Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fshbbdssbbgdd 1901 days ago
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.
2 comments
zp33 1901 days ago
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?
link
fshbbdssbbgdd 1901 days ago
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.

link
katbyte 1901 days ago
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

link
fshbbdssbbgdd 1901 days ago
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?
link