[Link] John Gruber on Doc Sears on Apple

A few days ago, Doc Searls wrote a multi-part post on Apple’s advertisting & adtech surveillance. John Gruber challenges his argument:

For all the criticism Apple has faced from the ad tech industry over this feature, it’s fun to see criticism that Apple isn’t going far enough. But I don’t think Searls’s critique here is fair. Permission to allow tracking is not on by default — what is on by default is permission for the app to ask. Searls makes that clear, I know, but it feels like he’s arguing as though apps can track you by default, and they can’t.

The fact that they both blog in public, regularly, makes it possible to ‘listen’ in on these conversations & learn a thing or ten.

 

 

[Link] Doc Searls on Apple vs Adtech

Doc Searls isn’t convinced that Apple is fully serious about privacy:

If Apple was fully serious, your iPhone would be set to not allow tracking in the first place. All those trackers would come pre-vaporized. And Apple never would have given every iPhone an IDFA—ID For Advertisers—in the first place…

Defaulting the master Tracking setting to ON means Felix has to tap “Ask App Not To Track” for every single one of those hangers-on. Meaning that one click won’t vaporize all those apps at once. Just one at a time. This too is misleading as well as unserious.