> Apple's attempts to block data tracking as you travel around the web could have a real impact on companies that rely on your personal information to make their billions.
asking the people that working in adtech, cross-device usage prediction and the likes: do you actually think it will disrupt your business or there are always workarounds and are relatively chill about it?
I think there's actually very minor benefits to the type of tracking that unauthenticated that they're doing, so while they might be able to track less, it won't have a material impact.
Apple attacks the core primitives of Adtech very strategically with this update. This is very smart actually, much better than the first iteration.
They're going after the meat right away, like cookie synchronization ("Tracker collusion") and the first-party tracker hack that Criteo pioneered, effectively disabling almost all the tracking possibilities on iOS. As a user, this is awesome.
And if you want to track, you need to provide both value (i.e. an authenticated service) as well as get explicit consent from the user.
Unfortunately, this will also serve to concentrate the power in the hands of Google and Facebook, who have and/or will create such authenticated embeds.
Note that all this hardtalk specifically excludes the mobile ad IDs. Apple would face much more headwind from GOOG and FB if they went about killing these. This is going to be very interesting, as Apple will need to carefully tread up to a point, after which there could be harsher repercussions.
They also know that an iPhone without access to Google Maps, Search, Mail, Authenticator, Youtube and a whole lot of other essential services won't be worth much to end users anymore.
Source: I'm working in Adtech, but we chose a different approach of giving users an actual benefit and being careful, compliant and frugal with data. All these recent updates about Apple and GDPR mainly hit the really bad players of the industry that just hoard sensitive data through shady channels and arbitrage it to hell — and I consider that a good thing.
> They also know that an iPhone without access to Google Maps, Search, Mail, Authenticator, Youtube and a whole lot of other essential services won't be worth much to end users anymore.
Google Authenticator => Authy (it reimplements google auth)
Search => Safari
Gmail => Native Mail (its not like Google will drop IMAP support)
Killing YouTube on iOS would be pretty bad for Apple, but I’m sure that wouldn’t be profitable for Google (cutting off a third of an already-unprofitable company? no thanks). What’s left bedides that, Google docs? Well Apple has their own suite so does Microsoft. And they both have web editors that rival Google Docs and support multi-user editing. In general I’m pretty skeptical about this assertion that Apple “can’t” step on Google’s toes.
Authy encrypts all of your data with a private passkey that is never sent to Twilio (the parent company) [0]. I found the ability to sync 2FA across devices to be convenient and a good compromise to “if you lose your phone, you’re screwed.” I can understand both perspectives, but I think Authy has done a great job at improving the usability of 2FA without sacrificing security. This is certainly more secure than SMS-based 2FA which most people currently use.
(Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Twilio. I am not involved with Authy in any way)
Microsoft Authenticator is another alternative and it doesn't need anything (plus is handy for MS 2fa). There's DUO. And I'd wager there are countless other apps as the standard is really simple.
> They also know that an iPhone without access to Google Maps, Search, Mail, Authenticator, Youtube and a whole lot of other essential services won't be worth much to end users anymore.
I don't know. Apple Maps is almost as good as Google Maps for me. Search I could use DuckDuckGo. Mail I use the native iOS mail client and could easily switch out from my GMail account to anything else. Authenticator I don't use and don't know anyone else who does either. YouTube's an interesting one, but I use it tons less since I got Spotify Premium.
If it was a choice between Apple protecting my privacy and losing all Google services these days, after everything players like Google and Facebook have done? It wouldn't be a difficult decision to keep my iPhone.
I used to work in adtech, though not the parts focussed on tracking folks. I think this will cause some disruption for people in the short term, and if Apple stays committed to this line of attack, it could really have a long term impact.
But on the other hand, IP+UA is a very good signal when you don't have a lot of devices behind NAT, and if you just have a Facebook ServiceWorker installed, it could track all of the IP addresses you use. And there is nothing preventing first-party tracking, e.g. what if Facebook starts a "Facebook Publishing Platform" which is basically a section of Facebook.com designed to ensure that you get all the user tracking as before. Or what if publications now ask for "Login with Facebook to read this article".
Apple is putting itself in an entertaining position in the industry. Most big tech firms have a business model that depends on user data. By explicitly taking the other side of that model, a fascinating new conflict is emerging between tech giants. And Apple is at least positioning itself on the sympathetic side of billions of users in this arena. This conflict will not die down -- the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection, so this tech war will only get more pronounced and dramatic as time passes.
the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection
They can though - they can go back to untargetted advertising based on page content as they were doing 10 years ago. All the personal tracking data is a layer on top of that tech aiming to improve the 'targettedness' of adverts. Nothing in the online ad industry really needs any of that personal data, and arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway.
Not strictly related to this discussion, but perhaps worth sharing.
I worked at a smaller tech company, and we kept saying "Correlation does not imply causation", and trying to come up with ways to separate them, etc. We spent/wasted a lot of time on this, explaining it to non-mathy people (which leads to even less confidence in data).
Then I went to work at one of the big tech companies, which is probably one of the best in the world at testing/data for product, and there I never heard it. If there was correlation, unless it was clearly spurious or a statistical fluke, they pushed on it hard. "It looks like more X means more DAUs. So let's manufacture more X." And it works pretty well for that company.
My takeaway is, I stopped thinking about this too much. Today, if there's correlation, unless it's clearly spurious/etc, and unless somebody has a better idea, I tell the product/eng team to push hard on it and don't even mention correlation vs causation.
I have experienced the same thing myself, but I would explain it differently.
Even in science where the focus is actually on proving things, it is difficult to prove causation. I see this more as a question of whether you act on a correlation that you’ve discovered or whether you simply talk about it.
While it’s fine to discuss things, it sounds like at the small company you worked at, that that was more important than taking action (or perhaps the company was too insecure to make a decision about what to do).
At the big company, the focus was on making experiments and seeing what the results are, and then iterating on that. In the end, the business doesn’t care whether something causes something else, it is only interested in adjusting things, measuring results and if they increase some important metrics, then the business is happy.
That said, it can be taken to an extreme where only the metrics are thought of as important, rather than other qualitative or hard-to-measure things.
It is much easier with web companies who can quickly roll out changes and use AB testing to run experiments. Also, those companies with larger user bases will have better sets of data on which to base their decisions. Companies that are well established will also have historical data that will make it easier to interpret results.
It also sounds like at the first company, the tech team was interested in being theoretically correct, while at the second one, the engineers were interested in trying things.
It is an understandable problem in some ways: good programmers are lazy and won’t want to make unnecessary changes, so they tend to argue against changes that haven’t been proven ahead of time to yield results. However, for the business to thrive, knobs must be adjusted and experiments made. And those programmers have to turn the knobs (or make them adjustable by someone else). So there is a strong counter-motive at play there.
However, good programmers who are also engineers with a focus on the product / business will understand the importance of doing this. It’s important for the engineering team to be aligned with the business and it helps to have cross functional teams. Otherwise you may end up with departments protecting their own interests. See also Conway’s law and its derivatives.
>Today, if there's correlation, unless it's clearly spurious/etc, and unless somebody has a better idea, I tell the product/eng team to push hard on it and don't even mention correlation vs causation.
Because it's actually a stupid thing to say. Correlation does not conclusively prove causation would be better. It certainly gives a sensible place to look.
Except that's not right. It may be. In fact persuing correlations is how we do science. At some point we gain enough confidence in the correlations that we call it causation.
I view 'imply' as 'suggest' and 'prove' is 'this is a fact'. Correlation does in fact imply causation (which is why correlations are investigated). It just doesn't prove the causation. It may be that the two things you're looking at are both related to some other cause (e.g. ice cream sales and murders increase in summer, supposedly. This does not mean ice cream sales has a direct relation to murder but they probably both have a relation to outside tempature), it may even be pure coincidence. But if you see a correlation you see a place to begin your investigations.
I'm not going to suggest that 'imply' is clearer/less clear, but they both mean what you think 'prove' does. To quote a bunch of dictionaries, the phrase is using 'imply' to mean:
'to involve something or make it necessary'
'to have as a necessary consequence'
'to involve something as a logical consequence'
Thus XKCD's extension of the phrase to `Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.` -- which is essentially what you're getting at.
There's nowhere else for the ad money to go. If less personally targeted online ads are the sole option, then that's the sole option. The ad money will go where the user attention is, which is increasingly online.
Besides, for Google, they don't need Facebook style personal targeting. When you search for womens shoes, they feed you ads for womens shoes, it's a wildly lucrative approach and it doesn't matter if you're 28 or 34 years old, or what your favorite music is (yes, there are gains to be had with more personalized ad targeting even in that case, it doesn't matter, Google's model is still an extreme money machine).
Radio, newspapers and TV were absolute dogshit for targeting for the prior 60 years. It was mostly blast and pray. At least with the Internet, even with less personal targeting, you still gain a lot of tech capabilities to improve ad systems (including intricate content targeting, matched with information on the demographics that like that content, and so on).
It is astounding that with all that tracking data ad quality has not actually improved in 20 years. They are still garbage ads that are still rarely relevant.
Even at big tech companies, a lot of those ML models are fed by nightly jobs, so updated once a day. If the targeting occurs on an outside property, there may be more delay. So if you make a purchase on day X, you should expect to see the ad for another ~48 hours. That's assuming there's logic which actually de-targets you post-purchase.
Even Amazon don't get this right and should have unbeatable knowledge of when the sale completes. Their helpful suggestions still only seem to work usefully for books and music.
I suspect that's because those are the only things that are easy to model. People buy them:
a) based on personal taste
b) in volume
I just bought a ladder on amazon, what information does that tell them? Since it's the only tool I've bought from them it doesn't tell them much. They now know that I might be willing to buy more tools from them in the future but doesn't help in targeting which kind or how often. Me being a ladder buyer is a very weak signal that I will buy any particular item from them.
If on the other hand, I've bought 15 Aubrey Maturin books from them over the last few months, it doesn't take the most sophisticated model to determine that I probably want to buy number 16 next. Or that I might like to read the Horatio Hornblower books.
I suspect the odds are well above normal that someone is going to buy a second _. At a minimum _ shows up and doesn't work pushes things above buying for example a vacuum cleaner on a random day.
Amazon knows I just bought a fridge. How many fridges per month do they think I need? I keep receiving fridge ads and even on their own website, when logged in, they show me fridge offers.
Taken to an entertaining extreme, one advertising approach would be to make ads as noticeably terrible as possible so people complain about them as much as possible.
It's almost as if, no matter what these advertising networks do, you can always reason in hindsight that it profited someone ...
It's almost as if, because it's rumoured to have powerful, dark & unknowable Machine Learning behind it, people assume it must be doing something reaaaaaally clever, and we're just not clever enough to realise what it's truly masterminding.
Ditto. I'm being bombarded by airbnb ad (on all possible platforms, e.g. facebook) recommending the exact same house I've already stayed in a few weeks back! Just stop...
You can avoid much of these issues by browsing in incognito or private mode when purchasing or looking to purchase or something. You can make your life a lot easier using firefox containers + container addons that automatically switch to isolated site-specific containers when browsing ebay or amazon or even facebook. Otherwise you're just inviting all kinds of cookies and tracking without making even hard for them
The point is that the ads are a waste, and that the advertisers aren't getting their money's worth. It's really remarkable that they still haven't caught on to this.
Is there even a way to check if the google and facebook charge the correct number of advert impressions? Seems to me like they can print money by reporting higher numbers.
I haven't played that game in a long time, but back then they were the sole determiners of whether a "click" was valid or not. I got charged for clicks for which people only stayed for a second or so. Now there were a lot of people who claimed they can make a decision about purchasing from a website in a second, but I don't think they're thinking it through. I think they were erroneous clicks or competitors, yet I was charged.
The ads are not a waste. It's called remarketing and it does boost conversion numbers over raw untargetted ads. The ads are targeting people who went to a site, browsed around, didn't buy but might do in future (much more likely than a random unselected person).
