I'm no fan of Facebook or Google, but this is a mega-monopoly deciding to crush a competitor. They're saying no to a company's revenue stream, and they've gotten in the habit of doing this to everyone.
The battle is over attention. Users have a finite amount of time to spend looking at their phone per day. The more time they spend scrolling Facebook, the less time they spend on other apps. The less time spent on other apps, the less money they spend on IAPs.
I don’t understand your position. There are many types of “freedom”. Is it freedom for Facebook to invade our privacy that you care about? Or do you care about allowing people to be free from privacy invasion?
Both freedoms cannot exist simultaneously. So are you saying that Apple should not be allowed to decide which freedom to prioritise? Despite the fact that every other comparable company is effectively on the side of Facebook?
Or is there some other kind of freedom you care about? You seem to say that “our freedom” is more important than our privacy, but privacy is a most fundamental type of freedom - literally, the freedom to think our own thoughts.
What other freedom could be more important than that?
I'm not sure I understand your point.
How is Apple crushing Facebook as a competitor by allowing users to give proper consent to tracking.
I could understand if there was really an overlap somewhere, but I don't really see it. They have different business models, Apple doesn't have any social media property that compete with Facebook or Instagram and if Apple really wanted iMessage to crush WhatsApp they should at least show their interest in dominance by having an Android version of it.
Maybe they are competing on resources? but I don't see it either. They don't seem to be going after the same acquisitions.
Maybe Apple is doing this because pleasing or pissing off ad-based companies has no effect on their bottom line and they see it as a good marketing campaign to woo the privacy conscious an earn some brownie points for practically zero expense.
Because Apple is worse, everything you do on the Apple platform has to be taxed, something like Italian mafia did in the past. Until things got heat in 2020, Apple wasn't even allowing payment competition in their iOS App Store. Think about that. Roman empire did the same with their provinces, wanna get romanised (civilised)? You got to pay the tax.
More so, Apple is #3 in the world in game revenue and guess what, Apple doesn’t even make games.
I can't buy an Apple device because of the ideology behind their products. Why expect Apple to put other storefronts on their platform? They have all the rights not to but this also implies that their ecosystem is less liberal, which is also fine. They made the OS and the device. If you hate the App Store, don’t use iOS. It's simple. They run 1984 ads but they are the core of 1984.
There is basically no reason for not providing an OS interface for others to build their own storefronts on your platform. Android showed that it's possible, there's no excuse. Period.
I'm not using Google and Facebook either. I've restricted the traffic from my router to their domains. I have a Samsung phone, using Samsung's store. I use Yahoo for mails. DuckDuckGo as preferred search engine. Only WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook unfortunately) and Discord for social stuff. My browser of choice is Edge. I don't pay oligarchs. Show me respect and openess, I will use your products. Restric my freedom, I will give you the middle finger. Also, I own Twitter and Medium fake accounts.
> I have a Samsung phone, using Samsung's store... I don't pay oligarchs.
Have you come across criticism of the chaebol system or Samsung as a company before? It’s pretty intense what has been going on and what Samsung has been convicted of doing. The wikis give a good overview.
Thanks for sharing, I will go through those wikis. As an user it treats my right. I have the freedom I desire when I'm using their products. And I also get quality among other things. Something that I can't say about Chinese brands, though I've owned Huawei, Xiamoi and ZTE phones before.
I feel like this happens on HN all the time. You make this really grandiose display about all these choices you've made while ignoring that 99.9% of the people using these products are clearly not as informed or aware as you are about the ins and outs of the technologies they're using. That's literally why Apple is pushing for user consent and for users being informed. Not everyone has the same experience you do.
Samsung is actually a company that was specifically called out for bypassing permissions that you denied them. They would dig through the logs of other applications on the filesystem, look through EXIF tags on the files on your camera roll, etc in order to scrape information that they'd send back to Samsung to sell.
None of this is hidden though. We have the absolute choice of not using Apple products. Simple. None of this seems relevant to the discussion at hand either. We can definitely disagree with two companies at the same time.
Facebook is objecting to allowing people to know that they're being tracked everywhere by them. Lots of people don't really understand how that works. I think this is a good thing Apple is doing in this particular case.
