I don't think they'll be taking a stance any time soon, the top grossing apps on iPhone include YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Threads so this is probably worth billions/year in fees that are disproportionately profit too. And that's ignoring the games!
The only chance maybe is if courts and regulators lock in zero-commission or a very small fee that eliminates Apple's incentive to allow and tax this stuff.
Meta are objectively worse than Valve because Valve don't allow ads in games or offer advertising services and they're generally more trustworthy, but that's really only part of the privacy story. Each app/game usually has its own data collection and usage on top and I don't think either of them do much to police or constrain that.
Plus Valve also says they don't sell any data the collect to anyone else.
But the idea that games have data collection outside of the platform (e.g., Steam) is surprising to me. Would this be VR games only or a particular type of game, like ones with online multiplayer? I don't own a VR headset and don't really play multiplayer games these days. Of the games I have played (mostly indie), I've come across very few that have a EULA or anything that would imply any data collection of any sort.
It's nothing to do with VR in particular. This is the top-10 from https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/US, half of them are collecting data to share (and one to sell) to advertisers. The fact that this is surprising you is kind of the point, Valve's not providing enough transparency or doing enough (any?) policing of this. You won't even find the disclosures in the EULAs, at best they link to a separate privacy policy. I suspect lack of EULA isn't necessarily a good indicator of no data being collected either.
The breadth of data being collected includes browsing, installed software, identity and account identifiers, location, device and OS characteristics.
"In the last 12 months, Take-Two has sold and/or shared unique identifiers, IP address, as well as Internet/Electronic Activity and Profile Inferences with third-party advertising providers to enable us to provide personalized advertising to you and others like you. We may sell or share personal information about users that we know are under the age of 18 (or older, in certain locations) with their (or depending on age, their parent's) settings or permission."
"Some advertising we engage in may be “targeted advertising,” which is the practice of showing you more relevant or personalized ads based on your activity over time and across non-affiliated services. Targeted advertising often involves us incorporating third party tracking technologies into our Service or disclosing (often hashed) identifiers, such as email addresses or Ad IDs, with third parties. These third parties then match our data with their own (or their partners’ data) to deliver ads to you or similar audiences. For example, we may incorporate the Meta pixel on our website to serve ads to Meta audiences based on the data we provide.
We also use audience modeling services, where we and a partner each disclose (often hashed) identifiers to a technology provider. The technology provider then matches common factors between our and the partner’s data to help us understand audience overlap and improve campaign performance."
"We disclose this personal information to: Online marketing or advertising partners including on our mobile games These partners may combine this personal information with information that they have collected about you when you use their services (or the websites and services of third parties) to personalize your experience or to improve the accuracy of their analytics, targeting, and measurement systems."
"We also may share information relating to your device and your use of our Services with our third-party advertising partners so they may deliver targeted advertisements to you when you visit third-party services and websites within their networks. This practice is commonly referred to as "interest-based advertising," "online behavioral advertising," or "targeted advertising
Thanks for breaking that down. I actually did think on Steam that if there was anything like this Steam would mark it as having a EULA. I don't tend to play games from big companies like that, but the use and sale of your info when you don't even agree to or even know about it is disturbing. All this stuff should be marked up front before you even purchase or interact with the game.
> Because if an AI takes over the systems at a factory, it can't really do much beyond what the factory could already do.
That can be enough, eg stuxnet. And like stuxnet they don't need to connect directly to the machinery themselves for a payload to breach them they just need someone to deliver the payload for them. And the machinery might be decades old, the software might still be Windows 95.
I think section 230 immunity shielding from from any liability is also very motivating. Google was born into a world where companies had 10,000s of support personnel, today there are companies with over a million employees, they could easily human-review every single ad and they probably would if they weren't able to divert that cost into profits without consequence. AI makes it even easier and cheaper but... why bother?
Then there's the profits from scams, Meta is the only one with the stones to admit they like scam ads because they make up 10% of their revenue. I doubt it's a massive coincidence all the other big platforms are overrun with scams they do as little as possible to police.
Does section 230 shield them from ads they select for display? Ads are not randomly hosted by random people and if you visit a random page those people uploaded, you see them. Google selects the ads they want to show you on search results, before youtube videos, or on third party websites. There's no "we don't know what that might be" going on at all -- they are running sophisticated algorithms to optimize the impact of those ads. Is that still be covered under section 230?
Yes, they would be, because you are still logged into your Apple account. You wouldn't use iPhone Handoff for border crossing unless you wanted to leave one phone at home and transfer your number to the iPhone you are taking with you when you leave the country. Still, the phones would have identical data on them unless you turned off syncing for certain apps, such as iMessage (messages).
The rumours say 10 million iPhone Duo are being made, there are hundreds of millions of iPads so the numbers might not sway any opinions for a while.
I think they need to aggressively court developers, just give a buttload of advertising credit to nice apps that predate AI slop if they add compatibility, what does it cost Apple to "give" you $10k or $20k credit in their own ad system...
But the rumours also say they are going to squeeze the App Store for higher margins so maybe it is too late.
Because what makes it useful , like media queries, can't be put in style attributes. Frankly this whole discussion is just as silly as claiming flex has nothing over table layout.
Then again one should aim to not even need media queries and make things responsive intrinsically, breakpoint-free, continuously. A design where things jump at hard coded viewport widths is not actually a great design.
>inb4 my 1:1 naive mapping of DB to screen works for me
>inb4 the web should be reserved for text documents and hyperlinks and user styles rule and running anything close to applications on the web was a mistake
I don’t think it’ll work because Plex gates everything with a sign in to their online accounts, so auth would have to go through them and there might be server-to-Plex verification going on too.
That said, I’m very interested in this space - I’ve been building a music server that provides compatible APIs for Synology and QNAP mobile apps, with a few more on my todo list. I’d love to include Plexamp so if it is possible please let me know!
I would be interested to hear from anyone who set it and can still access Plex over their LAN in a network outage. I have set this multiple times according to docs, and it worked only once ever, thereafter apparently resetting to online login. Of course, they do not make this an easy setting to change!
Mixed feelings about this, the thing about AI slop is there's an option B where you just throw it out because you're not committed to what it had produced and not having it is even better than spending big to have it be good.
I took on a contract recently to fix up an AI-generated SaaS, I was low-key impressed with the consistency and general quality and structure, but what was missing... uploading files, platform registrations and payouts, payments, booking management, notifications, administrative tools, refunds, proof-of-service and dispute resolution, they wanted a small-scale AirBnb-like service and AI had built them a UI showing mock listings and a skeleton API. Whole project ended up in the trash when they realized how much work was left.
The only chance maybe is if courts and regulators lock in zero-commission or a very small fee that eliminates Apple's incentive to allow and tax this stuff.
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