Generally the ad network does not know if you really completed a purchase or dropped off during the funnel. Presumably advertisers could set up a hook to inform the ad network if you did purchase or not, but I guess they don't care enough to do so.
That's the customer point of view. Spend sometime with a sales or marketing team esp when they are rolling out a new campaign or product. Targeting makes a big difference even though the conversion rates maybe low.
I think personal info, what you view, search for etc can be useful to both sides when both sides are seeking each other out.
But when it's one-sided is where things get ugly. When Alex Jones is trying to build a captive herd, the kind of data being misused is not so much your personal info/things you have searched for or viewed, but what I call "counter" type data surrounding the content you produce i.e. likes, retweets, views, upvotes etc.
This type of data is what drives the creation of an Alex Jones or a Kim Kardashian. Cause no sane person is out there searching for these clowns. The clowns come into existence only because these count numbers have an influence on people. 14 year old girls from Ecuador to New Zealand look at these counts for guidance on what is hip and that produces a Kim Kardashian with 110 million followers on Instagram.
These counter numbers need to be removed/hidden/shown less frequently or with delay and automatically the world will be a diff place.
When attacking FB and Google(YouTube), Twitter etc these numbers and their visibility to the uninformed and vulnerable of society is what needs to be attacked.
But what happens is people attack the personal info, search and view histories data collection which is actually useful. And that causes unneeded confusion and defensiveness.
The argument is that because the conversion rates are low anyway then the targeting doesn't make a big difference.
The sales/marketing guys are just doing what the hivemind says. Maybe I'm unlucky, but I seldom hear one suggest something against the grain. Usually they just say whatever hubspot says.
I meant they make a difference in comparison to non-targeted ads. It's easy to measure. Both have low conversion rates but the difference is not negligible or ignorable depending on what you sell.
If somebody charges 50% more to get my conversion rate from 0.5% to 1%, I'd call that a bargain — still doesn't make the ad any more interesting for the 99% who didn't convert.
My favorite is getting ads for the thing you already bought from the place you got it where you are very unlikely to need again anytime soon.
Most recently for me, it was a plumbing part. Now I have targeted ads everywhere for these parts. Sorry org, I finished my project and I won't be doing something similar, hopefully, ever again.
I can't really blame Google/Facebook for this - they don't necessarily know if you completed the purchase.
It's genuinely bizarre when Amazon does it. They know I just bought a $500 vacuum... surely they've got the machine learning chops to teach their algorithm that means I shouldn't ever see a vacuum as a sponsored product for a couple years?
The thought I've heard floated before is that you might not be happy with your new vacuum you just bought. Some percentage of people that buy anything will not be pleased with the result and that new ad in their face might be enough to push them over the edge to return it and buy what is advertised. Amazon just wants to ensure you buy the replacement from them.
That's actually a grey/black hat way of boosting your ad sales numbers, even if you didn't click.
You buy x at y store, y store has an ad buy with ShadyAdCo. If you see product x in an ad within z time afterwards, it counts as an influence towards your purchase. ShadyAdCo just made money, and y store can give record numbers.
Huh, I never thought of that.
Only works if you're using basic/bad metrics.
I believe google's stuff is a little more advanced than that and you can see your click-through all the way to buying rate etc.
That only works if you actually click and buy. If you see an ad for a part you need, then go to hardware store and buy it they have no way of knowing that you saw the ad, much less how much influence the ad had.
It also fails to account for awareness being a major reason to buy ads. Ford want to advertise to everybody (probably including Amish) because most people will eventually buy a car, and it is important that you think Ford then. Even if you bought a car yesterday it is important to them that you not forget that you can buy a Ford - they know you won't buy for a few years, but they still want you to think of them.
Google has been trying to tie store purchase to ad impression [1]:
"This location tracking ability has allowed Google to send reports to retailers telling them, for example, whether people who saw an ad for a lawn mower later visited or passed by a Home Depot. The location-tracking program has grown since it was first launched with only a handful of retailers. Home Depot, Express, Nissan, and Sephora have participated."
Ask yourself why Facebook counts "post-view" conversions instead of only post-click like AdWords and most others.
New client had been working off the assumption they were seeing ROAS of around 3 (not terrible). When we showed them how to see just the post-click, ROAS is now at 1. That means even if they are selling a product they received for free or stole, ie COGS = 0, they still only breakeven.
Attribution is the key. All this assumes that ad companies and Facebook are honest in the first place about the number of views and clicks an ad has received. Their behavior does not engender much good will for a benefit of the doubt situation.
Ads don't solely exist to convince you to buy a product. Some ads are designed to make you feel good about the purchase you already made. or to teach people who will never buy a product to respect people who do.
Why would Amazon showing me a dozen other vacuums make me feel good about my purchase? How would a post-purchase ad teach me not to make that purchase I already made?
You are thinking narrowly. Lets say your profile is "environmentally conscious family man". If you just bought a Tesla, and for 3 weeks after all you saw were ads around the internet reinforcing that "teslas are good for the environment", "teslas are great for budding families". Those ads are designed to generate brand loyalty.
In a completely different context, ads can be used to reenforce status. That was a separate distinct point gp was making. If you want to buy luxury goods, but can't afford them, a well placed gucci ad can act as a brand anchor & keep you yearning.
Your point stands, that the "mega retarget post amazon ads" are a flaw in the system, but as the system gets more data, they will be tweaked to be more effective.
Amazon has plenty of data already to fix this - they undoubtedly could determine "purchasers of X don't buy another one for Y months on average afterwards" - and I remain baffled that they haven't.
This specific case - "here are some other vacuums you didn't buy" - is one that seems more likely to hurt my brand loyalty and post-purchase feelings than anything else.
So, in the other-branded vacuum case, I can see a reason: buyer's regret.
Chances being that anything that irks you about your new vacuum are going to be most accutely felt in the initial period.
So reminding you heavily that there are other, greener-grass vacuums out there seems productive in inceptioning "I'll never buy X brand again!" resentment.
Yeah but you can turn that argument each way, it's just reasoning backwards. It amounts to just doing whatever with the tracking data, waiting for something positive to happen because of it, and then claiming it.
They can do that with random data and it'll work just as well. It's called divination and you don't need to track me for it.
Amazon doesn't care if your loyal to the vacuum brand. They just want the purchase to be through them. If you are unhappy with the purchase they want the rebound sale.
I can't speak for an individual ad I haven't seen. Even if I did see it, I don't necessarily know marketing enough to analyze it. I just know that the purpose can be broader than your post was originally giving it credit for.
So, ads are in fact optimizing our experience using these dangerously large amounts of tracking data, they're just working so subtly and ineffably, we just don't know enough about marketing's mysterious ways to appreciate it.
This is because ads are never targeted to you directly, but to buckets (audience segments).
If you buy something, you might land in one of those buckets.
Advertiser can buy impressions to those buckets.
The buckets are not refreshed on a daily basis (depending on the audience provider), and therefor can contain stale data.
I believe the GP is talking about the trend of adverts for the exact product you just viewed/bought on the exact store following you around the Internet for a few days.
e.g. you bought a blue striped t-shirt from H&M and it is continually advertised to you by H&M for a few days.
A large part of advertising is making you feel good about something you already purchased rather than convincing you to buy a new product. Someone who doesn’t know about algorithms will see that ad and conclude they bought the right plumbing supplies, better stay with that brand the next time I need some, tell my friends what I bought when they ask about it. Maybe plumbing supplies isn’t the best example.
From the merchant side, at least in the industries we’ve worked with, advertising on Fb is close to worthless. With all that data and all those impressions, it ought to at least breakeven. No where close.
It’s almost as if their business model’s primary focus is not to connect sellers and buyers. I wonder how Palantir feels about the effectiveness of fb data.
Good question. If FB doing all this tracking, keeping records on everyone:
1. doesn't benefit the merchants (by providing better targeting)
2. doesn't benefit the consumers (by providing better targeting)
C. I really don't care if they're running a scam, I'm not on FB nor am I advertising on it.
Then what the hell do they actually need all this tracking data for?!!
All that's left is that it benefits the political influence ecosystem (like you said, Palantir & co).
But! We used to believe it benefits the merchants, too (I don't think we ever honestly believed it benefited the consumer, ever). And for all the same, what if in a few months we'll hear political marketing companies and super-PAC whotsits complain that, also for them, FB ads don't really give a great ROI. That it's so much more effective to cold-call people or go door-to-door and do flabby meatspace stuff.
Then what? Why are they tracking us? Really, why are the big machine learning data centres tracking us? I'm just saying. Anyone who still thinks this century can't get any crazier hasn't been paying attention.
I see those as separate issues. I think just because they know what you may wanna buy doesn't mean they can come up with good marketing to sell it to you.
This kind of reminds me of the mass surveillance debate. Without transparency we can't know for sure if targeted ads are worth the billions being invested. Empirically I'd be inclined to believe they do effectively pair users with ads they want to see. We create bubbles around ourselves, and because I have trained myself to engage very little with the ads they probably do not get any better at swaying me for a product. Most of us grew up at the start with shitty ads that can't serve us. I bet they they work well against people who don't safeguard their interests.
I really really wonder if all the tracking nonsense has had any impact on efficacy. I never click any ads, and if I do, I do it very deliberately, to support a website for example.
Targeted ads aren't targeted because you, as the audience, care about it. It's targeted because I'm the person willing to pay the most for your eyeballs. All the tracking data has done is make it easier for me to target you specifically — it did nothing for how I then choose to use your attention, or what my cost/benefit analysis looks like.
Content-based ads are worse , though, depending on the site. I believe ad spending is never going to go down, even if advertising is very ineffective. It's something that you need to do to expand a business and there is no alternative.
Probably. My medium sized city has several OTA television stations that survive partially on untargeted advertising. Ads shown to the relatively small audience supports the running of a significant amount of equipment including broadcast antennas, satellite uplinks, a helicopter, several vans with lots of radio gear in them, servers, a staff of on air personalities and all the other people required to run the station.
How much infrastructure does Facebook need to serve this city? Facebook will be fine.
Unfortunately, even if they did that, a lot of their other products would suffer as things like Assistant etc. depend on the personalised data collected from their users internet traffic.
On the other side of the coin, targeted advertising is a way to get viewers of high-quality content to view your ads without paying a premiums to the people and institutions that produced the premium content.
This saves money for the advertisers, by transferring wealth away from content creators.
It boggles my mind that publishers still favor this model over display ads (targeted to articles, not readers).
Well, except for the people being targeted, and the ones being served malware, and the ones having their cross-Internet activities being tracked, logged, and analyzed. It's not such a win for them.
They win too. They get content without having to hand over cash.
Everybody wins because the value of what they are giving is, for them, less than they are receiving. And the value of what they are giving, for others, is more than what others are giving.
Going back to non-targeted ads would significantly reduce monetization, reducing the pile of money available to content creators, and driving many (if not most) of them out of business.
You can always not access any ad-funded content or service, the option is yours. Take it.
I wish more people understood this. We're in the middle of an unsubstantiated moral panic, like the old "video games will make kids into killers" panic that turned out to be totally false.
MySpace used to have animated DoubleClick style untargeted ads. It sucked. Facebook crushed them partly because it's a much cleaner experience and Facebook ads are so much higher quality.
The problem with all the people claiming this sort of move is great is it doesn't ring true, they sound almost in physical pain over "tracking" (a scary word for very primitive and broad-brush techniques, by and large).
But where are the people who have actually suffered concrete, quantifiable harm? Some real, unarguable case where someone suffered because of ad targeting? If there were a real harm here, given the enormous scale of the internet, there should be millions of such stories but the only one I can think of was years ago, about a supermarket that discovered that women who buy X, Y and Z things together are very likely to be pregnant. They caused a minor family drama by sending a teenager adverts for baby stuff when her parents didn't know. Arguably this is a hole the teenager dug for themselves, but even so, it wasn't even internet based stuff from what I recall.
And as far as harm goes, that's about it. I've never been harmed by ads. I've never met anyone else who has been either.