Let's not be apologetic towards oligarchs. Apple had broken EU privacy law by allowing iPhones to track users for advertising purposes without obtaining consent. Apple is doing the rIgHt ThInG just because they got caught. Facebook is complaining because Apple got caught and now their revenue has to suffer.
When 50% of my customers (in the US) have an iPhone, there's no choice for me, the developer, but to deal with Apple.
If I were marketing to youths, I'd have to deal with Apple's 90% market share among my customers!
In this particular case I don't care because FB is garbage IMO but the point stands - Apple has too much power in the US and we need to force them to allow third party app stores.
It absolutely is hidden. Apps are not allowed to be transparent with the user, for how much money is being taken by Apple, directly in the app purchase screen.
That is against the app store TOS, to show as a line item, the cost of the Apple cut.
First off, I agree with you that this change is a net positive for privacy.
However, let's not ignore the massive market for apps supported by ads. iOS developers had a way to be modestly compensated (without the Apple tax) in return for an app that is available to anyone for free. How much less profitable are ads going to be because people can opt-out of IDFA? I don't know. But I'm sure many developers are going to think twice about developing free apps for iOS.
Conspicuously, Apple also just reduced it's commission from 30% to 15% overnight for these developers. It seems to me like Apple really wants to nudge developers into creating paid apps. Is it because of privacy, or because it's better for Apple's bottom line? Probably both.
I'm glad Apple found a way to monetize privacy, but I didn't mind installing a free app with a few ads if I knew that I'd only use it a few times.
If Apple wanted free apps on their platform they'd make their SDK available for Linux, where thousands of developers would die for a chance to give free stuff to such a big market like Apple's even if Apple gives them nothing in return.
Your comment reads like Apple removed the ability of Facebook to monetize apps with advertising (which they didn't), and reads as if tracking users' every movement is the only way to advertise (which it isn't).
Furthermore, there are plenty of unjust/unethical systems in this world that - if dismantled - would cost the jobs of honest, hardworking people. That doesn't seem like a valid argument against the question of whether or not tracking people without their consent is itself unethical.
Edit: I want to bring up another point: You mention that using FB ads can allow developers to avoid the "Apple Tax." But not only does the Facebook Audience Network apply its own tax (via revenue share) to app developers, it also refuses to disclose that number! So if you monetize a free app with Facebook, you're paying an undisclosed Facebook tax. Given the Google tax for AdSense is 32%, it's likely that FB's secret tax is higher.
Those are all fair points. I was just speaking about incentives for a new iOS developer today. They might see the option to disable IDFA in addition to Apple's lowering of it's commission as a nudge towards creating a paid app over an ad-supported app in terms of choosing a business model.
I'm sure ad-supported apps are still going to exist, but the pros are a bit muddier now. The perceived devaluation of ads caused by removing IDFA, compounded by the lower Apple tax, are probably going to decrease the number of free apps in the App Store.
Imagine I had a free app, I was showing ads, when there was IDFA, Facebook audience network was pricing individuals, you had value $1 (for sake of argument lets say 10% chance to buy what is advertised) for some advertisement, I had maybe $0.01 (0.1% chance to buy).
Imagine I had 1000 users, 10 like you, 990 like me. Total value was $19.9 ( will net approx 2 sales )
Now we are a 1000 user pool with chance to buy (0.2%), and will be priced accordingly, will be like approx $0.02.
Actually nothing will be changed. Except, the middle man, facebook, will compete with other ad networks with commission, it means more revenue for developers. More privacy for consumers.
For advertisers, on bigger ones, there will be not much effect.
For smaller advertisers, there will be more work involved, but ad networks will manage that (from opt-in IDFA users). Ad networks eventually will discover you sources (apps you can advertise on positive ROI)
Eventually some small advertisers may have small disadvantage on this.
The real dirt behind the scenes is that Apple paid to have an evaluation of how much access was worth to Facebook, told Facebook to pay up or else. Facebook balked at the number, and now Apple is gonna cut them off. Just simple business.
