Canadians’ Health Data Needs Safeguarding Against Our Increasingly Hostile Neighbour ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Michael Geist and Kumanan Wilson, the Globe and Mail:

Given recent turbulent events and the diminishing trust between Canada and the U.S., it is entirely possible that Washington would seek enhanced access to sensitive Canadian data, notably including financial and health data. This data could be invaluable for developing AI algorithms, for instance, a current priority of the Trump administration.

[…]

Mandated data localization requirements would be an important policy response from Canada. While the end goal would be to establish viable Canadian-controlled cloud services ready to compete with U.S. giants, this may be a way off. An interim measure would involve further beefing up Canadian privacy law by ensuring that Canadian health data is encrypted, resides on servers in Canada and is subject to serious penalties for non-consensual disclosures.

I remain steadfastly opposed to trusting the U.S. government with data about non-U.S. citizens. There are some cases where it offers increased protections, but many where it is a risk — now increasing.

Digg Reboots Again ⇥ torment-nexus.mathewingram.com

Samantha Subin, CNBC:

Content aggregator Digg is making a comeback with the help of an unlikely partner: Reddit co-founder and rival Alexis Ohanian.

Ohanian and Digg founder Kevin Rose acquired the platform for an undisclosed sum. The deal is backed by venture capital firms True Ventures, where Rose is a partner, and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The partnership was announced Wednesday in a video post to the company’s X account in which Rose called the partnership a “team-up he would have never imagined 20 years ago.”

Before it was acquired by Money Group, a publisher and advertising company, Digg was previously owned by BuySellAds. No word on how many people were working on the most recent version and whether any of them will continue.

Mathew Ingram:

What I find the most interesting about the Digg 2.0 announcement is something that wasn’t really teased out in any of the coverage I saw, and that is how it represents an attempt by Ohanian to go into competition with Reddit and his former partner Huffman, who took over running the company in 2014 (Ohanian left the board in 2009) and last year took it public with a $9.5-billion IPO. Although the IPO makes it sound like the last few years have been a raging success, Huffman’s tenure at Reddit has been marked by significant controversy, including changes that led to a revolt by some of the platform’s volunteer sub-Reddit moderators — the workforce that is more or less responsible for most of the company’s value. What Ohanian thinks of all this is unknown, because he has kept his thoughts about Reddit private, but the relaunch of Digg suggests he sees an opportunity there, a market niche that could potentially be filled.

I am considerably less optimistic than Ingram. Digg has been relaunched a few times — first as a curated link aggregator, then as a web magazine, with a detour for building a Google Reader-like RSS client. Under BuySellAds, it appeared to fill a Buzzfeed-like best-of-the-web role.

Digg is a valuable domain being passed around to find a sustainable business model.

The Web Was Always About Redistribution of Power ⇥ werd.io

Ben Werdmuller:

The original web was inherently about redistribution of power from a small number of gatekeepers to a large number of individuals, even if it never quite lived up to that promise. But the next iteration of the web was about concentrating power in a small set of gatekeepers whose near-unlimited growth potential tended towards monopoly. There were always movements that bucked this trend — blogging and the indie web never really went away — but they were no longer the mainstream force on the internet. And over time, the centralized platforms disempowered their users by monopolizing more and more slices of everyday life that used to be free. The open, unlimited nature of the web that was originally used to distribute equity was now being used to suck it up and concentrate it in a handful of increasingly-wealthy people.

I imagine this will continue to ebb and flow over time. The vast majority of people still congregate on closed platforms that are begrudgingly loosening their hold thanks to legislative efforts, mostly in Europe. But there does seem to be growing discontent and mistrust.

Wine Prices Raised by Alberta Government ⇥ cbc.ca

Colleen Underwood, CBC News:

The province says the flat rate for wine is going up another 15 cents per 750 ml bottle.

And it’s creating a new ad valorem, or “value added” fee, that will go up as the price of wine goes up, on top of the flat fee.

For example, according to the province, a $25 750 ml bottle of wine will cost another 20 to 40 cents, but a $50 750 ml bottle of wine will cost anywhere from $2.80 to $3.25 more.

