It’s undeniably the case that a default is a soft diktat; but I have to wonder about the value of “entire categories of features” if the assessment is that effectively nobody can be bothered to flick the switch to un-break them.
1 Like
Such a switch does not exist. That’s the point. These are features our players value immensely and not only will they break, they can no longer be implemented. They don’t understand the nuances of an anonymous cookie ID on your phone that can be used to locate your progress next time you play. All they understand is they lose thousands of hours of their game when they get a new phone. They get upset at us and we lose them as a customer. Multiply that by a few million customers, and all my friends lose their jobs.
The point people are missing here is that this is just an anonymous device number. Yes, it is used for ad tracking, but it’s used in plenty of benign and player-helpful ways as well. This is killing ants with a nuclear bomb. There are plenty of ways this could have been done that didn’t have so many negative side effects.
It seems, however, that nobody in this thread is interested in nuance or a good faith discussion about a topic that is a lot deeper than people here seem to understand. I get that ad tracking is a sensitive issue and nobody likes it (myself included) but your choice is to learn something about it from someone who knows what they are talking about (me) or keep hurling angry gifs.
I was responding based on the below; which gave me the impression that iOS14’s default behavior was equivalent to iOS13 with the “Limit Ad Tracking” switch ticked on; and could be restored to equivalence with iOS13 if you went in and ticked it back off.
When you say that these features “can no longer be implemented”, rather than just breaking against the defaults, do you mean that there are additional differences in iOS14 behavior that cannot be modified; or that the expected willingness to modify the defaults is sufficiently low that the behavior has to be treated as unavailable for design purposes?
1 Like
Speaking from the point of view of someone who has zero interest in any form of gaming on my phone, tablet, computer, whatever, forgive me for not giving a shit.
There are times when I’ve given up trying to read an article on Flipboard and boingboing because the sheer number of ads flashing up cause the page to continually flicker up and down, rendering the article virtually unreadable. So, while I recognise that advertising keeps such sites going, when the advertising renders the site unusable, then I’ll happily see it burned to the ground. A poor user experience does nobody any good.
1 Like
Well, yes, I want to see no ads, but I also know that content producers have to get paid or they can’t continue to make content and host it. So I’d like to see ads without creepy tracking and without taking over the screen (coughsiteweallknowcough*).
1 Like
The question for me is can any such unique ID actually be truly anonymous when so much data can be aggregated? I can be IDd with as few as 3 location check ins, for example, so it doesn’t take much to deagregate data when it is so personal.
1 Like
If people want it, then you shouldn’t have to worry about them turning the option back on, should you?
That is a broken-ass way to implement progress saving. And I say this as someone who has come up with some pretty broken-ass ways of doing things in my time. Maybe consider migrating your progress tracking process to an actual account, instead of relying on a shady unrelated feature. Sign In with Apple even lets you do it without having to harbor anyone’s real email addresses or worry about password database breaches.
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