But I remember a LOT of people complaining back in the bad old days about the barrel-scraping punch the monkey inventory that typified the web experience.
Interesting research but no actual harm was done - the researcher experimented on a friend whom she already knew was gay, and Facebook made changes to close that glitch. Being able to do such things is certainly not an intentional part of their ad system.
I only skimmed parts of the paper but I also question the premise. It seems the attack is entirely dependent on you being 100% sure your ad is so carefully targeted it'll only show to a single person. If there's any doubt at all that it might match even two people, the attack doesn't work. Seems rather hard to pull off in anything other than lab conditions.
> It's neither "moral panic" nor people oppose targeted ads because it will harm us
Then just don't access any ad-sponsored content. You are the one deciding to use it, just make that call.
I hate ads like anyone else, but I know that ads pay for the services and content I access. As much as I'd love for them to go away, I don't want it because I know the impact it would have on the availability of content and services.
> You do realize that with adtech dying those sites and services will go out of business, right? Or you didn't think that through?
When will this happen? Does it happen before or after Hollywood stops making films because piracy, and the entire recording industry falls over and bursts into a fire?
If someone parks their van across the street from my home, sits there writing down everything they see me do, following me to work to do the same, I can’t show you tangible harm. I think most people can agree that it’s reasonable to object to this, no matter what the stalker’s benign stated purpose is.
It's only reasonable to object because of the inference that the stalker in question is about to do something much worse.
There are other cases where no such inference is possible, for example, if the person writing things down is a tax inspector investigating benefits fraud. In that case objections on privacy grounds would be ignored.
I'm not sure that the type of content people aren't willing to pay for and people aren't willing to create without payment is really all that worthwhile. I think there's a solid argument to be made that targeted ads just make creating and distributing low-quality clickbait content profitable, pushing more serious content aside.
I'm saying if ditching targeted advertising results in less tracking as well as less content, then I'm all for it because the content the current advertising model enables is so bad we're not willing to pay for it. And it's so meaningless no-one wants to create it as a hobby, either.
I don't mind ads so much. The tracking I detest, and I don't think the benefits are worth the cost to users. Let those who want to opt in to having their lives profiled, instead of the system we have now, where everyone gets their right to privacy violated without even being able to tell when and how it's happening.
Apple appear to be giving us, the users, some ways to claim our privacy back. I really don't see a problem here. Want content that relies on tracking for revenue? Use software that supports the tracking. Don't want it? Use software that doesn't support it.
This would work if there was actually a choice. Nowadays there is not - 99% of sites embed some kind of stalking scripts ranging from ads to Google Analytics or Facebook like buttons.
This also doesn’t work given the masses have zero idea of the tracking that is happening and blindly trust Zuck’s lies on how Facebook respects their privacy. If people knew the extent of the tracking you’d see a lot more backlash.
Nobody is talking about free - I’m happy to pay if I was given the choice.
You may not have the choice or free cars, but you have a choice of plenty of paid cars, including ones that don’t stalk you everywhere you go.
I don’t have a choice between a free Facebook and a paid Facebook that doesn’t stalk me. I have to either take the free Facebook and be stalked.... or not take the free Facebook and still get stalked by their like buttons everywhere.
I could try to do that, or I could just run software that doesn't let me be tracked to the extent possible, signaling to the market participants that I don't want to take part in their panopticon. I fail to see why the latter is so bad.
> They win too. They get content without having to hand over cash.
Nonsense. I'm targeted and the content I get for free is markedly better than the clickbait listicle crap is offering where the vast majority of tracking shit is coming from.
The ONLY place I've noticed the "ads for content" story even remotely work (in the 20 years I've been on line) is some YouTube channels. And they broker their OWN ads. The shit monetised by YouTube itself is still the same 99% clickbait poop.
There's a few exceptions that get monetised and make quality, but they are sooooooo not worth putting up with this shit, nobody ever asked me if perhaps I would like them to take their content AND their ads. Because what is left over WILL contain 99% less loud screaming attention whores.
Nobody is a winner when the people making beautiful things for free are being duped by ad network vultures.
Didn't you get the silly valley memo? The sheep that use our products aren't people. They're wallets with intent, and it's our job to program that intent.
Imho, targeted advertising is the black box / CDO of advertising revenue.
Eyeball time is a commodity. Microtargeting by "smart people" is what enables you to sell $1 worth of eyeballs for $10.
It's going to hurt. But in favor of Google and Facebook is that maybe they have enough last mile and market share that they can just charge the same thing for commodity advertising.
> and arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway.
I think this would be a contentious point, the advertising giants have invested significantly in targeting based entirely on their metrics of it actually working, random anecdotes aside.
I really hope some sort of media subscription service becomes common place.
If I want to read articles online, I'd love to pay $10/m and have it go to the content creators. Ads for me are unacceptable, but I'll happily pay, and I barely even read tech articles.
The specifics of the implementation would have to be very consumer friendly though. Ie, I can't imagine I make all sites combined more than $1/m from my ad traffic each month.. maybe that's not true, I just don't see it happening. So I don't want to (as a consumer) pay $5/m per site or anything silly like that. That's why as a consumer I like the idea of splitting an amount (say, $10/m) up between all places I go.
I remember a service like that... flutter I think? It never caught on though, because people don't like paying. We've got a tough hill to climb in this ad war, heh.
Yeah if you build hardware and aren't dependent on scumlord VC funding you have an advantage over rivals dependent on software and data. Apple and Samsung don't need your data to stay profitable. Google and Facebook are worthless without your data.
Microsoft and Oracle are in a different class. They provide tools to handle high value data.
The Cloud/BigData business, which is the strategic thrust of Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure and Google/GCP, is simply 2nd degree surveillance. BigData is code word for "ever more detailed logs of every human on the planet".
In many ways it has come to mean surveillance-as-a-service. Big Data usually means, “we want monitoring, logging & tracking at a scale large enough to cope with surveillance data ingestion rates.”
There are remarkably few instances of actual “big data” problems, at least in the commercial sector, that aren’t merely surveillance.
As a machine learning engineer myself, this is somewhat of an existential crisis. It truly makes quant finance look like one of the most ethically positive career choices left.
The words "privacy" and "Android" don't go well in the same sentence but at least on Android you can use FF with uBlock origin, while Apple keeps their walled garden with an iron fist (I'm beginning to wonder if that should be even legal; certainly an iPhone is everything but a loss leader for app and media purchases). Samsung isn't beyond mining your data either - the attention economy compromises everything.
Now you just have uBlock origin that can track you - meet the new boss.
With the content blocking framework that has been part of iOS for years, not even the ad blocking app can see your browsing history. It just sends a JSON file to Safari and Safari blocks content based on the JSON file.
Apple's content blocking framework can also work in other apps that embed web views depending on which web view they use. For instance, it works in my RSS reader.
The iPhone a loss leader? Apple has 40% margins, 80% of all the profit in the phone market, and the average selling price of an iPhone is $450 higher than the average selling price of Android.
Apple is not one of the most profitable companies in the world based on media sells.
Yeah I might've used the phrase "iPhone is everything but a loss leader" in a wrong way (I'm actually not quite sure). What I meant is exactly what you said: that it of course is not a loss leader given its price.
Apple is generally showing a superior attitude towards user privacy, even in situations that don't seem directly tied to their own ad channels, as you say. Maintaining a privacy-focused image is good for business in general, hence their reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement to violate individual user privacy.
tannhaeuser's point is worth considering though: Is Apple truly respecting privacy, or are they just refusing to share because they want to own all of the info? Are they not storing private information- like websites you visit and apps you download and such, and using it to target you in their store?
Apple's incredible success thus far selling higher-end computing devices hasn't required them to engage in "big data" tactics.
The fact that there's now popular pushback against the data-gatherers is certainly to their favor, and they'd be foolish not to trade on the fact that "Hey, you know what? We collect very little, and have no interest in monetizing you as a user, because that's never been our business model."
I think Apple does benefit from some solidly ethical leadership here, but it's also probably wise -- I can see lots more data-protection laws coming down the pike in the years ahead, and they'll endanger the big-data approach. If I were Apple, I'd probably stay away from it for those reasons alone.
Right. One would expect the company with the "superior attitude towards user privacy" would choose the option not to give them the keys up. This isn't about which country's government favors privacy, the earlier post claimed a company had a superior attitude which is not completely true even when trying to make excuses for them.
Privacy is a trust game. When for one country you'll make a very public stance against usurping encryption but for another you will do it and remain mum, your principles are called into question. User privacy depends on consistent application of principles and is harmed by setting the precedent that you willingly break it in inconsistent ways without even being vocally against it.
Apple is talking the talk about privacy where it's favourable to them. Is it actually walking the walk when it actually hurts them? That's when you know if a company if serious about privacy or it's just another marketing strategy.
Well, they took a politically- and PR-unfriendly stance when suggestions were made that they should provide an iOS version to the the federal government that allowed a passcode bypass because terrorists.
Again, leaving China would not help their users, but it would be a huge blow to their finances today and in the future. Is martyrdom a good play for a business and its stockholders?
>Again, leaving China would not help their users, but it would be a huge blow to their finances today and in the future. Is martyrdom a good play for a business and its stockholders?
It absolutely will. Apple users will know for sure that Apple respects privacy and will not budge under pressure, no matter what. Point is, Apple talks about being all about user's privacy till it hurts their finances. Thus, it talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.
Google famously even walked away from China at one point of time.
you could easily make the argument that in china, the govt is a given that you have to bow to. if apple believes (and i’m certain they do) that users are more protected from third party actors, then you could definitely argue that apple thought users are better off than they were before
it’s hugely grey; you can’t just say that apple only has principals when it suits them. china is a VERY complicated place, morally
Be it as it may, I believe some actions can benefit both users and companies. Maybe taking privacy seriously is going to benefit Apple's business, but it is going to benefit millions of users, too. So I guess it's a clever move by Apple.
> Apple doesn't do it for the good of mankind, but to push their own ad channels
This may be true. However it's also difficult to dispute that Apple has a far stronger and far more consistent stance on privacy than their competitors.
It was a big influence for me switching from Android to iOS a while back.
Google, Facebook, and Windows 10 have been getting ever more data greedy, Apple mostly haven't. To me, that's significant.
Apple's profits don't come from "their own ad channels" (other than trace-level profits from App Store Search Ads), they come from selling shiny hardware. I'm with you on Google, though.
The scamminess of basically everything sold through SMS billing is so high it makes Google and Apple look like benevolent liberators from the phone companies.
(Anyone remember the days when if you wanted to set a song as your ring tone you had to buy it again?)
So you're arguing Apple and Google should be gatekeepers of digital content instead, with their own currency and every purchase having your personal details and all?
Many Android apps are just Trojans to send home your address and calling lists, or to otherwise track you.
Telcos aren't saints (in fact they're greedy as sin) but at least have to play by the rules for a regulated market with standardized protocols. Deprecating open protocols not only hits SMS spammers but also limits your freedom as both publisher and consumer.
>Anyone remember the days when if you wanted to set a song as your ring tone you had to buy it again?
That was annoying, but not as sinister as you expect. With garageband, you could make custom ringtones out of your music files. It was cumbersome, but it was possible.
Apple doesn’t do it for the good of mankind. Anyone that expects a public or VC backed company to do that, minus regulations requiring them to do that (as in the case of a non-profit, but even there it’s the exception), is the fool.
Apple does it because they have a business model that incentivizes them to make better products for their users. In addition, all their competitors have a business model that is dependent on getting as much data on their users as possible. Attacking and damaging their competitors’ predatory business model not only makes the Apple product better, and therefore more attractive to users, it also undercuts their competitors, making Apple relatively stronger.
Apple’s greatest strength is that by charging a premium on hardware they are heavily incentivized to deliver a high quality product.
> the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection
Google's business is a bit more diversified than Facebook's, though, especially considering their expansion into providing cloud services. And they have long-term ventures that could really pay out in the future, like Waymo.