This was announced to retailers with basically no warning. The province is using the wholesale per-litre price to assess this additional levy, meaning a standard 750 mL bottle of wine costing over $11.25 from a distributor is considered “high value”. Based on the wholesale prices I have seen from one importer, that would include the vast majority of wine from our neighbours in British Columbia, at a time when they need support after last year’s cold snap.

This is not my usual beat here, but I wanted to highlight some local lies, emphasis mine:

“Changes to the liquor markup system were undertaken with the objective of minimizing the impact to Alberta consumers and support social responsibility as they ensure products with a higher content of alcohol are subject to higher markup rates,” said Brandon Aboultaif, press secretary to the Service Albert and Red Tape Reduction Minister, Dale Nally.

This is nonsense. The markup rate for spirits with 22–60% alcohol by volume, which comprises virtually all “hard” liquor on store shelves, remains identical for major producers and, for qualifying “small manufacturers”, has been reduced (PDF) compared to the previous rates (PDF). The government, according to Underwood, says this wine-specific tax is intended to “address industry concerns, improve equity within the system, and support the growth of Alberta’s liquor manufacturing industry”. Alberta does not have a wine industry; it does, however, make a lot of beer and spirits. What this sounds like, in part, is that wine drinkers are seen as snooty cosmopolitain types, not like good old-fashioned beer and whisky drinkers.

I have little problem in principle with taxing my vices or, say, increasing other taxes to pay for stuff. That is understandable. But I do not appreciate being lied to.

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton Honoured With 2024 Turing Award ⇥ acm.org

The Association for Computing Machinery which — and this is not, strictly speaking, important — ought to have a way cooler logo than it actually does:

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton as the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. In a series of papers beginning in the 1980s, Barto and Sutton introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning—one of the most important approaches for creating intelligent systems.

Barto is Professor Emeritus of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Sutton is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta, a Research Scientist at Keen Technologies, and a Fellow at Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute).

The University of Alberta has a good summary of Sutton’s contributions to the field’s development internationally and in this province. Great things can happen when people work together across borders.

Tapbots Reveals ‘Phoenix’ Bluesky Client for Summer Release ⇥ macstories.net

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Tapbots, the makers of Mastodon client Ivory, announced today that they are working on a Bluesky client. The app, which will be called Phoenix, is planned for release this summer.

I have been begging for a decent Bluesky client for MacOS. This looks promising. And, if it has the same system requirements as Ivory, it means I will be able to run it on my ageing Intel iMac. Truly miraculous.

Apple Says Not Every Generation Will See an ‘Ultra’ Chip ⇥ arstechnica.com

Apple:

Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip. The ultimate pro desktop delivers groundbreaking pro performance, extensive connectivity now with Thunderbolt 5, and new capabilities in its compact and quiet design that can live right on a desk. Mac Studio can tackle the most intense workloads with its powerful CPU, Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, higher unified memory capacity, ultrafast SSD storage, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine. It provides a big boost in performance compared to the previous generation, and a massive leap for users coming from older Macs.

The introduction of the M3 Ultra, for which Apple issued an entirely separate press release, is a curious twist. Every other Mac available today updated in the past year uses the M4 generation, mostly because Apple makes essentially two computers: consumer Macs — the iMac, MacBook Air, and the Mac Mini — and its more “pro” Macs, with the M chip architecture generally shared across each these lines. You can quibble with my oversimplification — there is one M4 Pro configuration available for the Mac Mini, and the MacBook Pro now starts with the no-suffix M4 — but it is correct enough to make it conspicuous that the Mac Pro, the Studio’s architectural sibling, was not updated today.

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an “Ultra” tier. This is, as far as I can recall, the first time that Apple has said anything like this in public.

This statement doesn’t totally preclude the possibility of an eventual M4 Ultra — if Apple wanted to put more space in between the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, reserving its best chip for the Mac Pro could be one way to do it. But it does suggest that Apple will skip the M4 Ultra entirely, opting to refresh these gigantic and niche chips on a slower cadence than the rest of its processors.

