The "enemy" of the whole Internet is also willing: Apple's privacy war | Overseas Weekly Selection

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Tim Cook always gives people the impression of being soft spoken and even a little boring. His Twitter The content is always about Apple The company's platitudes. But when it comes to user privacy - "one of the most important topics of this century", Cook, who is known for his gentleness, immediately enters a state of battle.

In January this year, the CEO of Apple angrily denounced "data brokers, fake news providers... fragmented trackers and vendors... mercenaries who only want to make quick money". Cook said that if "everything in our life can be aggregated and sold, then we will lose not only data, but also the freedom of being human".

These are just words full of gunpowder. Just last week at the Apple Developers Conference (WWDC 2021), Apple officially launched a policy to support these provocative words. In the latest update of Apple's operating system, the technology giant with a market value of 2.2 trillion dollars is determined to punish application developers for collecting data from Apple's 1 billion users to create personalized advertisements.

At present, iPhone users around the world will now see a prompt popping up in the app asking whether they agree to be "tracked". After users click "Ask applications not to track", application developers cannot see their IDFA. IDFA, also called advertiser identifier, is a series of numbers associated with each iPhone; When users access different applications, IDFA will generate user profiles.

In fact, the new function does not give consumers new power that they did not have before; Instead, an inconspicuous function originally hidden in the depths of the phone settings was placed in the center of the table. But this little trick from behavioral psychology - choosing to allow tracking rather than opt out - may have a profound impact on the future of Internet privacy and most technology companies around the world.

When Cook released the signal of this new measure for the first time in June 2020, people immediately thought that it would have a huge impact on the digital advertising industry with an annual output value of nearly 400 billion dollars. $400 billion, more than Apple's annual revenue. However, the master of this industry is Facebook and Google 。 At that time, some people called Cook's signal "IDFA apocalypse".

Charles Manning, CEO of Kochava, an American advertising technology company, compared Apple's policy adjustment to "throwing bombs into the lake to see how many fish can be blown up".

Bumble, an American dating application, once expected that only 0-20% of platform users would choose to share their IDFA. When Bumble said that, it actually said the voice of most applications. Bumble reminded investors that "the ability of advertisers to accurately launch advertisements and evaluate advertising activities at the user level will be greatly limited".

In many people's eyes, Apple's various privacy behaviors are like a battle with Facebook. Facebook， Undoubtedly, it is a typical representative of the kind of "free" applications that profit from advertising. It can be said that a more accurate description should be Apple's battle with everyone - because every company involved in advertising will have to learn new rules.

The voices of opposition have been rising one after another. Germany's largest media, technology companies and advertising companies have filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing it of abusing its power. A month ago, a lobbying group consisting of 2000 French startup companies also filed a lawsuit, accusing Apple of being a "privacy hypocrite".

　　 Snap Snap, the parent company of chat, is exploring ways to quietly identify users based on device and network information. Similarly, advertising technology companies such as Adjust and AppsFlyer have begun to sell their countermeasures to customers, claiming that their "probability matching" technology can achieve an accuracy rate of more than 90% when identifying users who refuse to be tracked.

　　 Privacy has isolated Apple from other companies, but enabled it to gain consumer support

Apple seems to be caught off guard by such strong opposition. The company had to clarify its frequently asked questions and answers to developers many times; Send an immediate stop letter to the company trying to use the alternative identifier CAID of IDFA; It also rejected several applications that bypass the IDFA system. At the beginning of this month, Cook said in his podcast that he was "shocked by such a degree of resistance".

If Apple has become relatively isolated in its overall policy adjustment, at least it has one major supporter: consumers.

Apple speculates that millions of iPhone users have no idea that they have been closely watched by others. Even experts cannot say that they fully understand how and where these data are used.

Apple's best demonstration of Cook's "digital industrial complex" is an Apple speech entitled "One day in data life: father daughter garden day".