As a long time user of Android, I am for the first time contemplating buying an iPhone. I probably would if not for the lack of headphone jack. If I ever replace my old, rarely used home laptop, I'd probably get a macbook (unless of course I was building a gaming machine).
I do wonder however how much influence this will have on the average user. Those of us who work in the industry are far more aware of tracking and personal privacy. I'm not sure how much the typical consumer will actually care.
Wasn't there a report recently that FB's user base has dropped by several percentage points in the wake of their privacy scandal? If so, that would imply that many average users are taking it seriously -- that would be millions of people who stopped using FB.
Teens don't want to use FB because it's the same platform that granny is on. "FB is for old people" trend has been going on for years. It has little to do with the recent news.
But to automatically say it has anything to do with the latest news is like all of the "stock analyst" who claim after the fact to know "investor sentiment".
Your links are mostly before the privacy scandal. So how can it relate to that? Facebook’s stock wouldn’t be a few percentage points away from all time highs again if things were this bad for them (of course we won’t know for sure until next earnings report).
Microsoft could do this too - push out a security update to Win10 that blocks tracking and cut Google and Facebook off at the knees overnight. Windows Privacy Defender, they could call it.
I believe the only reason they haven’t done this already is lingering fears of antitrust again.
Apple and MS only have to do ads because that’s the state of the industry. But they could ditch that model entirely and retain all their core revenue streams if the attention economy was no longer a thing.
I wish Microsoft would still have a viable option for phones. I don't like iPhones or Apples walled garden, but I don't wan't to be dependent on Google either. I wonder if they would have a better chance today, when cross platform app development is easier and most people only use a handful of them.
I wish that too. Especially that their UX ideas were good, and their tablets show capacity of doing better than both Apple and Google.
Alas, I feel the mistake they made was releasing an MVP of a phone OS, instead of hitting feature parity with Android (or at least iOS) of the era. Phones have quite a big switching cost - if you make a mistake and are not super wealthy, you may need to live with it for the next year, or more. By releasing and aggressively pushing a subpar product, Microsoft completely obliterated the trust in their mobile brand.
Right. That was a problem as well. But what I remember the most from the experience with early Windows phones is the lack of many OS-level features and configuration options I came to expect from Android.
I wish developers started to care about the users again instead of looking for the ways to make a life easier for themselves.
I’ve never saw enjoyable cross-platform app and I doubt I ever will, by definition.
Only the Linux version of Skype used to be based on Qt. The Windows, Linux and macOS Skype clients were all separate codebases with considerably different UI rather than one cross-platform application (although I'm sure they probably shared a lot of the network, protocol and VoIP code).
I think the "best" option for now would be an Android phone without Google services. And as a developer you don't have to play to put your app in the F-Droid repository (you may want to donate though).
In 2019, the Librem 5 will probably be a good (expensive?) option too.
You don't need root and developer options on such a device. If your device is well supported, you may have regular OTA updates with latest security patches (which is not always the case with stock Android by the way).
Using only apps from F-Droid, I'm reasonably sure no app is doing something shady. Google is probably not spying on you as much as on a regular Android phone. No need for having a Google account to install apps, by the way. Depending on the device, SELinux policies can be enforced (and probably are on a well supported device).
F-Droid requires enabling insecure sources but this is not a problem if you don't download random APKs from the Internet and on Oreo, it seems insecure sources are handled with a permission given per app. Insecure sources can be enabled in any regular Android device anyway.
I can't verify what are doing the numerous proprietary blobs all over the place, but this is true on any current Android phone so far (and this is my motivation to put "best" inside quotes actually).
Why would this option not be secure enough compared to a regular Android phone?
Sure you have to deal with an unlocked bootloader, but if someone gets physical access to the phone, they can unlock it anyway. They will not get access to the data since it is encrypted (it should, anyway!).
(p.s. for posterity: I meant "pay", not "play" in my previous message)
Fuck that. Microsoft is worse then Google when it comes to privacy. At least when you opt out to Google's tracking, it doesn't magically opt back in after an update. Microsoft is a toxic company that simply has a good PR team on social media. I wish we had the Ubuntu phone instead.
I get that people may not like the tone here...but the central point is true. Microsoft is even more aggressive about this stuff than Google now. Having to opt-out per major update is just insane, almost nobody will remember to do it making the opt-out virtually meaningless.
I'm not attempting to derail, or to engage in OS partisanship, AT ALL. I'm actually hoping I can get a more nuanced answer here, at HN, than I might posing the question elsewhere.
What do you mean specifically about the walled garden? Is it just the fact that it's a bit of a hassle to get apps on an iOS device without going through the store, or is it something else?
(I'm absolutely not trying to argue your preference; some people just like Android's take on the mobile OS better, and that's fine. I'm specifically interested in your comment about the walled garden, and what that prevents or gets in the way of for you.)
> it's a bit of a hassle to get apps on an iOS device without going through the store
You seem to be deliberately understating the difficulty. For the overwhelming majority of the people, it's simply not an option.
I'm not who you're replying to, but it's hard to honestly argue that Apple doesn't maintain a walled garden unless you come up with a euphemistic term that means the same thing but sounds more generous. It's entirely possible that such a model doesn't bother you, and it clearly doesn't bother most of their enormous customer base, but that doesn't make it not the case.
I'm really not. I have apps on my iOS devices right now that I didn't get from the app store; all I had to do was download them from the publisher, and then accept their signature in the security settings. (In my case, it's the frozen-in-amber old version of Sonos, which they'll let you have if you ask for it, but presumably this would work for anything.)
Anyway, you're coming at me apparently ready to argue about whether it is or isn't a walled garden. That isn't what I'm asking about. I'm asking what, specifically, Apple won't let you do that you want or need to do that leads you to describe it as a walled garden.
> Is it just the fact that it's a bit of a hassle to get apps on an iOS device without going through the store, or is it something else?
A bit? Maybe you can provide a nuanced answer here. As a user, when browsing a site on my iPhone, what steps do I need to take to download software from a website and run it? Can you provide an example of a website that provides their software for iPhone download without Apple's permission? I can build and publish an APK on my website without Google's approval. That approval is the wall, the only place to get apps is the garden.
There's not a broad repo of software other than the app store, but see my other comment: Sonos distributes a prior version of their controller via their own web site. You download it from there, but you have to give the "okay" in the security settings to trust it before it'll work.
Another example is Blink.io, which is currently the best terminal emulator for iOS. (It works GREAT, btw -- I can use emacs and orgmode in it, even.) Blink is in the app store, at $19.99, but you can also download and build from source and get it on your device that way. That's more trouble than most folks will go to, but my assumption is that it's not too high a bar for most folks who are seriously sideloading software on Android.
The main problem with the walled garden is that it takes control away from the end user. In exchange, apple can provide a better end-to-end experience.
Android fixes this with side loading, but forces you into a surveillance model that many find unacceptable.
At win phone’s peak many people (including me) incorrectly thought that MS would be able to provide the best of both worlds, since that’s what windows used to be, and they weren’t ad dependent at the time.
With Win 10, it is clear that they’re going the opposite direction: surveillance + walled garden + pay for the OS and services.
This let’s them triple monitize the windows platform, so it is great for the short term stock price, but it is a risky, user-hostile, bet.
Full disclosure: had android, then win phone, typing this on an iPhone.
MSFT has historically had a REALLY hard time doing anything objectively good and successful in mobile. It's amazing to me, given their resources.
I think, in the Ballmer years, what hurt them was his ideological obsession with Windows Everywhere -- like, down to the Start button. I'm still pretty convinced that mobile needs a fundamentally different interface than desktop, and not coincidentally that's the way Apple has approached it. MSFT under Nadella is way better in lots of ways, but they still seem to think Windows oughta be the way for every device, and it hurts them.
Are there any legal ways (as in not breaking any ToS) to get iOS apps onto your phone which aren't in the app store?
The walled garden doesn't stop at apps and the app store, but it includes how easy it is to integrate non-Apple products into your Apple device or how easy it is to integrate Apple devices into non-Apple products. Which is often near or completely impossible and Apple doesn't provide any support for it. If it's non-Apple there's no reason to support it.
Just take a look what they did to OpenGL. Open standards implemented by pretty much everyone gets deprecated for their proprietary Metal implementation.
The walled garden isn't only about apps, but it's any interaction with the non-Apple world or from the non-Apple to the Apple world that is being made very complicated if not impossible at times.
>Are there any legal ways (as in not breaking any ToS) to get iOS apps onto your phone which aren't in the app store?
Yes, there are.
You can compile your own and sideload, or you can download precompiled apps and allow them to execute explicitly in the security settings. It's just that most people don't care to bother.
I get that "the walled garden isn't only about apps," but I really don't see examples of it being a problem. You broadened the question to "Apple" from "iOS;" are you aware there's absolutely no walled garden AT ALL for apps on the Mac? You can download software from ANYWHERE YOU WANT; my emacs build came from gnu.org.
As a Mac user in a Windows world I've always been able to interoperate pretty well, at least at the user/app level. For example, both OS X and iOS have native Exchange support, which is huge. (And the native tools are more capable than Outlook in lots of interesting ways that aren't germane here.) This is something that Apple explicitly supports. Macs talk to Windows file shares without issue. So I guess I don't really know what you mean here at all.
I can't speak to OpenGL, but given that Apple development has always kind of gone its own way I'm not sure that's a great example of a walled garden where actual user experience is concerned. Can you say more about why that applies?
Can facebook release a phone where you can develop apps with swift and an API similar to the iOS API? Or at least with a translation layer? Would that be illegal?
That would allow devs to develop apps for both platform very easily.
This is not new however, companies have been trying to find ways to deprive others from data. For example, Google's strong push for https adoption was mostly a play to deprive ISPs from detailed web browsing data.
Microsoft could've done the same to Google when it started that mini Do Not Track war.
But it chose to fight a useless battle, when it could've added a tracking or ad blocker by default to the Edge browser instead, because at the time it wasn't sure whether or not to quit the advertising business for good (Bing was losing a lot of money at the time) or double down on it. It seems to have chosen the latter with all the tracking it has put in Windows 10.
But Apple has its own ad platform, and a recent report says Facebook shared user data with hardware companies like Apple. IMO Apple wants to kill tracking pixels and ads to make their in-app ads more valuable to bidders. This is a business decision.
This is why I reward, and will keep rewarding Apple with my money. In a capitalistic system, voting with dollars may effect the change that voting with ballots may not.
To be clear I was not endorsing the current system, as much as observing that monetary incentives are powerful motivators for companies to change their behavior.
Also, not all currencies require income: when using DuckDuckGo instead of Gooogle, one is redirecting ad money from one company to the other; or think of Keybase teams vs Slack, Gitlab vs. GitHub, etc. Every choice we make can affect whether money is sent the way of companies that share our principles or not.
> voting with dollars may effect the change that voting with ballots may not
This does not mean 'real' change is only created by consumption. I think spac means that consumption may well affect what political institutions do not. So people with less money can still use their political votes to change many things. I would contest the idea that they do not vote (significantly) as consumers though.
People with less money still have some money, and rich people don't buy ten iPhones, while many poorer people do still buy one as the richest people do too, so any kind of consumption with a very steep decline in marginal benefit probably hands out power to individuals in the market more equitably than you would otherwise expect.
Apple is very clear that only wealthy people can have privacy. If you don't give them money for iPhones and Macs, no iMessage for you. Remember how they publicly made fun of "green bubbles", painting talking to non Apple users as something bad?
1. You can buy a used iPhone -2 generations for under $200, and it will run the latest iOS with all security updates, which is more than you can say for a used Android phone.
2. Apple is not the one violating privacy at the lower price points. If you’re going to blame a company for making privacy “only for the rich,” blame the company that invades your privacy on the cheap devices, not the one protecting it on the more expensive devices.
You 're presenting a false dilemma. Apple is not competing with google on hardware (srsly, google's business is search advertising). Are you saying you'll start using apple.com for search or for social networking?