Seeing the Studio updated today instead of at WWDC gave me hope for a radical Mac Pro update in June. Apple’s statement to Cunningham makes me think that might not be coming.

Cloudflare Blocking Privacy Focused Users From Accessing Third-Party Websites ⇥ theregister.com

Liam Proven, the Register:

According to some in the Hacker News discussion of the problem, something else that can count as suspicious – other than using niche browsers or OSes – is something as simple as asking for a URL unaccompanied by any referrer IDs. To us, that sounds like a user with good security measures that block tracking, but it seems that, to the CDN merchant, this looks like an alert to an action that isn’t operated by a human.

Making matters worse, Cloudflare tech support is aimed at its corporate customers, and there seems to be no direct way for non-paying users to report issues other than the community forums. The number of repeated posts suggests to us that the company isn’t monitoring these for reports of problems.

The more privacy you want on the open web, the more cumbersome it becomes. There are reasons for this — every website is being constantly scraped for A.I. training, mining contact data, and generally abusing the social contract of public access. Administrators, understandably, want to limit the amount of automated traffic. To do so, they depend on tools from the same handful of companies as everyone else. And, if you have taken steps to improve your privacy online, your traffic looks abnormal, which is apparently suspicious.

The open web is becoming ever more complicated. You must frequently confirm your humanity. Google now requires JavaScript just to search, since it is also apparently trying to combat bots and scrapers. Everything, even viewing a relatively basic document, feels degraded unless you abandon control over your experience either on the web or in an app.

Apple Appeals U.K. Backdoor Demand to Investigatory Powers Tribunal ⇥ bbc.com

Zoe Kleinman, BBC News:

Apple is taking legal action to try to overturn a demand made by the UK government to view its customers’ private data if required.

The BBC understands that the US technology giant has appealed to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent court with the power to investigate claims against the Security Service.

Neither the BBC nor the Financial Times, which broke this news, has any details about the appeal, presumably because nobody can talk about this in public through official channels. According to both reports, it is possible this whole thing will be conducted in secret, too.

It looks like I, by way of Mike Masnick, was wrong to believe the only grounds on which Apple could fight this are financial. It turns out there is an appeals process which I could have found at any time — and in even more detail (PDF) — if I had double-checked. That is on me. However, in the first four years appeals were permitted on legal grounds, just two cases (PDF) were heard, with one being dismissed.

The way this is playing out is farcical. Nobody is legally permitted to discuss it, so we have only on-background leaks from Apple (almost certainly, I am guessing) and U.K. intelligence (maybe) to the same handful of reporters. This has advantages for both parties since they can craft a narrative through limited disclosures, but it means the rest of us can only speculate about how long Apple will be permitted to offer uncompromised end-to-end encryption worldwide.

Did the Trump Administration Minimize Russian Cyber Threats? ⇥ zetter-zeroday.com

Stephanie Kirchgaessner, the Guardian:

A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia.

Martin Matishak, the Record:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Kim Zetter:

Taken together, the two stories raised alarms that the policy changes would have a drastic impact on U.S. national security and make the country more vulnerable to cyberattacks from Vladimir Putin’s hackers. The Record noted that the order to Cyber Command provided “evidence of the White House’s efforts to normalize ties with Moscow,” and the Guardian quoted a source who said that the change at CISA represented a win for Russia. “Putin is on the inside now,” the source told the Guardian.

Although a number of people on social media seem to believe The Record story corroborates The Guardian story (I won’t call anyone out here), the two stories are reporting different things and are based on different sources.

[…]

I’ll first parse what the two stories said and didn’t say and then look at what has changed since they published.

We all know that reporting during a breaking news cycle is going to contain inaccuracies. When it is the policy of the U.S. government to set in motion a series of these cycles on a seemingly daily basis, it is difficult to get a handle on anything. I appreciate Zetter’s more careful reading and verification with her sources. If you want a better idea of what is — and is not — known about the U.S. cybersecurity posture regarding Russia, her analysis is the one to read.

Potions and Spells ⇥ 8ball.report

Sean Monahan:

People love to quote the third of Arthur C. Clark’s laws — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And almost always with a positive spin. The Disneyfied language makes it sound wondrous. But let’s reconsider the quote with a different word:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from witchcraft.

