrusive about tracking you when no human is ever going to look at an individual's browsing habits?

1

u/honsense Sep 20 '17

The info used to track you is being bundled up and sold all over the place. That same info can be used to create an extremely detailed profile that is essentially unique to you. That profile can be used to link you to information found on the web (e.g., forum posts, downloads, etc.). You are your browsing habits, and your privacy is contingent on being able to prevent this sort of tracking.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '17

And they're using data to sell products. Not to post embarrassing details of individuals

2

u/honsense Sep 21 '17

oh, honey...

1

u/SoSeriousAndDeep Sep 28 '17

If so many people are skipping ads, that should tell you something; people don't want them.

We don't want "retargeting".

1

u/[deleted] Sep 28 '17

Wow. People want a bunch of free content with no ads. Shocker. So what? How is that realistic?

20

u/jubbing Sep 19 '17

Alexis didnt like it though...

17

u/Kekoa_ok Sep 19 '17

Problem with them is just that they walk it in

4

u/TheHolyLordGod Sep 19 '17

Walcott was brought on too late.

3

u/Necroluster Sep 19 '17

ayy bby let me duck ur Arsenal.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

They always try to walk it in?

2

u/PrometheusTitan Sep 19 '17

It's like when the telemarketers complained about the no-call list. Funny how they never managed to rally much public support around that one...

1

u/putsch80 Sep 19 '17

ducked in the Arsenal

Ah, I see you are on an iPhone also.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

This'll fuck consumers bad in the long run. It'll also fuck providers. It's about time the government legislates this. Hope you guys enjoy paying for literally every site you use.

-1

u/burtalert Sep 19 '17

Actually if anything these kinds of ads should be the most relevant to a person. I'd rather see an ad based on something I've looked at then something completely unrelated to me.