I think it'd be nice to have a browser option where it simply won't load content from outside of the current domain. Though at the moment that would break a lot of the web, it'd be a much more neutral solution. To me what's more alarming than Facebook is what percentage of websites load fonts/js/analytics from Google (even Freedesktop.org did till I pointed it out on their mailist). They don't get a referral link (I think?) but they still effectively know when you're online or not
Apple blacklisting sites/companies is honestly more scary... that's basically anti-net-neutrality.. if you're naughty (or Apple doesn't like you) you can't have your images loaded?
> I think it'd be nice to have a browser option where it simply won't load content from outside of the current domain. Though at the moment that would break a lot of the web
I have been using RequestPolicy Firefox extension for that for years. You can manually approve domains (ex. let website X load stuff from domain Y as well), so once you figure out which of the dozen other domains it tries to connect to is serving static content (CSS, images) it works great.
Unfortunately, new Firefox broke this, so you can only use it with Firefox ESR currently.
Umatrix does a significant portion of what you desire. You can set global rules, so I always block Facebook. I have a separate browser for stuff like banking where I don't want to break the websites by blocking JS.
As to your second point, I think there's a huge, gaping chasm between apple blocking Facebook's tracking and the collapse of civilization at the hands of apple's alleged anti net neutrality.
> simply won't load content from outside of the current domain
This would be a very bad idea!
First because it will break a lot of legit use-cases: CDNs, distributed architectures, SSO, payment gateways, ...
Second because it won't actually prevent the tracking: it would be easy to make a subdomain and point it to Google Analytics or any ad network to "re-enable".
> Second because it won't actually prevent the tracking: it would be easy to make a subdomain and point it to Google Analytics or any ad network to "re-enable".
> I think it'd be nice to have a browser option where it simply won't load content from outside of the current domain.
Take a look at uMatrix[0]. With the two rules
* * * block
* 1st-party * allow
you'll achieve what you want.
> To me what's more alarming is what percentage of websites load js from Google
That's where the Decentraleyes[1] plugin comes in handy. It injects a locally cached version of 3rd party cdn libraries. To use it easily in conjunction with uMatrix, you'll need some more rules that you can find in the FAQ[2].
Decentraleyes is fantastic. Makes the internet way more usable from China.
But I guess my point was that if Apple crammed a first-party-only system down our throats and 20-30% of the population was forced into this new paradigm - then that would make websites change and the internet would change in its nature. If I use uBlock.. well then I just make my life irritating :)
There would be a ton of problems with that. E.g. PCI essentially requires credit card forms be served by a different domain now, so you'd lose the ability to use credit cards online.
So is Apple trying to position itself as the Data Protector Platform You Can Trust? Like how The New York Times has seen a record increase in subscriptions because of fake news.
The economic value of ad personalization is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
A part of that value goes to Facebook, Google, and other social media and advertising firms. A part goes to publishers, who provide free shit such as news to billions of people. A part goes to advertisers who get to sell more stuff. A part goes to consumers who get to see the aforementioned free news, plus occasionally see slightly less shitty ads.
When Apple blocks user data, it destroys a lot of economic value, which costs jobs; a lot of them are in the US since the biggest advertisers, publishers, and ad firms are US based.
Maybe it's worth it because privacy. But it certainly hurts millions of people who depend, directly or indirectly, on the effectiveness of ads.
I can't really think of a nicer way to say this: I don't care.
I get the theory. I get that everyone wants everything for free, and many providers still need a return. But we've let adtech run wild, and they've just got scummier and scummier.
"When in hole, stop digging". adtech really need to start taking responsibility for their own actions. They've been at war with users for far too long, and still play victim when the user doesn't appreciate it.
One the one hand, I agree wholeheartedly. But then there is reality. You can make two equally nice services, and charge a nominal fee for one while making the other one free but with lots of offensive advertising and tracking ... and you could tell users the truth about all of it ... and still, the 'free' one would dominate and the paid one would go out of business. This is the world we live in.
When your say "scummier", are you referring to Facebook ads that follow your recent activity online? Or something else?
On another note, as you put it, everyone wants everything for free. Is it really your place to tell them they can't have it, by disrupting the flow of money that makes that free stuff possible?
This is the industry that created the popup/pop-under, and abused it until it got to the point where every reasonable browser has integrated functionality to block & whitelist them.
Now they're abusing mass data harvesting and profiling until it too gets to the point where every reasonable browser will integrate functionality to block & whitelist it.
This is an industry that targets users as prey, and cries foul when we play hard to get.
For me, most advertising lives on a scale. At one end we have advertising that seems mutually beneficial to all, like sponsorship of podcasts. At the other end of the scale, we have unsolicited bulk email, which I've never seen anyone try to defend.
It feels like each generation of web advertising starts somewhere in the upper third of this scale, and then digs and digs to sink as low as it can, until some measure is brought in to make this generation ineffective. Then they go off, come back with a new model, and start digging all over again.
Ultimately I do wish they'd come up with a model that isn't abusive of users, publishers and even their own advertisers; but at this point I'm inclined to believe this leopard can't change its spots, and will always sink as low as we allow it to.
>The economic value of ad personalization is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
Would like to know more about this. Who says this? How was this measured? Would like to see the data that supports this statement and how it was done.
My problem with the internet and advertising is pretty simple.The site can to do whatever they wish to do there, ads, tracking, whatever. BUT - the site itself is the only other party in this relationship.
The current reality is that there are dozens of hidden parties in the mix.
Just take ad revenues (not just gross profits since we also want to count the money going to publishers) of large tech firms. Then deduct however much of that you think was the reduction in offline advertising (most of it, non personalized) as ad spend shifted to online. Then add another 20-50% of typical ROI (an advertiser would only spend $1 on ads if they think it would increase their profits by $1.20-$1.50).
You would easily arrive at the ballpark of several hundred billion.
If you disallow sites from using third party ads and ad tech, they would only get a small fraction of their normal ad revenues. Even without that, many publishers end up giving up on the ad model, either going for paid content / promos (far more misleading IMO), subscriptions, transactions, or just shut down entirely. If you reduce ad income by several times, a lot of free stuff on the web will disappear, and with it the jobs at those publishers and the advertisers who sell more things due to those ads (non personalized ads aren't very effective).
I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying that's something worth knowing before settling on an opinion about this topic.
So it really does have to do with Facebook services only? That's what I thought yesterday, but still wasn't sure. Why not all social media then? What if I do want to share/like stuff? Just don't use Safari?
zucc buys relationship with Apple by handing over user data. A few years later and apple rebukes facebook by jacking what I assume is sandboxed javascript when facebook has bad pr
Does anyone know what Apple's stance is on using Facebook/Google/etc for targeted advertising of their own products?
My assumption would be that they use every tool at their disposal to advertise/sell their products, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised and find out that they are putting their money where their mouth is on the flip side of this (the companies that pay for/fund the collection of this data).
I regularly see Apple banner ads on news sites like the homepage of the Washington Post. I have not checked, but I bet that these ads are served through an ad platform like Doubleclick and are targeted at me based on data they have about me.
I have been actively using Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and I do most of my shopping online. What always boggles my mind is that how do advertisers make money? I don't remember the last time I actually saw an ad on Facebook/Google, liked the product so much that I instantly bought it. Everyone I know in my circle would agree and comply with me.
That's a pretty closed feedback loop and not yet representative of the web as a whole.
A simple example of someone different are those who work around me who work in a corporation and aren't allowed ad-blockers by company policy and look at Ads by force.
However what I found recently was so do others. I was with my friend, and we wanted to know the exchange rate, so my friend fired up his phone and googled it.
We got to a web page with tiny white boxes with black text, and a half screen booking.com ad. I asked him what his thoughts were on annoying ads shifting the content down like that, and he said "I haven't seen an ad for years mate".
The glaring device screen was mostly ad and he failed to even make the connection.
It makes me wonder, are ads really so easily ignored, or have ads went down some psychological hole where you think you are clever but a few years later you are foaming at the mouth as a booking.com customer?
I don't remember the last time I clicked on an ad either. But there's definitely been times when I'm looking to buy something and I google a company I know offers that product—often through advertising.
I would be more than happy to pay for a premium Facebook and premium Google where 0 tracking bytes are harvested about my activity and I just use their product as it is. But we all know that as much as some people sitting in the boardrooms of these companies would want a premium service model too they will never allow it. Tracking users make them money on multiple folds that premium revenue stream would be a chump-change for them.
They way I use Facebook and the kind of information I have shared with it (photos, places, connections) I have already established a valid identity with them. I don't use Facebook as some anon profile "LonelyGirl99". By paying them a premium fee Facebook and I would bind into a new agreement about not persisting my information for ad tracking and wherever possible ask its third party affiliates to do the same. Say you and I are both logged in and actively commenting on TechCrunch. You are a free user and I pay premium. TechCrunch can request FB to have metrics for free users but not for premium. Unless FB provides a backdoor, has a bug or TechCrunch savvy programmers can hack FB social plugin to extract info about premium users as well. Similarly, FB will also not sell my meta-data to advertisers. Even if I fall well into the targeting of advertisers I will be excluded. FB will not even give me "opt-out" options. I will be opted-out by default unless I choose I want to be opt-in. I will have more tight control over shared entities as well. If my ex tagged me in his/her pictures and then we are unfriended, then I would still have the option to go through his/her pictures and choose to remove myself (I think FB allows this currently anyway). Basically the contract b/w me and FB will be iron clad.
I hear this sentiment a lot. Here's why it doesn't work:
If facebook sets the price at $20/mo for no ads no tracking, most of the people who can afford that actually generate more than $20/mo of ARPU for facebook with ads. So they get this adverse selection where mostly only the wealthy (highly valuable advertising targets) opt out of ads and this eventually decreases FB's revenue.
If they raised the price to offset this, the adverse selection would get even stronger.
The flip side of this is that Netflix could almost certainly make more money if they showed interstitial video ads, because this allows them to effectively make more money off wealthier people (because advertisers pay more to advertise to them).
> most of the people who can afford that actually generate more than $20/mo of ARPU for facebook with ads
How so? I’ve never clicked on an ad other than by accident, and I actively despise any brand that tried to push me their garbage via ads.
I’m not sure I ageee with you there. I’d say most people who can afford that are actually making Facebook less money because they’re smart enough to see through the bullshit and ignore the ads.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadasking the people that working in adtech, cross-device usage prediction and the likes: do you actually think it will disrupt your business or there are always workarounds and are relatively chill about it?
They're going after the meat right away, like cookie synchronization ("Tracker collusion") and the first-party tracker hack that Criteo pioneered, effectively disabling almost all the tracking possibilities on iOS. As a user, this is awesome.
And if you want to track, you need to provide both value (i.e. an authenticated service) as well as get explicit consent from the user.
Unfortunately, this will also serve to concentrate the power in the hands of Google and Facebook, who have and/or will create such authenticated embeds.
Note that all this hardtalk specifically excludes the mobile ad IDs. Apple would face much more headwind from GOOG and FB if they went about killing these. This is going to be very interesting, as Apple will need to carefully tread up to a point, after which there could be harsher repercussions.
They also know that an iPhone without access to Google Maps, Search, Mail, Authenticator, Youtube and a whole lot of other essential services won't be worth much to end users anymore.
Source: I'm working in Adtech, but we chose a different approach of giving users an actual benefit and being careful, compliant and frugal with data. All these recent updates about Apple and GDPR mainly hit the really bad players of the industry that just hoard sensitive data through shady channels and arbitrage it to hell — and I consider that a good thing.
Google Authenticator => Authy (it reimplements google auth) Search => Safari Gmail => Native Mail (its not like Google will drop IMAP support)
Killing YouTube on iOS would be pretty bad for Apple, but I’m sure that wouldn’t be profitable for Google (cutting off a third of an already-unprofitable company? no thanks). What’s left bedides that, Google docs? Well Apple has their own suite so does Microsoft. And they both have web editors that rival Google Docs and support multi-user editing. In general I’m pretty skeptical about this assertion that Apple “can’t” step on Google’s toes.