This is far from the first article aligning new technologies — particularly artificial intelligence — with magical thinking. Just searching some related keywords yields at least three academic papers, plus loads of articles with similar framing. Some include this same Clarke quote for obvious reasons.

Monahan, though, ties it to a broader social condition in which magical thinking is on the rise, and there is something to think about in this. I am not necessarily in agreement — I think this is more of an interesting exercise in language than it is describing a broader trend — but I have also just finished reading “If It Sounds Like a Quack” and, so, my head might be in a funny space.

The U.S. Government Is Apparently Upset About the U.K. iCloud Backdoor Demand ⇥ ft.com

Joseph Menn, Washington Post:

The U.S. Justice Department told Congress in November that there were no major disputes with the United Kingdom over how the two allies seek data from each other’s communication companies.

But at that time, officials knew British authorities were preparing a demand that Apple build a back door to its users’ encrypted data, according to people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal department matters.

There are only two reasons I can see for Biden officials to omit this from their report: first because it was not, in November, a current dispute but a potential future one; and, second, it understood it could not talk about it. Neither seems justifiable.

Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times:

Donald Trump has lashed out at the UK’s demand for Apple to grant secret access to its most secure cloud storage system, comparing the move to “something … that you hear about with China”.

[…]

Earlier this week, Tulsi Gabbard, US director of national intelligence, said any move to force Apple to build a back door into its systems would cause “grave concern” as an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy. Gabbard said she had ordered lawyers and intelligence officials to investigate the matter.

It is amazing to see this particularly despicable U.S. administration arguing for the correct position given its history. To be fair, Tulsi Gabbard is less of a surprise; though she now apparently supports U.S. surveillance programmes, she has a history of questioning privacy overreaches. But the first Trump administration was not at all friendly to end-to-end encryption. According to Menn, then at Reuters, the FBI tried to pressure Apple to kill its plans for end-to-end encryption in iCloud, a feature which would ultimately be launched – in 2022 – as Advanced Data Protection. In 2019, the U.S. was exploring whether it could ban end-to-end encryption entirely and, in 2020, was a co-signatory on a multilateral statement requesting a backdoor as policy.

Thankfully, none of the more extreme U.S. positions on end-to-end encryption has become law. And, while the U.S. is among many in opposing end-to-end encryption, there have been no reports of it compelling service providers to do what the U.K. government is expecting of Apple, though Menn reports the FBI has tried. That is not to say the U.S. would not issue a mandate, nor that we would find out about it. The PRISM program was a backdoor into tech company data maintained secretly for six years before its existence was revealed by Edward Snowden, while Yahoo built (maybe?) a way for it to search users’ email accounts after being compelled of the U.S. government. I do not think anyone should expect ideological or principled consistency from the Trump administration on this matter. There is a history of U.S. officials making these kinds of demands.

Maybe there is a third reason Biden officials did not want to notify Congress after all.

The Digital Packrat Manifesto ⇥ 404media.co

Janus Rose, 404 Media:

While streaming platforms flatten music-listening into a homogenous assortment of vibes, listening to an album you’ve downloaded on Bandcamp or receiving a mix from a friend feels more like forging a connection with artists and people. As a musician, I’d much rather have people listen to my music this way. Having people download your music for free on Soulseek is still considered a badge of honor in my producer/dj circles.

I don’t expect everyone to read this and immediately go back to hoarding mp3s, nor do I think many people will abandon things like Spotify and Amazon Kindle completely. It’s not like I’m some model citizen either: I share a YouTube Premium account because the ads make me want to die, and I will admit having a weakness for the Criterion Channel. But the packrat lifestyle has shown me that other ways are possible, and that at the end of the day, the only things we can trust to always be there are the things we can hold in our hands and copy without restriction.

Yes — a thousand times, yes. These are all effective ways of embracing art. One can stream and buy music, just as one can see movies in theatres and on a phone while sitting on a train. I am not saying the latter is as enjoyable, but I do not think the people involved in making “Twisters” will very much mind.