This is a fable about how "John" and "Emma" spent a happy day in the playground, but did not realize that their every move was under monitoring. John's weather, news and location tracker in the map app on his mobile phone record his location on his way to the playground. When the father and daughter took a lovely photo with digital rabbit ears, the photo filter application accessed the metadata of all the photos taken by John.

Then John went to buy ice cream and entered a toy store. His credit card purchase record quietly matched his location data and his preference for sweets, adding new details to John's digital portrait. Then, when Emma was playing the game on her father's tablet, an ad for a scooter from the instant auction appeared on the screen, and the auction was based on John's recent webpage behavior portrait.

Therefore, for consumers, the prohibition of tracking without consent is commendable. Zack Edwards, a science and technology analyst, said: "Any enterprise that gets rich by relying on weak privacy standards will either evolve or die, and the market will not miss the exploitative products they created that randomly intrude into mobile games and applications."

In response to Apple's new privacy policy, critics said that Apple is deploying alarming statements about "tracking", and Apple has not been able to tell users why they may need relevant advertising. Stephen Cavey, co-founder of Ground Labs, which helps enterprises understand data, said: "What people don't know is that the other option is that you will see a bunch of advertisements about a brand, and you may not care about the product you never need."

Others argue that tracking is not as intrusive as Apple said, because advertisers need personas rather than specific individuals. Amy Fox, product director of Blis, said: "It can be said that the advertising industry never really cared about individuals; they bought media on a large scale, and individuals are just statistics - they are only interested in statistics."

But Apple doesn't think so. Apple retorted that although data such as location information "often claims to be anonymous", there are "hidden third-party data brokers" throughout the industry who can match these data with other information to identify the person.

For example, on January 6, after former President Donald Trump made a speech in the National Plaza, his supporters rushed into the United States Capitol. These data intermediaries can piece together the data to find the people who rushed into the Capitol. According to the records shown in the FBI search warrant found on Google, the mobile phone was traced to a specific house hundreds of miles away.

What Apple has not mentioned in its marketing materials is how far-reaching its own interests are in this new paradigm with privacy at its core.

At present, the iPhone manufacturer said: "84% of applications are free, and developers do not need to pay Apple any fees." However, if Apple's privacy adjustment makes third-party data more and more difficult to access, developers may need to change their strategies to pay consumers for in use purchases and subscriptions - for this model, Apple usually charges 15% to 30% commission.

Leslie Hanna, partner of Hausfeld, an American law firm, said: "I don't think Apple is doing this for the benefit of others, and definitely not. Of course, they can get charming public relations expressions from privacy activists by doing this, but this is not enough to explain the logic behind Apple's behavior in the end."

Apple is already expanding its fledgling advertising business. Any iPhone user can turn off these "personalized" ads, but they are turned on by default - an operation that many critics consider hypocritical.

Apple's defense is that the company only customizes ads based on its own user data. These user data include "the music, movies, books, TV dramas and applications you downloaded, as well as any in app purchases and subscriptions... the reports you read, the publications you follow, subscribe to and allow news push, etc.".

In the eyes of critics, this is very like tracking, but Apple said that these data will be "piecemeal" aggregation, and will not share personal identity information with "third parties.".

Matt Warda, consumer privacy advocate and CEO of OptiMine, a marketing analysis platform, said that it was difficult to know whether Apple's behavior was hypocritical, but in general, he believed that Apple's behavior was a "revolutionary" move that would force the digital advertising market to become more and more transparent.

　　 The new privacy policy may be invalid for large enterprises, and the "content fortress" may break through Apple's blockade

The subsequent impact of Apple's privacy policy adjustment may take years to understand. But Apple's privacy policy may strengthen the position of some large enterprises.

In this regard, Jane Hawash, Apple's privacy director, once argued that one of the problems in the current state is that "the accumulation of large amounts of data is mainly beneficial to large enterprises with large data sets".

Among them, Google has a large amount of data about its users, so Google does not care about Apple's privacy protection.