It doesn't reimplement Google Auth. Both are just different implementations of RFC 6238.
Try OTP Auth[0] on iOS that fully respects privacy and security. It was Authy asking for email first that prompted me to search and find this.
[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/otp-auth/id659877384
(Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Twilio. I am not involved with Authy in any way)
[0] https://support.authy.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001932768-Aut...
I don't know. Apple Maps is almost as good as Google Maps for me. Search I could use DuckDuckGo. Mail I use the native iOS mail client and could easily switch out from my GMail account to anything else. Authenticator I don't use and don't know anyone else who does either. YouTube's an interesting one, but I use it tons less since I got Spotify Premium.
If it was a choice between Apple protecting my privacy and losing all Google services these days, after everything players like Google and Facebook have done? It wouldn't be a difficult decision to keep my iPhone.
But on the other hand, IP+UA is a very good signal when you don't have a lot of devices behind NAT, and if you just have a Facebook ServiceWorker installed, it could track all of the IP addresses you use. And there is nothing preventing first-party tracking, e.g. what if Facebook starts a "Facebook Publishing Platform" which is basically a section of Facebook.com designed to ensure that you get all the user tracking as before. Or what if publications now ask for "Login with Facebook to read this article".
They can though - they can go back to untargetted advertising based on page content as they were doing 10 years ago. All the personal tracking data is a layer on top of that tech aiming to improve the 'targettedness' of adverts. Nothing in the online ad industry really needs any of that personal data, and arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway.
I worked at a smaller tech company, and we kept saying "Correlation does not imply causation", and trying to come up with ways to separate them, etc. We spent/wasted a lot of time on this, explaining it to non-mathy people (which leads to even less confidence in data).
Then I went to work at one of the big tech companies, which is probably one of the best in the world at testing/data for product, and there I never heard it. If there was correlation, unless it was clearly spurious or a statistical fluke, they pushed on it hard. "It looks like more X means more DAUs. So let's manufacture more X." And it works pretty well for that company.
My takeaway is, I stopped thinking about this too much. Today, if there's correlation, unless it's clearly spurious/etc, and unless somebody has a better idea, I tell the product/eng team to push hard on it and don't even mention correlation vs causation.
Even in science where the focus is actually on proving things, it is difficult to prove causation. I see this more as a question of whether you act on a correlation that you’ve discovered or whether you simply talk about it. While it’s fine to discuss things, it sounds like at the small company you worked at, that that was more important than taking action (or perhaps the company was too insecure to make a decision about what to do). At the big company, the focus was on making experiments and seeing what the results are, and then iterating on that. In the end, the business doesn’t care whether something causes something else, it is only interested in adjusting things, measuring results and if they increase some important metrics, then the business is happy. That said, it can be taken to an extreme where only the metrics are thought of as important, rather than other qualitative or hard-to-measure things. It is much easier with web companies who can quickly roll out changes and use AB testing to run experiments. Also, those companies with larger user bases will have better sets of data on which to base their decisions. Companies that are well established will also have historical data that will make it easier to interpret results.
It also sounds like at the first company, the tech team was interested in being theoretically correct, while at the second one, the engineers were interested in trying things.
It is an understandable problem in some ways: good programmers are lazy and won’t want to make unnecessary changes, so they tend to argue against changes that haven’t been proven ahead of time to yield results. However, for the business to thrive, knobs must be adjusted and experiments made. And those programmers have to turn the knobs (or make them adjustable by someone else). So there is a strong counter-motive at play there.
However, good programmers who are also engineers with a focus on the product / business will understand the importance of doing this. It’s important for the engineering team to be aligned with the business and it helps to have cross functional teams. Otherwise you may end up with departments protecting their own interests. See also Conway’s law and its derivatives.
Because it's actually a stupid thing to say. Correlation does not conclusively prove causation would be better. It certainly gives a sensible place to look.
It's no broader a statement than the one you prefer.
What do you think the relevant difference between the terms 'imply' and 'conclusively prove' is?
'to involve something or make it necessary'
'to have as a necessary consequence'
'to involve something as a logical consequence'
Thus XKCD's extension of the phrase to `Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.` -- which is essentially what you're getting at.
Besides, for Google, they don't need Facebook style personal targeting. When you search for womens shoes, they feed you ads for womens shoes, it's a wildly lucrative approach and it doesn't matter if you're 28 or 34 years old, or what your favorite music is (yes, there are gains to be had with more personalized ad targeting even in that case, it doesn't matter, Google's model is still an extreme money machine).
Radio, newspapers and TV were absolute dogshit for targeting for the prior 60 years. It was mostly blast and pray. At least with the Internet, even with less personal targeting, you still gain a lot of tech capabilities to improve ad systems (including intricate content targeting, matched with information on the demographics that like that content, and so on).
I just bought a ladder on amazon, what information does that tell them? Since it's the only tool I've bought from them it doesn't tell them much. They now know that I might be willing to buy more tools from them in the future but doesn't help in targeting which kind or how often. Me being a ladder buyer is a very weak signal that I will buy any particular item from them.
If on the other hand, I've bought 15 Aubrey Maturin books from them over the last few months, it doesn't take the most sophisticated model to determine that I probably want to buy number 16 next. Or that I might like to read the Horatio Hornblower books.
The ads drove you to post here and as a result, I'm reminded amazon is an option for white goods.
It's almost as if, because it's rumoured to have powerful, dark & unknowable Machine Learning behind it, people assume it must be doing something reaaaaaally clever, and we're just not clever enough to realise what it's truly masterminding.
They may have improved.
Generally the ad network does not know if you really completed a purchase or dropped off during the funnel. Presumably advertisers could set up a hook to inform the ad network if you did purchase or not, but I guess they don't care enough to do so.
I think personal info, what you view, search for etc can be useful to both sides when both sides are seeking each other out.
But when it's one-sided is where things get ugly. When Alex Jones is trying to build a captive herd, the kind of data being misused is not so much your personal info/things you have searched for or viewed, but what I call "counter" type data surrounding the content you produce i.e. likes, retweets, views, upvotes etc.
This type of data is what drives the creation of an Alex Jones or a Kim Kardashian. Cause no sane person is out there searching for these clowns. The clowns come into existence only because these count numbers have an influence on people. 14 year old girls from Ecuador to New Zealand look at these counts for guidance on what is hip and that produces a Kim Kardashian with 110 million followers on Instagram.
These counter numbers need to be removed/hidden/shown less frequently or with delay and automatically the world will be a diff place.
When attacking FB and Google(YouTube), Twitter etc these numbers and their visibility to the uninformed and vulnerable of society is what needs to be attacked.
But what happens is people attack the personal info, search and view histories data collection which is actually useful. And that causes unneeded confusion and defensiveness.
even though the conversion rates maybe low.
The argument is that because the conversion rates are low anyway then the targeting doesn't make a big difference.
The sales/marketing guys are just doing what the hivemind says. Maybe I'm unlucky, but I seldom hear one suggest something against the grain. Usually they just say whatever hubspot says.
Different perspectives, different conclusions.
Hah. You're forgetting that the real customer for these adtech companies are infact the sales and marketing teams.
Most recently for me, it was a plumbing part. Now I have targeted ads everywhere for these parts. Sorry org, I finished my project and I won't be doing something similar, hopefully, ever again.
It's genuinely bizarre when Amazon does it. They know I just bought a $500 vacuum... surely they've got the machine learning chops to teach their algorithm that means I shouldn't ever see a vacuum as a sponsored product for a couple years?
Like come on, I just sent you a bunch of these!
You buy x at y store, y store has an ad buy with ShadyAdCo. If you see product x in an ad within z time afterwards, it counts as an influence towards your purchase. ShadyAdCo just made money, and y store can give record numbers.
EDIT: typo
It also fails to account for awareness being a major reason to buy ads. Ford want to advertise to everybody (probably including Amish) because most people will eventually buy a car, and it is important that you think Ford then. Even if you bought a car yesterday it is important to them that you not forget that you can buy a Ford - they know you won't buy for a few years, but they still want you to think of them.
"This location tracking ability has allowed Google to send reports to retailers telling them, for example, whether people who saw an ad for a lawn mower later visited or passed by a Home Depot. The location-tracking program has grown since it was first launched with only a handful of retailers. Home Depot, Express, Nissan, and Sephora have participated."
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/23...
Ask yourself why Facebook counts "post-view" conversions instead of only post-click like AdWords and most others.
New client had been working off the assumption they were seeing ROAS of around 3 (not terrible). When we showed them how to see just the post-click, ROAS is now at 1. That means even if they are selling a product they received for free or stole, ie COGS = 0, they still only breakeven.
Attribution is the key. All this assumes that ad companies and Facebook are honest in the first place about the number of views and clicks an ad has received. Their behavior does not engender much good will for a benefit of the doubt situation.
In a completely different context, ads can be used to reenforce status. That was a separate distinct point gp was making. If you want to buy luxury goods, but can't afford them, a well placed gucci ad can act as a brand anchor & keep you yearning.
Your point stands, that the "mega retarget post amazon ads" are a flaw in the system, but as the system gets more data, they will be tweaked to be more effective.
This specific case - "here are some other vacuums you didn't buy" - is one that seems more likely to hurt my brand loyalty and post-purchase feelings than anything else.
Chances being that anything that irks you about your new vacuum are going to be most accutely felt in the initial period.
So reminding you heavily that there are other, greener-grass vacuums out there seems productive in inceptioning "I'll never buy X brand again!" resentment.
They can do that with random data and it'll work just as well. It's called divination and you don't need to track me for it.
If you buy something, you might land in one of those buckets. Advertiser can buy impressions to those buckets. The buckets are not refreshed on a daily basis (depending on the audience provider), and therefor can contain stale data.
e.g. you bought a blue striped t-shirt from H&M and it is continually advertised to you by H&M for a few days.
It’s almost as if their business model’s primary focus is not to connect sellers and buyers. I wonder how Palantir feels about the effectiveness of fb data.
1. doesn't benefit the merchants (by providing better targeting)
2. doesn't benefit the consumers (by providing better targeting)
C. I really don't care if they're running a scam, I'm not on FB nor am I advertising on it.
Then what the hell do they actually need all this tracking data for?!!
All that's left is that it benefits the political influence ecosystem (like you said, Palantir & co).
But! We used to believe it benefits the merchants, too (I don't think we ever honestly believed it benefited the consumer, ever). And for all the same, what if in a few months we'll hear political marketing companies and super-PAC whotsits complain that, also for them, FB ads don't really give a great ROI. That it's so much more effective to cold-call people or go door-to-door and do flabby meatspace stuff.
Then what? Why are they tracking us? Really, why are the big machine learning data centres tracking us? I'm just saying. Anyone who still thinks this century can't get any crazier hasn't been paying attention.
But I don't know.
https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...
Source?
How much infrastructure does Facebook need to serve this city? Facebook will be fine.
Targeting has become a boogieman I think.
It's the individual targeting that has such high costs (in resources and privacy) for an apparently small increment in effectiveness.
This saves money for the advertisers, by transferring wealth away from content creators.
It boggles my mind that publishers still favor this model over display ads (targeted to articles, not readers).
Not really. It actually increases the pool of money available to content creators.
Everybody wins.
> It boggles my mind that publishers still favor this model over display ads (targeted to articles, not readers).
Because they generate more revenue, I'd guess. Mind-boggling, I know.
Well, except for the people being targeted, and the ones being served malware, and the ones having their cross-Internet activities being tracked, logged, and analyzed. It's not such a win for them.
They win too. They get content without having to hand over cash.
Everybody wins because the value of what they are giving is, for them, less than they are receiving. And the value of what they are giving, for others, is more than what others are giving.
Going back to non-targeted ads would significantly reduce monetization, reducing the pile of money available to content creators, and driving many (if not most) of them out of business.
You can always not access any ad-funded content or service, the option is yours. Take it.
