[mangosquash]

I work on digital advertising for a franchise where each individual store manages their own shopify site at location.franchise.com. Soon, these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases, unless franchise.com is added to this list.

I understand the PSL managers' position that this is an unfair burden to place on them though.

[donmcronald]

Yeah, I didn’t quite understand it correctly at first. That’s a really good example of a legit use case that’s collateral damage from Apple vs Facebook.

I can think of other issues now too. For example, I think government services should be structured as subdomains instead of each department registering a separate domain. This will encourage the use of separate domains if they need to track effectiveness and that’s bad IMO. We don’t want to normalize stuff like irsonline.com because of the boost it gives phishing.

There’s definitely two sides to this one.

[local_dev]

>these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases

Isn't that part of the purpose of the changes that Apple is making? As a user, this seems like a great change. Less tracking is a positive.

[donmcronald]

Yeah, but if they’re talking about physical location franchises individually owned by local residents (there are a lot), the tracking they want to do probably isn’t nearly as pervasive as Facebook as a whole.

For example, each location might want to track the effectiveness of ads for their locality. Facebook is probably a decent place for them to run ads too.

The big problem is that Facebook has earned a reputation of abusing all the data they collect, so most people are going to say the same thing as you and not have any sympathy, but it probably screws over the poster you’re replying to pretty bad.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

In principle, you can know that an ad click resulted in a purchase without knowing who clicked the ad and who made the purchase. Apple supports these kinds of measurements for its own Apple Search Ads product.

The “entropy limit” you see people talking about elsewhere in the thread is one means that attempts to allow ads to be measured like this without revealing information about the users. But if every store *.shopify.com is in the same entropy pool, there won’t even be enough information to tell which ad campaign led to a sale on which store.

[zp33]

How can you give every subdomain in *.shopify.com their own entropy pool without also giving domains the ability to serve a distinct subdomain for each user (eg, user-1.example.com & user-2.example.com) and therefore bypassing the restrictions Apple is seeking to implement?

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

That’s the debate happening in the GitHub issue. I think a natural answer is with carrots and sticks. Shopify will police their platform if that is what’s necessary to prevent Apple from destroying its business by cutting them all off.

There aren’t that many “build your own store” SaaS platforms, so it is feasible to maintain a whitelist.

It may sound strange at first to propose that Apple should be essentially auditing the behavior of other companies, but they have shown a willingness to pick up that mantle. Apple has already undertaken the huge effort of regulating the business practices of anyone on the App Store with the privacy label and other areas such as payments for digital goods. In this case, they’ve sort of delegated responsibility to a volunteer effort, which is understandable given how the situation evolved, but doesn’t seem sustainable.

[katbyte]

Maybe I’m crazy but I don’t want to be tracked and I don’t want my purchase to be linked to an ad click* - I don’t want to be tracked so stop it?

*I haven’t clicked on an ad in a decade so I’m probably not the target audience

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

If they know somebody clicked the ad and made a purchase, but they can’t know it was you, why are you bothered? Is it about something other than privacy?

[mangosquash]

Apple is doing some cool things to make personally identifiable tracking from Facebook ads much less pervasive, while still providing advertisers/businesses data about whether or not their ads are working. These things include sending batches of data every 36-48 hours instead of data as it happens, etc. But in order for these tools to work, Apple is asking Facebook to rely on this list to see if subdomains would be able to set up conversion events to collect this anonymized batched data.

This system will make ads worse, but I think it's an alright balance. Not being able to have any conversion tracking will make ads dismal.

I wish that Apple would work to maintain their own list that served this purpose, or provided support to the volunteers that were tasked with keeping this updated.

[3np]

I think that's precisely according to intentions. Either they're separate entities with separate domains, or they're run by the same entity and get the same entropy.

> Soon, these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases, unless franchise.com is added to this list.

They still can, though, right? Just that they don't get more bits than if they had everything on one site. It's just that they can't "eat the cake and have it".