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Advertising Groups Complain About Safari Browser Update

From Adweek, the advertising industry is in a tizzy about Safari’s new Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature:

“Apple’s unilateral and heavy-handed approach is bad for consumer choice and bad for the ad-supported online content and services consumers love,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by Adweek this morning. “Blocking cookies in this manner will drive a wedge between brands and their customers, and it will make advertising more generic and less timely and useful. Put simply, machine-driven cookie choices do not represent user choice; they represent browser-manufacturer choice.”

Advertising companies serve ads that are garish, pop up over content, are hard to navigate around, sometimes impossible to dismiss, are security threats, and yes, drop scripts and cookies on our devices surreptitiously to track everything we do on the web. To see them complain about being treated unfairly is incredible.

Advertisers have been abusing all of us for years. Fuck these people.

In case you didn’t know (this is not news):

“Ad tracking technology has become so pervasive that it is possible for ad tracking companies to recreate the majority of a person’s web browsing history,” according to an Apple spokesperson. “This information is collected without permission and is used for ad re-targeting, which is how ads follow people around the Internet.”

When Apple opened iOS 9 to allow content blockers, advertisers bitched pretty loudly then as well. I think any time these companies complain, it means something good is happening.

Categories    Apple    Technology