MySpace used to have animated DoubleClick style untargeted ads. It sucked. Facebook crushed them partly because it's a much cleaner experience and Facebook ads are so much higher quality.
The problem with all the people claiming this sort of move is great is it doesn't ring true, they sound almost in physical pain over "tracking" (a scary word for very primitive and broad-brush techniques, by and large).
But where are the people who have actually suffered concrete, quantifiable harm? Some real, unarguable case where someone suffered because of ad targeting? If there were a real harm here, given the enormous scale of the internet, there should be millions of such stories but the only one I can think of was years ago, about a supermarket that discovered that women who buy X, Y and Z things together are very likely to be pregnant. They caused a minor family drama by sending a teenager adverts for baby stuff when her parents didn't know. Arguably this is a hole the teenager dug for themselves, but even so, it wasn't even internet based stuff from what I recall.
And as far as harm goes, that's about it. I've never been harmed by ads. I've never met anyone else who has been either.
But I remember a LOT of people complaining back in the bad old days about the barrel-scraping punch the monkey inventory that typified the web experience.
http://gawker.com/5671582/how-facebooks-targeted-ads-reveale...
I only skimmed parts of the paper but I also question the premise. It seems the attack is entirely dependent on you being 100% sure your ad is so carefully targeted it'll only show to a single person. If there's any doubt at all that it might match even two people, the attack doesn't work. Seems rather hard to pull off in anything other than lab conditions.
Then just don't access any ad-sponsored content. You are the one deciding to use it, just make that call.
I hate ads like anyone else, but I know that ads pay for the services and content I access. As much as I'd love for them to go away, I don't want it because I know the impact it would have on the availability of content and services.
I’m trying hard not to. My wallet is always open when there’s an option to not have my privacy violated.
The issue? Most services don’t allow me to pay, and the ones that do still try to track me after I’ve paid.
The result? My adblocker is happily giving them the middle finger and I can’t wait for adtech to die in a fire.
You do realize that with adtech dying those sites and services will go out of business, right? Or you didn't think that through?
Your comment makes it seem like these businesses are invented recently.
I'm tired of these excuses of business dying.The online ad tech industry brought it themselves.
Also I care more about people than a corporation that exploits people; which is opposite of American culture.
When will this happen? Does it happen before or after Hollywood stops making films because piracy, and the entire recording industry falls over and bursts into a fire?
There are other cases where no such inference is possible, for example, if the person writing things down is a tax inspector investigating benefits fraud. In that case objections on privacy grounds would be ignored.
> creating and distributing low-quality clickbait content profitable, pushing more serious content aside.
Sure, you can make that argument, but why should anyone decide what kind of content is worthwhile?
Are you suggesting a "internet content quality board"?
Let users decide what content is worthwhile, voting with their clicks, eyes and wallets.
I don't see any need for any quality control.
You're saying that you don't like the content, so you'd be ok with it going away.
What about people who like it and use the services?
Nobody is forcing you to consume ad-sponsored content.
Apple appear to be giving us, the users, some ways to claim our privacy back. I really don't see a problem here. Want content that relies on tracking for revenue? Use software that supports the tracking. Don't want it? Use software that doesn't support it.
Then don't use those services. The choice is yours. Let other users assess the value for themselves.
This also doesn’t work given the masses have zero idea of the tracking that is happening and blindly trust Zuck’s lies on how Facebook respects their privacy. If people knew the extent of the tracking you’d see a lot more backlash.
And since when should you have a "choice of products"?
Companies offer products, if you like them, use them.
I don't have a choice of free cars.
You may not have the choice or free cars, but you have a choice of plenty of paid cars, including ones that don’t stalk you everywhere you go.
I don’t have a choice between a free Facebook and a paid Facebook that doesn’t stalk me. I have to either take the free Facebook and be stalked.... or not take the free Facebook and still get stalked by their like buttons everywhere.
Remember, you're the one accessing. The choice is yours.
> They win too. They get content without having to hand over cash.
Nonsense. I'm targeted and the content I get for free is markedly better than the clickbait listicle crap is offering where the vast majority of tracking shit is coming from.
The ONLY place I've noticed the "ads for content" story even remotely work (in the 20 years I've been on line) is some YouTube channels. And they broker their OWN ads. The shit monetised by YouTube itself is still the same 99% clickbait poop.
There's a few exceptions that get monetised and make quality, but they are sooooooo not worth putting up with this shit, nobody ever asked me if perhaps I would like them to take their content AND their ads. Because what is left over WILL contain 99% less loud screaming attention whores.
Nobody is a winner when the people making beautiful things for free are being duped by ad network vultures.
Eyeball time is a commodity. Microtargeting by "smart people" is what enables you to sell $1 worth of eyeballs for $10.
It's going to hurt. But in favor of Google and Facebook is that maybe they have enough last mile and market share that they can just charge the same thing for commodity advertising.
I think this would be a contentious point, the advertising giants have invested significantly in targeting based entirely on their metrics of it actually working, random anecdotes aside.
If I want to read articles online, I'd love to pay $10/m and have it go to the content creators. Ads for me are unacceptable, but I'll happily pay, and I barely even read tech articles.
The specifics of the implementation would have to be very consumer friendly though. Ie, I can't imagine I make all sites combined more than $1/m from my ad traffic each month.. maybe that's not true, I just don't see it happening. So I don't want to (as a consumer) pay $5/m per site or anything silly like that. That's why as a consumer I like the idea of splitting an amount (say, $10/m) up between all places I go.
I remember a service like that... flutter I think? It never caught on though, because people don't like paying. We've got a tough hill to climb in this ad war, heh.
Microsoft and Oracle are in a different class. They provide tools to handle high value data.
There are remarkably few instances of actual “big data” problems, at least in the commercial sector, that aren’t merely surveillance.
As a machine learning engineer myself, this is somewhat of an existential crisis. It truly makes quant finance look like one of the most ethically positive career choices left.
With the content blocking framework that has been part of iOS for years, not even the ad blocking app can see your browsing history. It just sends a JSON file to Safari and Safari blocks content based on the JSON file.
Apple's content blocking framework can also work in other apps that embed web views depending on which web view they use. For instance, it works in my RSS reader.
The iPhone a loss leader? Apple has 40% margins, 80% of all the profit in the phone market, and the average selling price of an iPhone is $450 higher than the average selling price of Android.
Apple is not one of the most profitable companies in the world based on media sells.
Please don't spread disinformation, uBO tracks nothing. Privacy policy is here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Privacy-policy
It's the same thing with Google et al:
> "We're penalizing non-https sites to protect users"
... to push our own ad channels rather than theirs
> "We're disabling insecure MMS on Android phones (Stagefreight bug 2015)
... to eliminate the last remaining open channel for payed content downloads with carrier billing outside of app stores
Apple is generally showing a superior attitude towards user privacy, even in situations that don't seem directly tied to their own ad channels, as you say. Maintaining a privacy-focused image is good for business in general, hence their reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement to violate individual user privacy.
The fact that there's now popular pushback against the data-gatherers is certainly to their favor, and they'd be foolish not to trade on the fact that "Hey, you know what? We collect very little, and have no interest in monetizing you as a user, because that's never been our business model."
I think Apple does benefit from some solidly ethical leadership here, but it's also probably wise -- I can see lots more data-protection laws coming down the pike in the years ahead, and they'll endanger the big-data approach. If I were Apple, I'd probably stay away from it for those reasons alone.
No? They aren’t doing that, at least not the website tracking stuff - that would be a huge violation of their privacy policy.
Only where it benefits them. In China, they have gladly given up encryption keys so that govt. can access user's data.
In the U.S. the law favors their users’ privacy to some degree. Not in China.
Apple is talking the talk about privacy where it's favourable to them. Is it actually walking the walk when it actually hurts them? That's when you know if a company if serious about privacy or it's just another marketing strategy.
Again, leaving China would not help their users, but it would be a huge blow to their finances today and in the future. Is martyrdom a good play for a business and its stockholders?
It absolutely will. Apple users will know for sure that Apple respects privacy and will not budge under pressure, no matter what. Point is, Apple talks about being all about user's privacy till it hurts their finances. Thus, it talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.
Google famously even walked away from China at one point of time.
it’s hugely grey; you can’t just say that apple only has principals when it suits them. china is a VERY complicated place, morally
This may be true. However it's also difficult to dispute that Apple has a far stronger and far more consistent stance on privacy than their competitors.
It was a big influence for me switching from Android to iOS a while back.
Google, Facebook, and Windows 10 have been getting ever more data greedy, Apple mostly haven't. To me, that's significant.
They have their own ad platform which takes 30 - 50% of the cut on advertisements shown in Apple News.
(Anyone remember the days when if you wanted to set a song as your ring tone you had to buy it again?)
Many Android apps are just Trojans to send home your address and calling lists, or to otherwise track you.
Telcos aren't saints (in fact they're greedy as sin) but at least have to play by the rules for a regulated market with standardized protocols. Deprecating open protocols not only hits SMS spammers but also limits your freedom as both publisher and consumer.
That was annoying, but not as sinister as you expect. With garageband, you could make custom ringtones out of your music files. It was cumbersome, but it was possible.
Apple does it because they have a business model that incentivizes them to make better products for their users. In addition, all their competitors have a business model that is dependent on getting as much data on their users as possible. Attacking and damaging their competitors’ predatory business model not only makes the Apple product better, and therefore more attractive to users, it also undercuts their competitors, making Apple relatively stronger.
Apple’s greatest strength is that by charging a premium on hardware they are heavily incentivized to deliver a high quality product.
Google's business is a bit more diversified than Facebook's, though, especially considering their expansion into providing cloud services. And they have long-term ventures that could really pay out in the future, like Waymo.
I do wonder however how much influence this will have on the average user. Those of us who work in the industry are far more aware of tracking and personal privacy. I'm not sure how much the typical consumer will actually care.
The story was that young people aren't using FB. But they are using FB owned Instagram.
https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-act...
https://www.recode.net/2018/2/12/16998750/facebooks-teen-use...
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-shows-faceb...
But to automatically say it has anything to do with the latest news is like all of the "stock analyst" who claim after the fact to know "investor sentiment".
https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-act...
https://www.recode.net/2018/2/12/16998750/facebooks-teen-use...
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-shows-faceb...
I believe the only reason they haven’t done this already is lingering fears of antitrust again.
Apple and MS only have to do ads because that’s the state of the industry. But they could ditch that model entirely and retain all their core revenue streams if the attention economy was no longer a thing.
Alas, I feel the mistake they made was releasing an MVP of a phone OS, instead of hitting feature parity with Android (or at least iOS) of the era. Phones have quite a big switching cost - if you make a mistake and are not super wealthy, you may need to live with it for the next year, or more. By releasing and aggressively pushing a subpar product, Microsoft completely obliterated the trust in their mobile brand.
I think Windows needs to run Android apps like Chrome OS does. Then they will eventually be able to run on phones once again.
I think the "best" option for now would be an Android phone without Google services. And as a developer you don't have to play to put your app in the F-Droid repository (you may want to donate though).
In 2019, the Librem 5 will probably be a good (expensive?) option too.
It is not the best option for a secure device, for which some restrictions are necessary.
Using only apps from F-Droid, I'm reasonably sure no app is doing something shady. Google is probably not spying on you as much as on a regular Android phone. No need for having a Google account to install apps, by the way. Depending on the device, SELinux policies can be enforced (and probably are on a well supported device).
F-Droid requires enabling insecure sources but this is not a problem if you don't download random APKs from the Internet and on Oreo, it seems insecure sources are handled with a permission given per app. Insecure sources can be enabled in any regular Android device anyway.
(edit: and actually, I think enabling insecure sources is not necessary if F-Droid Privileged Extension is flashed on the device (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged...)
I can't verify what are doing the numerous proprietary blobs all over the place, but this is true on any current Android phone so far (and this is my motivation to put "best" inside quotes actually).
Why would this option not be secure enough compared to a regular Android phone?