They're saying no to certain privacy violations on their platform. This being detrimental to Facebook's revenue says a lot more about Facebook's business model than it says about Apple's policies.
Using an Oculus Quest you'd honestly have no idea it was using Android under the hood, they've created something that feels extremely slick and crammed full of the UX niceties people would usually associate with Apple.
The AR OS battleground is going to be very interesting.
Interestingly, 3d TV had the same problem as VR now: lack of content. A single movie (Avatar) created the whole industry, and there was little follow up.
I don't think 3d TVs sole issue was lack of content. my belief is that the 3d viewing experience becomes very tiresome and many people were in fact perfectly happy with regular HD tv.
>The AR OS battleground is going to be very interesting.
Not really, once Apple steps in with their own AR headset then Oculus is done. Not only does Apple build their own hardware, they also have the trust needed to make it mainstream.
Trust in the parent company is a core requirement of AR, one that FB will never be able to deliver, their brand is kaputt in that regard. In FBs position I'd try to sell it, the team they have working on it is great, they don't deserve the backlash from the trust issues of the parent company.
I wonder if they'd take another stab at that as a workaround to tracking protection, assuming Android follows suit on this in a year or two. Get users to sign in and now you have all of their installed apps and know what they launch, all tied to a Facebook account.
just curious, do you think this would be a positive development? I have to assume a facebook OS would combine the worst parts of the iOS walled garden and android data mining. but still, I think it would be good overall to have a third major smartphone OS, if only to add a little pressure to the existing competition.
> The HTC First, also known as the Facebook phone, was unofficially declared a disaster after AT&T dropped its price from $99 to 99 cents on Wednesday.
Unrelatedly it's not clear from that quote who did the declaring, which makes me believe it was "declared a disaster" by the author... just classic journalism tricks.
I'm definitely no Facebook fan, but I think they're right to be upset with Apple.
If you look at the documentation in the app store around the Apple privacy policy (which is required for any new app version right now) you'll see a bunch of language that, to me, seems squarely aimed at Facebook and the Facebook SDK.
For example, it specifically calls out third-party auth SDKs, sharing hashed email addresses with third parties, and sharing identities so third parties can optimize their advertising for you.
These are all functionalities where Facebook is the clear industry leader. Especially the language around "hashed email addresses" seemed quite clearly targeting Facebook to me.
I'm surprised Apple's weaponization of the App Store (for example, forcing Sign in with Apple on any developers who use Facebook or Google SSO) hasn't drawn more anti-trust attention.
I definitely applaud Apple's push to be more transparent about the privacy you give up when installing these apps! I just wonder if the rollout could have been done in a more app-publisher-friendly manner.
For years it has been painfully clear that facebook has been a net negative for society.
Bring back the days of being able to trust your device and services you use without have to skim through TOS and hope they didn't throw a Facebook auth sdk in somewhere.
Before the whole "attention economy" bullshit happened you could reasonably trust software from a known, popular company not to be malicious (back then the creepy tracking behavior was considered "spyware" and would immediately get flagged by any anti-malware software, ruin the publisher's reputation and potentially put them in legal trouble).
Nowadays, most software out there comes with some kind of spyware (Facebook SDK, extremely granular analytics sometimes going as far as screen recording, etc) and nobody seems to care.
On the other hand, I don't think it's a healthy situation if companies need to own the entire hardware platform to be safe from another company's whims.
> On the other hand, I don't think it's a healthy situation if companies need to own the entire hardware platform to be safe from another company's whims.
Maybe we (as humans) shouldn't have tried to over-optimize everything and squeeze every bit of whatever we wanted out from something.
As a reader of the old slashdot and a non-native speaker, the progress of score on my comments give me mixed emotions. It first gets a small bump, then hit in the head to -1/-2, making me question my thinking, ideas and my English skills for conveying them.
Then, after a random time, it gets back to 0 and gets a small or a big bump depending on support, converting my comment to a small battleground which is kinda amusing. :D
This could also happen politically when governments make it a requirement. Facebook has the luck that not many in power understand what problems they cause and how they should be fighted.
