Privacy
Opt in Privacy
I dont like how these companies can just create so many settings to disable snooping your data or your privacy.
Its like in order to be healthy, you need to be dieting or take a more conscious approach towards making sure that the food you get at the supermarket isn't filled with SUGAR, High fructose, carbs or whatever is the ingredient in the big 25+ list of the label.
You need to disable other things & even if you forget 1 out of 25 things, you're privacy and security is still compromised.
Having more devices is actually a downgrade in terms of your time and keeping uptime with all these menial tasks.
We need a core framework of human privacy choices "adChoices" which gets translated well to all the platforms irrespective of ur hardware, software and political choices.
No I don't need to explicitly set Only Necessary Cookies for 47th time on web browser of android, iOS, iPadOS, xrOS or Windows / macOS. I'm just tired that these companies can get around their way out of providing better regulations.
The irony is, I work in ad monetization industry making these standards, designing, interfacing, codifying all these things but very things are under an engineer's or architect's hand. When the business with lawyers have given the green signal, its our job to do vanilla implementation rather than question their core beliefs or make sure it isn't aligning with privacy-first practices. We do try to influence on how the data gets collected and EU in general has been a safe haven for safeguarding our privacy but we need more activism around this as well as corps juicing / milking us out.
In no way im frustrated with my current work life but im just saying as humans we could easily have better lifestyle physically and mentally. & not just a metric or a "user" at the end of the day.
Apple
App tracking transparency is still a good endeavor and it has appropriate sandboxing implemented from OS X days foundational to iOS.
Granulated Copy / Paste permissions, Location services for 1 hour, allow once, background, app tracking default on / off, location tracking, backgrounding apps different entitlements, 10 mins bare minimum, App transparency report, Safari default better than Chrome or average browser privacy, app fingerprinting, Ads with anonymous UUID to tackle tracking, local compute not always though, End to End encyption, lockdown mode, anonymous logging with os_log, redacted logging etc.,
I still would prefer out of the box apple experience compared to other OEM vendors like samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, LG, Sony, One Plus etc.,
Apple user privacy
P.S: I don't drink the apple cult koolaid but I have seen good initiatives from User Experience and being on the fore front to minimize making money off its users directly.
Can I gate functionality on agreeing to allow tracking, or incentivize users to agree to allow tracking in the app tracking transparency prompt?
No, per the App Review Guidelines: 5.1.2(i).