Sure you have to deal with an unlocked bootloader, but if someone gets physical access to the phone, they can unlock it anyway. They will not get access to the data since it is encrypted (it should, anyway!).
(p.s. for posterity: I meant "pay", not "play" in my previous message)
So for Europe, each major update should either remember your preferences or have them opted out by default.
What do you mean specifically about the walled garden? Is it just the fact that it's a bit of a hassle to get apps on an iOS device without going through the store, or is it something else?
(I'm absolutely not trying to argue your preference; some people just like Android's take on the mobile OS better, and that's fine. I'm specifically interested in your comment about the walled garden, and what that prevents or gets in the way of for you.)
You seem to be deliberately understating the difficulty. For the overwhelming majority of the people, it's simply not an option.
I'm not who you're replying to, but it's hard to honestly argue that Apple doesn't maintain a walled garden unless you come up with a euphemistic term that means the same thing but sounds more generous. It's entirely possible that such a model doesn't bother you, and it clearly doesn't bother most of their enormous customer base, but that doesn't make it not the case.
Anyway, you're coming at me apparently ready to argue about whether it is or isn't a walled garden. That isn't what I'm asking about. I'm asking what, specifically, Apple won't let you do that you want or need to do that leads you to describe it as a walled garden.
A bit? Maybe you can provide a nuanced answer here. As a user, when browsing a site on my iPhone, what steps do I need to take to download software from a website and run it? Can you provide an example of a website that provides their software for iPhone download without Apple's permission? I can build and publish an APK on my website without Google's approval. That approval is the wall, the only place to get apps is the garden.
Another example is Blink.io, which is currently the best terminal emulator for iOS. (It works GREAT, btw -- I can use emacs and orgmode in it, even.) Blink is in the app store, at $19.99, but you can also download and build from source and get it on your device that way. That's more trouble than most folks will go to, but my assumption is that it's not too high a bar for most folks who are seriously sideloading software on Android.
Android fixes this with side loading, but forces you into a surveillance model that many find unacceptable.
At win phone’s peak many people (including me) incorrectly thought that MS would be able to provide the best of both worlds, since that’s what windows used to be, and they weren’t ad dependent at the time.
With Win 10, it is clear that they’re going the opposite direction: surveillance + walled garden + pay for the OS and services.
This let’s them triple monitize the windows platform, so it is great for the short term stock price, but it is a risky, user-hostile, bet.
Full disclosure: had android, then win phone, typing this on an iPhone.
I think, in the Ballmer years, what hurt them was his ideological obsession with Windows Everywhere -- like, down to the Start button. I'm still pretty convinced that mobile needs a fundamentally different interface than desktop, and not coincidentally that's the way Apple has approached it. MSFT under Nadella is way better in lots of ways, but they still seem to think Windows oughta be the way for every device, and it hurts them.
The walled garden doesn't stop at apps and the app store, but it includes how easy it is to integrate non-Apple products into your Apple device or how easy it is to integrate Apple devices into non-Apple products. Which is often near or completely impossible and Apple doesn't provide any support for it. If it's non-Apple there's no reason to support it.
Just take a look what they did to OpenGL. Open standards implemented by pretty much everyone gets deprecated for their proprietary Metal implementation.
The walled garden isn't only about apps, but it's any interaction with the non-Apple world or from the non-Apple to the Apple world that is being made very complicated if not impossible at times.
Yes, there are.
You can compile your own and sideload, or you can download precompiled apps and allow them to execute explicitly in the security settings. It's just that most people don't care to bother.
I get that "the walled garden isn't only about apps," but I really don't see examples of it being a problem. You broadened the question to "Apple" from "iOS;" are you aware there's absolutely no walled garden AT ALL for apps on the Mac? You can download software from ANYWHERE YOU WANT; my emacs build came from gnu.org.
As a Mac user in a Windows world I've always been able to interoperate pretty well, at least at the user/app level. For example, both OS X and iOS have native Exchange support, which is huge. (And the native tools are more capable than Outlook in lots of interesting ways that aren't germane here.) This is something that Apple explicitly supports. Macs talk to Windows file shares without issue. So I guess I don't really know what you mean here at all.
I can't speak to OpenGL, but given that Apple development has always kind of gone its own way I'm not sure that's a great example of a walled garden where actual user experience is concerned. Can you say more about why that applies?
That would allow devs to develop apps for both platform very easily.
Also see the Pinterest/Snapchat/Apple news lately.
But it chose to fight a useless battle, when it could've added a tracking or ad blocker by default to the Edge browser instead, because at the time it wasn't sure whether or not to quit the advertising business for good (Bing was losing a lot of money at the time) or double down on it. It seems to have chosen the latter with all the tracking it has put in Windows 10.
Would you never pay a cell phone bill again but trade your personal data for it? I feel like there’s enough people out there that would.
Also, not all currencies require income: when using DuckDuckGo instead of Gooogle, one is redirecting ad money from one company to the other; or think of Keybase teams vs Slack, Gitlab vs. GitHub, etc. Every choice we make can affect whether money is sent the way of companies that share our principles or not.
This does not mean 'real' change is only created by consumption. I think spac means that consumption may well affect what political institutions do not. So people with less money can still use their political votes to change many things. I would contest the idea that they do not vote (significantly) as consumers though.
People with less money still have some money, and rich people don't buy ten iPhones, while many poorer people do still buy one as the richest people do too, so any kind of consumption with a very steep decline in marginal benefit probably hands out power to individuals in the market more equitably than you would otherwise expect.
2. Apple is not the one violating privacy at the lower price points. If you’re going to blame a company for making privacy “only for the rich,” blame the company that invades your privacy on the cheap devices, not the one protecting it on the more expensive devices.
Yes, Apple carries a premium price, but it's not so high that it prices itself away from all but the absolute dirt poor.
aka bribery
Apple blacklisting sites/companies is honestly more scary... that's basically anti-net-neutrality.. if you're naughty (or Apple doesn't like you) you can't have your images loaded?
I have been using RequestPolicy Firefox extension for that for years. You can manually approve domains (ex. let website X load stuff from domain Y as well), so once you figure out which of the dozen other domains it tries to connect to is serving static content (CSS, images) it works great.
Unfortunately, new Firefox broke this, so you can only use it with Firefox ESR currently.
As to your second point, I think there's a huge, gaping chasm between apple blocking Facebook's tracking and the collapse of civilization at the hands of apple's alleged anti net neutrality.
This would be a very bad idea!
First because it will break a lot of legit use-cases: CDNs, distributed architectures, SSO, payment gateways, ...
Second because it won't actually prevent the tracking: it would be easy to make a subdomain and point it to Google Analytics or any ad network to "re-enable".
How many sites would do that though?
Take a look at uMatrix[0]. With the two rules
* * * block
* 1st-party * allow
you'll achieve what you want.
> To me what's more alarming is what percentage of websites load js from Google
That's where the Decentraleyes[1] plugin comes in handy. It injects a locally cached version of 3rd party cdn libraries. To use it easily in conjunction with uMatrix, you'll need some more rules that you can find in the FAQ[2].
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...
[2]: https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes/wiki/Frequently-As...
But I guess my point was that if Apple crammed a first-party-only system down our throats and 20-30% of the population was forced into this new paradigm - then that would make websites change and the internet would change in its nature. If I use uBlock.. well then I just make my life irritating :)
Firefox does have that as an option hidden in about:config ("privacy.firstparty.isolate").
Net neutrality is about access to internet, not what your browser and/or software supports. An ad blocker certainly isn't anti net neutrality.
I asked Apple for all my data. Here's what was sent back
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r...
So is Apple trying to position itself as the Data Protector Platform You Can Trust? Like how The New York Times has seen a record increase in subscriptions because of fake news.
A part of that value goes to Facebook, Google, and other social media and advertising firms. A part goes to publishers, who provide free shit such as news to billions of people. A part goes to advertisers who get to sell more stuff. A part goes to consumers who get to see the aforementioned free news, plus occasionally see slightly less shitty ads.
When Apple blocks user data, it destroys a lot of economic value, which costs jobs; a lot of them are in the US since the biggest advertisers, publishers, and ad firms are US based.
Maybe it's worth it because privacy. But it certainly hurts millions of people who depend, directly or indirectly, on the effectiveness of ads.
I get the theory. I get that everyone wants everything for free, and many providers still need a return. But we've let adtech run wild, and they've just got scummier and scummier.
"When in hole, stop digging". adtech really need to start taking responsibility for their own actions. They've been at war with users for far too long, and still play victim when the user doesn't appreciate it.
On another note, as you put it, everyone wants everything for free. Is it really your place to tell them they can't have it, by disrupting the flow of money that makes that free stuff possible?
Now they're abusing mass data harvesting and profiling until it too gets to the point where every reasonable browser will integrate functionality to block & whitelist it.
This is an industry that targets users as prey, and cries foul when we play hard to get.
For me, most advertising lives on a scale. At one end we have advertising that seems mutually beneficial to all, like sponsorship of podcasts. At the other end of the scale, we have unsolicited bulk email, which I've never seen anyone try to defend.
It feels like each generation of web advertising starts somewhere in the upper third of this scale, and then digs and digs to sink as low as it can, until some measure is brought in to make this generation ineffective. Then they go off, come back with a new model, and start digging all over again.
Ultimately I do wish they'd come up with a model that isn't abusive of users, publishers and even their own advertisers; but at this point I'm inclined to believe this leopard can't change its spots, and will always sink as low as we allow it to.
Would like to know more about this. Who says this? How was this measured? Would like to see the data that supports this statement and how it was done.
My problem with the internet and advertising is pretty simple.The site can to do whatever they wish to do there, ads, tracking, whatever. BUT - the site itself is the only other party in this relationship.
The current reality is that there are dozens of hidden parties in the mix.
You would easily arrive at the ballpark of several hundred billion.
If you disallow sites from using third party ads and ad tech, they would only get a small fraction of their normal ad revenues. Even without that, many publishers end up giving up on the ad model, either going for paid content / promos (far more misleading IMO), subscriptions, transactions, or just shut down entirely. If you reduce ad income by several times, a lot of free stuff on the web will disappear, and with it the jobs at those publishers and the advertisers who sell more things due to those ads (non personalized ads aren't very effective).
I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying that's something worth knowing before settling on an opinion about this topic.
To be fair it never made any sense digging around a webpage for a like/tweet button to share something anyway.
My assumption would be that they use every tool at their disposal to advertise/sell their products, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised and find out that they are putting their money where their mouth is on the flip side of this (the companies that pay for/fund the collection of this data).
A simple example of someone different are those who work around me who work in a corporation and aren't allowed ad-blockers by company policy and look at Ads by force.
However what I found recently was so do others. I was with my friend, and we wanted to know the exchange rate, so my friend fired up his phone and googled it.
We got to a web page with tiny white boxes with black text, and a half screen booking.com ad. I asked him what his thoughts were on annoying ads shifting the content down like that, and he said "I haven't seen an ad for years mate".
The glaring device screen was mostly ad and he failed to even make the connection.
It makes me wonder, are ads really so easily ignored, or have ads went down some psychological hole where you think you are clever but a few years later you are foaming at the mouth as a booking.com customer?
If facebook sets the price at $20/mo for no ads no tracking, most of the people who can afford that actually generate more than $20/mo of ARPU for facebook with ads. So they get this adverse selection where mostly only the wealthy (highly valuable advertising targets) opt out of ads and this eventually decreases FB's revenue.
If they raised the price to offset this, the adverse selection would get even stronger.
The flip side of this is that Netflix could almost certainly make more money if they showed interstitial video ads, because this allows them to effectively make more money off wealthier people (because advertisers pay more to advertise to them).
How so? I’ve never clicked on an ad other than by accident, and I actively despise any brand that tried to push me their garbage via ads.
I’m not sure I ageee with you there. I’d say most people who can afford that are actually making Facebook less money because they’re smart enough to see through the bullshit and ignore the ads.