The reason is simple: losing access to third-party data will certainly damage interests, but if all competitors also lose access to third-party data, then the company with the most third-party data is the winner. The winner is Google.

Apple's privacy policy will prevent developers from tracking users' activities in third-party applications; However, it will not prevent companies with multiple applications from organizing users' activities in these applications. Therefore, Google can continue to build user portraits based on the way consumers use search engines, maps, Chrome browsers, Gmail, YouTube and other applications. This will also become a major advantage for Google.

Facebook is also aware of this. This week, when someone asked Shirley Sandberg whether the adjustment of iOS would change from "short-term obstacles to potential advantages", the chief operating officer replied, "Your judgment is completely correct." She explained that Apple's policies are indeed not conducive to Facebook, but compared with competitors, Facebook is "relatively in a more favorable position". In March, CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said that many companies might choose to "launch more business activities" directly on the Facebook platform.

The belief that "the bigger the better" has promoted the integration of the market. According to the details contained in the latest annual document of California game developer Glu Mobile, in July 2020, Glu Mobile realized that it needed to purchase or be acquired on a large scale to "use the scale of merger to solve the business model challenges brought by the upcoming Apple iOS update". A few months later, the United States Electronic Arts Acquired Glu Mobile for $2.1 billion.

Christian Selcha Hansen, CEO of Formation, a personalized marketing software company, said that "the number of game mergers and acquisitions has soared" because the company gradually realized that advertising to multiple game combinations can bring "more powerful advantages than a single game application".

Eric Soyfert, a mobile advertising expert, explained that the best strategy to deal with Apple's new policy would be to cut off dependence on external advertising platforms and create a "content fortress" - the first party data set supported by proprietary advertising technology infrastructure. Leading game companies Zynga And Applovin have adopted such a strategy.

　　 Is Apple's privacy war a "revolution" or a "show"?

Another risk for Apple will be that the company may have dug a law enforcement pit for itself, an endless cat and mouse game, and developers will repeatedly try to bypass Apple's rules.

In recent weeks, internal materials disclosed by an unrelated and ongoing lawsuit mentioned Apple's method of sometimes not strictly maintaining the security of the App Store.

For example, when one of Apple's top fraud detection engineers talked about the review process of the app store, he said that it was "more like a beautiful girl holding a local traditional wreath to welcome you at the Hawaiian airport, rather than a serious anti drug dog".

Apple has disabled a large number of applications that try to bypass IDFA, but the violation code of these applications is clearly written in the "Software Development Kit", and Apple can also see it. Other documents released by the lawsuit show that Apple has encountered difficulties in detecting the "Jekyll" application in the past. It is reported that "Jekyll" applications refer to malicious applications that can change the behavior of applications by changing the server level after passing the application audit.

Tiki is a company that helps users control their own data. Mike Audi, the founder of the company, said: "They only know what is running on your mobile phone; but they don't know what is running on the cloud. However, most of the things that happen today are in the cloud. All data is sent to the cloud, algorithms are also running on the cloud, and IDs are built and shared on the cloud. Except for the companies that develop and run these activities, no one knows what's going on inside. "

If developers can use these technologies to "fingerprint" a device in violation of Apple's policies and continue to maintain the original advertising game, Apple's extensive privacy action will lose its revolutionary nature and become a marketing campaign. In this case, iPhone users will not get more privacy protection. What they see is just a fake.

Even if Apple wins, it may have unpredictable consequences. Almost everyone knows Apple's struggle to redefine the way digital advertising works, so that some observers worry that this is just a power show that Apple is playing when facing antitrust censorship in Washington and Brussels.

Mike Fang, CEO of Privoro, a smart phone security hardware manufacturer, said: "If Apple succeeds, it actually shows that Apple has extraordinary influence on their ecosystem. When these influences are related to antitrust, they are very detrimental to Apple. We have the world's largest companies - Google, Facebook, etc., as well as the world's largest government. And Apple, this time, is really against everyone, and it won. "