Daily Archives: February 5, 2022

Developers react to Apples 27% commission with astonishment, anger

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Developers reacted with astonishment and anger at Apple’s 27% commission policy as a minimal form of compliance with a new antitrust law regarding the App Store.

One leading developer described the move as ‘vile,’ while another said Apple is deliberately ensuring it would cost developers more to opt-out of Apple’s payment system than it would to remain within it …

 

Background

Dutch regulators, like those in South Korea, ordered that Apple allow developers to opt-out of the App Store payment platform. Apple initially said that it would comply, but didn’t give any details.

The company today announced that it would reduce its commission by only three percent for those who chose to do so, and would also impose onerous administrative overheads – such as applying for permission to use a specific API, maintaining a separate version of the app, and filing reports with Apple.

[…]

Marco Arment highlighted the conditions imposed by Apple:

  • Separate app, only available in Netherlands
  • Cannot also support IAP
  • Must display scary sheets before payment
  • Website links are all to a single URL specified in Info.plist with no parameters
  • Must submit monthly report to Apple listing EVERY external transaction

Adding:

And after you pay your ~3% to your payment processor, Apple’s 27% commission takes you right back up to 30%. Glorious. Come on, THIS is comedy. Amazing, ridiculous comedy. I’d be surprised if a single app ever took them up on this. (And that’s exactly by design.)

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Source: Developers react to 27% commission with astonishment, anger – 9to5Mac

Suicide Hotline Collected, Monetized The Data Of Desperate People, Because Of Course It Did

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Crisis Text Line, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit support options for the suicidal, is in some hot water. A Politico report last week highlighted how the company has been caught collecting and monetizing the data of callers… to create and market customer service software. More specifically, Crisis Text Line says it “anonymizes” some user and interaction data (ranging from the frequency certain words are used, to the type of distress users are experiencing) and sells it to a for-profit partner named Loris.ai. Crisis Text Line has a minority stake in Loris.ai, and gets a cut of their revenues in exchange.

As we’ve seen in countless privacy scandals before this one, the idea that this data is “anonymized” is once again held up as some kind of get out of jail free card:

“Crisis Text Line says any data it shares with that company, Loris.ai, has been wholly “anonymized,” stripped of any details that could be used to identify people who contacted the helpline in distress. Both entities say their goal is to improve the world — in Loris’ case, by making “customer support more human, empathetic, and scalable.”

But as we’ve noted more times than I can count, “anonymized” is effectively a meaningless term in the privacy realm. Study after study after study has shown that it’s relatively trivial to identify a user’s “anonymized” footprint when that data is combined with a variety of other datasets. For a long time the press couldn’t be bothered to point this out, something that’s thankfully starting to change.

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Source: Suicide Hotline Collected, Monetized The Data Of Desperate People, Because Of Course It Did | Techdirt