But I think you should have local copies of the stuff you like. None of these third-party services promise availability. In fact, their legal terms say they are provided on an “as-is” basis, and explicitly deny a warranty of “satisfactory quality” or any “obligation to provide specific content”. The service providers will try, of course, but they cannot make guarantees. Your local, backed-up music library, though? That will almost certainly work.

Inclusive Typefaces ⇥ itsnicethat.com

Harry Bennett, It’s Nice That:

Inclusive Sans is a new typeface from Olivia King that puts accessibility at the forefront. It’s arisen from the type designer’s research into typographic accessibility and readability – from highly regarded traditional guides and papers to more modern approaches to letterform legibility. “A few years ago, I was working on branding projects in the disability and government sectors, where accessibility was always a big focus,” Olivia tells It’s Nice That. Olivia wanted to take things a step further, however, and she and her colleague, Jo Roca, began to explore typographic accessibility at the character level rather than through the typeface as a whole.

Inclusive Sans is a free download through Google Fonts. Via a Brand New case study, I also learned about Atkinson Hyperlegible from the Braille Institute of America. Both are not only reflecting more inclusive principles, they are also quite nice examples of type design.

Microsoft and Google Jack Up Prices to Pay for A.I. ⇥ levernews.com

Luke Goldstein, the Lever:

If you’re in one of the 9 million organizations that use Google Workspace, your company likely just received notice that it’ll have to fork over a lot more cash to use its ubiquitous office applications.The monthly price for business plans is jumping 16 percent, from $14.40 to $16.80. If all 3 billion Google Workspace users paid that standard increase, that would equal an additional $7.2 billion in monthly revenue for the company. At the same time, Google’s cloud division, which houses Workspace, slashed its workforce this week, though the exact number of staff layoffs is unknown.

This is smaller bump than the one recently announced for Microsoft 365. Google most recently hiked prices this time last year. The margins say keep squeezing.

Adam Engst Does Not Understand Quantum Computing Either ⇥ tidbits.com

Adam Engst, riffing for TidBits on my confused reaction to recent breakthroughs from Google and Microsoft:

Perhaps it was inevitable. Companies like Microsoft and Google invest billions of dollars in fundamental research (which is good!), but their marketing departments (whom I suspect don’t understand quantum computing either) can’t help but search for user benefits for their announcements. The result is cognitive dissonance — it’s hard to imagine these companies’ quantum products solving the world’s ills when Google users complain about the quality of search results and Microsoft users frequently swear at Teams and OneDrive. Meanwhile, university labs that make significant strides in quantum computing rarely make it into mainstream tech news.

I think the marketing of these inventions is most of what tripped me up. If you divorce the consumer-type sales pitches from Google, Microsoft, and now Amazon from the likely uses for these computers, it seems to make more sense. Think of them in the realm of a supercomputer or, as Engst writes, the “mainframes of the future”. If they work — if — the distance between them and the effects you and I may feel is going to be vast.

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Safari Cleanup ⇥ tbray.org

Tim Bray:

Also, Safari is technically competent. It’s fast enough, and (unlike even a very few years ago) compatible with wherever I go. The number of Chome-only sites, thank goodness, seems to be declining rapidly.

So, a tip o’ the hat to the Safari team, they’re mostly giving me what I need. But there are irritants.

I am sure there are people who will gripe with Bray’s description of Safari as “technically competent” because of all the APIs it does not support. I will not because I cannot remember the last time I needed to open a page in a Chromium-based browser for compatibility reasons.

I do share Bray’s frustrations with Safari’s odd tab behaviour, though. There are a few peculiar circumstances in which links will open in a new window instead of a tab, and when pressing ⌘–W will close a window instead of a single tab. The first of these things happens if you have a dialog box open or if you are using Tab Groups. I am not sure about the second but it has happened to me.

Bray:

I humbly suggest … that Safari do these things:

[…]

Don’t just exit on ⌘-Q. Chrome gets this right, offering an option where I have to hold that key combo down for a second or two.

