Mobile Safari's privacy settings give web marketers headaches

Online advertising is atrocious these days. Especially the part about the hidden malware that activates on its own. 90% of online ads look extremely sketchy, and Flash ads have to be the worst, because not only do they clutter your web browsing experience, they do it at the expense of your computer's CPU (and battery life, if you have a laptop). I'm really glad Apple disables 3rd-party cookies by default across Safari and MobileSafari. Until online advertisers realize that their ads suck, I won't be clicking on any of them (much less buying the advertised product). I've only clicked on ads that looked good, and 100% of the time, those ads took me to beautiful websites with really good products (meaning, they didn't advertise it for the hell of it, they advertised it because it was good).

@signup: I turn off 3rd party cookies. I also run Firefox with the Adblock Plus and the Element Hiding Helper add-ons, so I don't see any of those ads (targeted or not) that you are defending.

I'm not so sure I care about this. I don't go online to look at ads, and a rarely click on them. I shop online a lot, but it's mostly a case of my going to look for something very specific, instead of being lured in by ads. I use an ad blocker extension in Safari anyway.

If ad companies are worried, maybe they shoudl rethink the way they do business. That's called innovation.

"I'm sure Apple will get right on that problem. We know that they don't care about consumer privacy one bit."

I guess that's why they set the default to not sharing the info. Duh.

Online advertisers are the scum of the earth! You want to know how much malware I remove from *gasp* Windows computers that were hit by a browser drive-by? That means the stupid advertisement had the malware embedded in it and it infected the user with some phony Anti-Virus program or Hard Drive diagnostic or some other hacker scheme to generate ad clicks on his own domains, etc. The users don't have to click the ad to get infected! And don't think it can't happen on a Mac! I had one in Safari popup a My Computer window and download an EXE over and over again. Of course, it won't run on a Mac, but the attack managed to auto-download a file to me and popup windows.

I don't like the way the entire online advertising business works, far too shady for me! The big guys are not the problem, it's when they outsource many levels out and some joker manages to slip some malware into the advertisers feeds! That malware then goes all over the place even on legit sites where it infects god knows how many people.

I don't like the way these tracking cookies work anyway, I applaud Apple for disabling 3rd party cookies by default!

I have not once, since the dawn of the public Internet ever, not ever, clicked an advertisement on a website! I find the whole concept offensive. You want your product noticed? Get the media, twitterverse, and blogosphere to talk about it, put your product on it's own website and give us the kind of detail we want. I'll find it and buy it if I want it! Stop ramming it down my throat by cluttering up my browsing experience. I filter ads by proxy, I block them at the browser, I blackhole the advertising domains in /dev/null.

I found out about something I didn't know about and will certainly buy immediately when it's ready. No advertisement alerted me to that product. It was an ArsTechnica article about Ten's Compliment and their upcoming X-410 storage (ZFS filesystem on a Mac). I immediately followed them on Twitter. That is the new way of things, that is how it's done. I should have been able to search Twitter for ZFS and would have found it.

Web advertising needs to go social and get away from the old way of marketing, course that screws up big sites who rely on ad click revenue.

"This makes it difficult for ad servers, tracking systems, and ad management tools to link visitors to ads that brought them to the Web site."

How can this be a bad thing?

If the concern is tracking referrals from ads, are cookies even necessary? I thought that these things are reported to the server automatically when someone visits a site via a link.

AAPL is investigating on charging 2 cents per cookie planted in his precious iThings and 1 cent per cookie harvested by an ad server.

Ads? Oh, you mean those things I never see because I use Firefox and AdBlock on my desktop?

Now that I think of it, I DO see those on Mobile Safari from time to time. I generally just zoom the screen and push them out of the margins.

People actually use Safari? I've never used it on any of my computers. And only used it temporarily till I found a replacement on the iPhone.