[kemayo]

> The Federal Cartel Office claims that Apple's ATTF defines "tracking" in a way that only covers data processing for advertising purposes across companies – but that these "strict ... rules do not cover Apple's own practice of combining user data across its ecosystem – from its App Store, Apple ID and connected devices – and using them for advertising purposes."

...yes. Apple defines "tracking" here as sharing your data with other companies, and then doesn't do that itself. Because that's the opaque and objectionable thing.

If you launch an Apple app then you probably expect Apple to know what you're doing. If you launch a Meta app, similarly you expect Meta to know what you're doing. But you might not expect Meta to immediately go and tell, say, some random company called Cambridge Analytica everything you're doing.

Meta absolutely could do exactly what Apple's doing without needing to warn users -- collect user data across its various apps, and use it to advertise its own products.

I do agree that Apple has carefully chosen a thing to object to that aligns well with their own business model. But I also think the thing they're objecting to is worth disclosing to users, so: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ajross]

The article says that in 2022 Apple started disallowing first party tracking within providers, actually. So in fact Meta can't do that, while Apple still can.

[kemayo]

Yeah, but then it describes what's clearly third-party tracking. It's The Register, you can't rely on them getting technical things right.

> As one programmatic ad news outlet pointed out, Facebook was actually hit the hardest by the 2022 first-party rules because its software development kit (SDK) "plugged into so many outside apps and ... its attribution pixels [were] littered liberally across the web."

The article they link to there about the 2022 rules is from 2021, incidentally, and is just talking about other apps embedding Facebook tracking -- i.e. third-party stuff. There's a lot of talking about how "first-party data is valuable to Facebook", but it's all referring to how Facebook wants to use the data from other people.