Its amusing that Apple itself is one of the biggest ad companies that exists, fed entirely from their own users private data. Yet by simply pointing the finger away from themselves and helping their customers block other ad companies efforts, they seem to have gained complete trust of all their users and most dont even know how much Apple are making in ad revenue from their own data.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/11/14/apples-4b-ad-busi...

When Apple first released App Tracking Transparency, I immediately used it to block the trackers

There seems to be a common misconception that this blocks trackers, which is not the case. Use a DNS-based ad/tracker blocker and watch the logs and you'll see that many apps happily track you. As far as I understand, ATT blocks is cross-app/website tracking. If you deny, the app does not get access to the Identifier for Advertisers, meaning that tracking services cannot use a single identifier that is used across apps. While this initially had a large financial impact (see the article), trackers have probably developed other ways to correlate data from apps/websites now.

The real solution would be for Apple/Google to offer an option to completely disable in-app trackers and if an app would violate it, boot them from the App Store.

Of course, they would never do that because they make a lot of money from targeted advertising with their own ad networks, so either they would have to block themselves or get in hot water with regulators.

Put differently, Apple and Google are not your friend here.

In my case firefox + arkenfox + ublock origin advanced mode require all sorts of weird clicking to enable similar tracking :)

Ironically Google couldn't disable third-party cookies even if they wanted to; it's seen as anti-competitive to other tracking networks and was blocked by the courts.

We should pass laws that require the weird clicking gymnastics to opt-in to tracking.

Instead of the default opt-in hidden in the terms and conditions nobody reads.