> Well Apple decimated that ability with ATT.

No, wrong again, please look this stuff up before you say things with this much confidence. The concerns I'm talking about popped up after ATT (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/11/meta-inje... and https://www.itechpost.com/articles/113985/20220923/meta-sued...).

It is unclear to me that this vulnerability has ever been patched, though of course Facebook denies that they use it for tracking (but of course they do). In the interest of being diplomatic to Apple I am operating under the assumption that they eventually patched it, but I have never been able to find a source verifying that they did.

As far as I know, Facebook is still doing this today in iOS.

It is of course also notable that when Apple discovered that Facebook was essentially performing malware attacks on 3rd-party sites, they didn't remove Facebook from the app store or punish Facebook in any way. So let's also get rid of the idea that moderation is a solution here, because Apple has repeatedly proven that they are not willing to remove apps like Facebook that violate privacy rules. 3rd-party XSS was not a big enough deal to Apple to remove the Facebook app.

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> [censored VPN advertising site]

VPNs are not a suitable alternative to native adblockers for a myriad of reasons that get discussed to death whenever VPNs come up in these conversations. Also, please do not link to a recommendation site that recommends NordVPN as the best VPN for privacy. NordVPN should be avoided.

In general, while I take a much more positive view on VPNs than many other HN commenters and while I do think they can enhance privacy, I still agree with the advice of many security professionals that VPNs can open up users to substantial privacy risks and should not be lightly used without a good reason or without a lot of research into their privacy policies and management.

> You named one additional way that you can track on an app if a user uses a web view.

No, many. Low-level graphics, contacts, device IDs, webview injection, long-term storage, precise location, bluetooth connections, etc, etc... the list goes on and on.

> There are dozens of ways that websites can track you without your permission that aren’t available in apps.

Such as? I can't think of a single one.

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> Really? You can’t do persistent storage on the web that’s available cross site?

No, you can't! How is this a surprise to you?

The lack of persistent cross-site storage and the fact that any available cross-site storage is strictly opt-in is one of the biggest things that the web does. It used to be a little bit worse with 3rd-party cookies, but not only was that still subject to cross-origin restrictions and still required opt-in from every participating site, but also every major browser is now restricting 3rd-party cookies (even Chrome).

Even with PWAs on iOS, you can't access cross-site storage. In fact, Apple's entire justification for shutting down PWAs was that they wanted to ensure that cross-site storage restrictions continued to be respected (which is a bullcrap reason since every other browser already does this, but whatever).

Seriously, I'm trying to be diplomatic and respectful about this, but you need to look up how security models on the web work before you spout nonsense like this. 3rd-party site isolation is a big deal on the web, as is easily cleared storage that is treated like a temporary container. Safari goes a step further and auto-clears some of that storage. It was a big deal with PWAs when they announced a single way to get just 1st-party storage to reliably persist long-term.

There is no shared storage pool for the web that every site is subjected to, that is the entire point of cross-origin restrictions.

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> In fact they do, I just cited a list of VPNs you can install.

See above.

> Good thing that every single person or even the majority of people use ad blockers…

More than the people using adblockers for iOS. Like seriously, do you think the number of people who pay for a VPN adblocker is higher than the number of people who install for free ublock origin or a similar Safari-compatible adblocker?

This is absurd, you're looking at a tangible way in which native privacy is worse and you're saying, "but nobody uses the better solution." That's not exactly a convincing argument. I use adblockers online. My whole family does. Having at least the ability to protect oneself to some degree is important. You're not denying that for anyone that actually cares about privacy, the web is easier to secure -- you're just arguing that nobody cares about privacy. But some of us do.

And if you're talking about what the average user does, the average user A) doesn't pay for VPNs (even if VPNs were a substitute for adblockers, which they're not), and B) doesn't turn down invasive data requests from native apps, of which there are far more available to make on native platforms than on the web.

Objectively, factually, native app privacy is worse. It just is; you can either accept that or you can keep pretending that reality is something that it's not. But your lack of acceptance doesn't change anything about the reality that native platforms expose more fingerprinting vectors, have fewer ways for users to protect themselves, and are generally capable of much more invasive and malicious behavior.