> and whose incentives happen to align with their customers' privacy
They don't really align so well, see IDFA. Yes, you can opt-out, but there's no reason Apple couldn't change that in the future if shareholders want that.
The reason Facebook has been so riled up in the past few weeks is that IDFA will now be opt-in (with a warning explaining the tracking) instead of opt-out.
so you mean that they need to own the platform in order to be remain hidden with their exploitation of the users data?
a user should be at least aware when his/her data is used for other purposes.
Yes, spyware is at the 'whims' of software security. If only computers obeyed Facebook and other 3rd parties, instead of their users (and supposed owners), so many exciting new business models could thrive!
> On the other hand, I don't think it's a healthy situation if companies need to own the entire hardware platform to be safe from another company's whims.
What about users? What do I need to own to be safe from the whims of a company like Facebook?
“Actually owning” my hardware is no protection against that, though. Sure, it means I can audit what apps are doing, but if I don’t feel like doing that, I’m basically trusting the author not to do things I don’t want them to do. Apple does a lot of the lifting for me on iOS.
I was thinking of Oculus Quest, and how owning the actual hardware would be preferred over being tethered to Facebook through your FB account.
Also, you don't have to audit apps yourself if there's an entire community of volunteers doing it for you, and perhaps even writing alternative FOSS apps.
In a lot of cases with software I trust the iOS platform security model more than I trust a community of volunteers to consistently protect privacy and security. My desktop system is technologically wide open, versus my phone. I don't have to trust that apps aren't doing certain things because the APIs don't allow it. On the desktop I have to trust a community of volunteers, and the authors, and so on.
In theory, the “web of trust” would solve the trust issue. You trust Dev A who trusts Dev B. Therefore, you implicitly trust Dev B. In practice, bad actors and “rouge” developers make it harder than that.
At least a web of trust could to some extent address the issue of loss of trust. At some point Apple, being just a company with shareholders, could start behaving like Microsoft, Amazon, Google or even Facebook. Where would you go then?
Their business incentives are currently more aligned with my desires and needs than any other company. If they started behaving like those other companies, I wouldn't really have anywhere to go. I would probably end up using desktop Linux, but mobile is an open question.
Interestingly the sandboxed web + web browser provided and provides much more trust and security than apps/binaries.
The web browser sandbox was created to solve lots of problems with security of executables, it didn't solve all of them but it did make content by third parties more secure.
Granted the web probably tracks you as much as mobile, but it will need permission to use your camera/mic/etc and you can more easily see what is being tracked, at least the scripts and states.
All Apple is doing it creating a similar security sandbox to the web and they should.
> Also, you don't have to audit apps yourself if there's an entire community of volunteers doing it for you, and perhaps even writing alternative FOSS apps.
Didn’t OpenSSL with Heartbleed show that the “many eyes” argument for FOSS doesn’t hold water?
That is true. The big problem is that employees are paid to find and fix bugs, but unpaid volunteers aren’t. The flip side is that there may be more volunteers than a corporation would hire as employees. The best of both worlds would be being paid to work on open source software (such as Linux).
There's an entire infosec community with white hat hackers that would love to find holes in openssl and talk about them at conferences. Perhaps they gave up on openssl because it has been impenetrable for so long?
As far as I know it was mostly just conventional neglect like you’d expect. Everyone assumed someone else was dealing with it until it was too late to fix.
It’s much improved since then though. Huge portions audited and rewritten.
Point me towards a mobile device I can actually own that has a healthy ecosystem of apps and I'm there.
Librem and Purism sound interesting, but without apple and ios there would be literally no hope in getting away from the toxic business model the ad-tech giants are shoving down our throats.
> On the other hand, I don't think it's a healthy situation if companies need to own the entire hardware platform to be safe from another company's whims.
That's the risk you take working on someone else's platform. If you don't like it, start your own or conform to the new, privacy-enhancing features.
If "being safe from another companies whims" means "my user hostile business model is no longer allowed" then those companies can get either adapt or get fucked.
Apple is making a choice, and I support it and will gladly move back to buying apple products if it means they are willing to fight facebook and google over user privacy.
There definitely are, and I didn’t argue that Facebook was the only way – just that it has done more good for the world than bad.