I disagree. I think Chrome’s nonstandard behaviour is confusing and unexpected. But I do think Safari should offer users a chance to reconsider instead of immediately quitting, especially since the Q and W keys are next to each other. A user’s open tabs are kind of like an unsaved document, except there is no guarantee those same links will work upon relaunch. Sometimes a paywall will be triggered, or a website could be down. I have therefore mapped “Quit” in Safari to ⌘–⌥–Q.

But, on the subject of Tab Groups, I find myself accidentally switching to them more often than I would like. This is because rotating between them is mapped to ⌘–⌥–[ and ⌘–⌥–]. Notice I did not write “by default”, and that is because there is no way to change this shortcut key combination. I have tried; according to Safari, the shortcuts for “Go to Previous Tab Group” and “Go to Next Tab Group” are the ones I have set. Yet, for some reason, Safari still responds to the shortcut keys Apple has apparently hardcoded.

Apple News Remains a Bad Citizen of the Open Web ⇥ mjtsai.com

Michael Tsai, commenting in relation to the “tyranny of apps” article:

I think Apple News would have a better user experience with a Web site and an RSS feed than as an app.

I agree, but I think it is a worse situation than that suggests. Apple News is not only a mediocre app experience, but its existence also causes regressions on the open web.

Stories in Apple News have a permalink, like anything else on the web. However, unlike just about any link you have seen from a mainstream publication for the past, say, twenty years, these links are inscrutable. Instead of being in a format containing the source of an article and its title, all Apple News permalinks are something like https://apple.news/Ayls8UZCzQnWfFNRugL3tPA.

That is not only gross, it is also unhelpful. Sometimes, but not always, links like these display a page containing nothing but the following:

Open this story in Apple News.

For the best reading experience, open this story on a device with Apple News. It may also be available on the publisher’s website.

Learn more about Apple News

There is no link to the article — certainly not on the publisher’s website, but also not even on Apple News. In MacOS browsers, I am prompted to open Apple News to view the article; if I decline, I have no next steps.

There is scant indication of what article this is. The <title> element of the page shows the article’s headline, but the publisher is not visible. (It is, however, contained in the page’s markup, along with a description of the article.) This is true no matter which user agent I use. I tried it with a couple of automated webpage testing tools and got the exact same page.

This article is, of course, also available on the web. I chose it essentially by chance from plentiful options. Apple could make next steps visible on this page, but it does not, and never has since Apple News launched ten years ago this September.

Update: As Bill Bennett reminds me, these links are even worse in regions without Apple News availability.

‘The Tyranny of Apps’ ⇥ theguardian.com

Marc Fisher, in the Washington Post in December:

Too often now, in matters meaningful and meaningless, the good stuff is reserved for people who have smartphones or other digital tools. From parking garages to airplane movie offerings, it pays to be digitally equipped. More to the point, it hurts to be in the technological slow lane.

Rupert Jones, the Guardian:

“It’s the tyranny of the apps,” says Ron Delnevo, the chair of the campaign committee at lobby group the Payment Choice Alliance. “In this country we’re being treated like sheep,” he says. “We’re always being told there’s no alternative.” But when a new smartphone can set you back hundreds of pounds, it is “an expensive passport to participate”, Delnevo says.

According to the latest data from the telecoms regulator Ofcom, 8% of people aged 16 or over do not have a smartphone, which for the UK translates into just under 4.5 million people. Among those aged 75-plus, the proportion is said to be 28%. Add in all those who don’t or can’t use apps and the total number of people affected is a lot bigger.

Yet another example of how being poor can cost more. If you do not have enough money for a smartphone, you might be locked out of discounts for basic goods. My local supermarket is currently offering a dollar off eggs if I use my personalized coupon — but it is only available in the app.

Even for those of us with smartphones — a majority of people in Canada in all under-75 age groups, for example — we might not want to install software to get grocery coupons or park their car. These apps are often clunky experience, and seem to usually be a website in an app wrapper. Web apps are not treated as mainstream citizens on iOS, in particular, so these bad apps are all we get. Loyalty programs have long been mechanisms for collecting more data about customers, though, so it is little surprise they are going smartphone-first or –only.