[babypuncher]

Businesses got along just fine before all that intense user tracking was even possible. If your business absolutely needs it to survive, then your business doesn't deserve to survive.

"boo hoo, I can't invade my users privacy anymore! Waaaaah! It's unfair"

[kmeisthax]

A lot of the old machinery for small businesses to find their customers - e.g. news, hobbyist magazines, etc - is no longer around, and so there's nothing for those businesses to return to. The Internet, and specifically advertising companies, killed them off. What's unfair is not that they can't violate privacy, but that Amazon still can.

[babypuncher]

Is Amazon somehow exempt from the App Store's privacy rules?

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

Apple limited data from being transferred between apps. So you can’t measure whether your ad being clicked in one app resulted in a purchase in another app (aka. a “conversion”). That throws a big wrench into ad pricing, because the sellers want to pay-per-conversion. It hurt companies like Snap, Shopify. Since Amazon owns both the search/discovery and checkout in the same app, this doesn’t affect them.

Also, Apple didn’t limit their own advertisers from measuring conversions. So if you click an ad in Apple News and then buy an app from the App Store they will measure and charge the advertiser for that conversion without ever popping up a scary message saying Apple wants to track you. Go figure.

The companies have worked around these issues by doing stuff like statistical modeling to guess the conversion rate, but this has obvious downsides and makes everything harder, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage vs. vertically-integrated players like Apple and Amazon.

[comex]

For one thing, the privacy rules only cover sharing data with third parties. They don’t cover Amazon using its own data for product recommendations.

But also, Amazon doesn’t rely on product recommendations in the first place. When I want to purchase something, I usually go to amazon.com and type in exactly what I’m looking for. No need for Amazon to guess. Amazon does make recommendations, but at least in my case they represent a tiny fraction of purchases.

In that way I’m voluntarily contributing to Amazon’s monopoly. I feel bad about that. But I use Amazon anyway because there are no alternatives that offer even a remotely comparable buyer experience.

[asow92]

By virtue of everything sold on Amazon being in the Amazon app the rule in question is kind of moot. The ATT privacy rules don't matter to them because they've already got everything they need to know about you from your habits in their app.

[_jal]

Amazon has its own enormous scale, it doesn't need Apple's complicity.

[catiopatio]

Weren’t those outlets even less targeted?

[kmeisthax]

The key was that people self-selected into those outlets. If you were selling, say, game controller skins; you'd be making a pretty sure bet buying ads in GameInformer or on Joystiq. The problem with going back to that kind of business model is that these dedicated websites with specific niche audiences are dead or dying because the ad dollars moved elsewhere.

[morkalork]

Shouldn't the ad dollars be moving back in after super targeted advertising got neutered?

[Schiendelman]

It kind of is. Look at magazines like Monocle, and websites like Uncrate, Hiconsumption, and Gearpatrol.

[elzbardico]

Business didn’t have to compete with Amazon in so stringent conditions. People even were able to (gasp!) maintain physical stores, etc etc etc

[asow92]

You say that, but what this rule has done is made it so this kind of tracking is available only to large apps like Amazon. The little guy gets snuffed out before they can even gain traction.