There are indeed plenty of other ways to connect people without intrusions into privacy, and hopefully Facebook will be forced into those corners (chat apps broken up, content-based advertising instead, offering a subscription, etc.)
People seem to think that the whole thing is rotten and we need to get rid of it, and it’s a great first instinct – but frankly Facebook is here to stay. We need to figure out how we can make that more sustainable.
Don’t want to labour this, but undermining democratic societies is such a negative it’s pretty hard to see any app balancing that one out. And that’s just a single example.
I've seen Facebook's algorithmic feeds radicalize an entire side of my family over the past 10 years because they've been allowed to bury themselves in a radical-right leaning feed of Fox, OANN, and online conspiracy theorists. There's nobody moderate left to help normalize their beliefs, so they keep drifting further and further right based on what Tucker Carlson tells them.
I have a very hard time socializing that that half of my family any more because they bring up politics constantly and their beliefs on race, healthcare, etc. are frankly embarrassing to be associated with. And I say this as somebody who is overall very moderate and willing to engage with both left and right-leaning beliefs.
Facebook made half of my family unbearable to deal with. I don't think that's a unique situation by any means. So I'd say that they're an awful awful cancer on society that needs to die.
Not a Facebook fan here, but this argument is like saying "Alcohol made my dad an alcoholic!" Only true in the strictest medical/chemical sense. The bottle didn't leap into dad's hand by itself. I feel bad for your family, and this happened to a few folks in mine as well, but Facebook doesn't jump into your family's brains all by itself. Users are actively installing, using it, and poisoning themselves. I think Facebook is a net negative, and should be regulated like any other harmful addictive product. But, the blame for its affects must be shared with its users.
If someone would be giving my friends alcohol for free and strongly encourage them to drink as much as possible - then yes, I would blame them for alcoholism and other damage.
No users under 21. ID needed for registration. Warning labels on every page. Refusing service to people clearly under the influence. Heavy fines, jail-time, and possible destruction of service if found to be in willful noncompliance.
The tobacco and social media industries actually share a lot in common in how they both studied how addictive and dangerous their products are and decided to look the other way.
This shouldn't be news to you if you frequent tech forums.
I agree that this is absolutely terrible and I agree that it is not unique by any means. It is likely fairly widespread. I also disagree with the other comment on the thread saying it is your family's fault – it's not.
If Facebook somehow disappeared overnight, would Fox, OANN and the like throw up their hands and stop? Or would your family just find them on YouTube or Twitter some other platform instead? Or does your family already watch those news sources on TV? Facebook's news feed is certainly a part of the problem here, but it is not the underlying cause for polarization. I haven't studied in depth where the distrust in our institutions is coming from, but as long as there are people seeking to capitalize on it, they _will_ capitalize on it.
The reason I am bringing this up and getting a bunch of downvotes is not because I like Facebook. It is because I want to make sure we focus on the right solutions to solve the actual problem at hand. So, if the problem is radicalization specifically, algorithmic news feeds (plural) are an important piece to focus on. But it's not the entire story: the rest of the news media and other platforms also have things to fix.
If the problem is a concentration of monopoly power, or blatant abuses of privacy, then those bring different problems that warrant different solutions. People like to combine all of these concerns into a single bucket and say "Facebook is bad" but when we do that we lose sight of the other trouble makers: the news networks, the other tech monopolies, and credit card companies who actually sell user data.
Despite all of this, I still think a global network of people connected with real identity has a lot of benefits for society. Maybe a better way of phrasing it: if you haven't deleted your Facebook account yet, then why not?
> Bring back the days of being able to trust your device and services you use without have to skim through TOS and hope they didn't throw a Facebook auth sdk in somewhere.
Agreed. If you make money from invading my privacy I hope you go bankrupt when your ability to spy is stripped from you.
Are you able to step out of your campus/post-campus bubble, or just 'wilfully ignorant'?
I use FB when required for family events, and for niche advertising.
The vast majority of my family and peers use it, for a variety of reasons, almost none of which is toxic or insidious.
Facebook is a reflection of the the internet itself: you have your ice cream blogs, videos about cats, your CNNs, Foxs and the occasional Newsmax turds, very angry social justice types, weddings, funerals, sales, new toys, new interiors, babies, graduations etc. etc. That's life.
I was wary of Facebook right form the start, with Millenials foolishly handing over every little bit of their personal lives thinking 'this was the future' ... but also wary of Facebook now, largely for the same reasons, though the evolution was always a little bit obvious if you think about it.
People were way too upbeat about it then and way to downbeat about it now. Realize what a narrative and try to get off of it.
Facebook was always gossip, prone to bits of otherwise tawdry trash, but otherwise normal for any given era.
I have not been on campus in decades, if I am in a "post-campus bubble" then I guess I'll be stuck there the rest of my life.
There is nothing normal about Facebook and the impact it has had on society.
You can try to paint it as just the salt of the earth sharing baby pics and conspiracy theories if you want, but that is pretty naive, especially for this forum.
Facebook has spent billions building an engagement engine that has radicalized millions of people all over the world.
Talk to burmese refugees about what Facebook means to them and then tell me about my "bubble".
>Zillions of people use FB every day to read about stuff, connect, organize things.
Zillions of people used to smoke and still do. And even though I assume people were coughing their lungs out for everyone to see because of it since time immemorial, till the 70s people were ridiculed for suggesting that smoking is dangerous rather than cool.
Smoking is scientifically proven to be bad for you.
Organizing the family Christmas event is not.
Comparing FB to smoking is beyond pale - these bits of HN zealotry are a serious detriment to sober thinking, it's anti-intellectual and tiring frankly.
Organizing the family Christmas isn't, but that doesn't require Facebook. There's enough easily accessible free digital tools for that.
General social media use however actually is scientifically associated with quite a lot of negative effects. From increased self-harm in teenage girls (and to a lesser but significant degree boys), to anxiety disorders, bullying, and well we don't need a phd to see the negative effects of having genocides arranged on the website.
I don't really see what's anti-intellectual about just looking at the evidence of how these industries manipulate human behaviour, spread misinformation, and cause psychological harm.
I think what's deeply anti-intellectual is talking down the degree to which these digital services have changed and intruded into our lives because "it's just an app on your phone bro" which has been the prevailing attitude, that is only slowly changing.
I actually suspect that just like smoking, or drinking, we're going to look at how we interacted with online media in the early 21st century with a lot of dismay in the not so far future.
I love how you're being downvoted here, for having a different opinion.
My primary account got auto-shadow banned because I got so many downvotes that my karma went a lot below zero.
With the risk of this account going the same way, I want to add that even the ad part of Facebook is a net positive to everyone involved.
Targeting allows small businesses to advertise their niche products or services... and helps the user be aware of the product or services. Before Facebook, the same thing existed but in a different form. You as a small business owner would have to buy placement in niche TV shows or radio programs or a local niche magazine... but for some small businesses, it could be a no go because they'd have to consider a much bigger than required marketing budget. Targeting solves this problem, for small businesses and for users who get suggested the things they're likely to buy and use. In fact, it's not just good for users being targeted, it's even better for those who are not being targeted because they don't have to be bombarded with products they'd never be interested in.
The reason Apple is deciding the default for the users when it comes to Facebook learning about the user is to deliberately hurt small businesses and give their users fake sense of "privacy"... and to not let other platforms flourish.
Apple needs to be legally challanged for monopolistic practices i.e. disallowing users to choose what software they get to run on devices they purchase. Users should be able to download and install Microsoft App Store, Samsung App Store, Epic Games Store... and install any software they want. Why is Apple allowed to restrict what software users can run? Apple is big and too much of a monopoly. Its hardware and software divisions need to be separated and other companies should be allowed to license and sell their hardware with whatever software they want. Users should be able to choose what software comes with their devices.
Ideally Facebook should just allow users to buy a subscription. I think a lot of people, at least in the western world, wouldn't mind paying say $1-2 dollars a month maybe even more, if Facebook were honest about how they use your data, and how much money they make of of your data.
I mean, we're all happily paying $8.99 for Netflix and friends, is it really so outrageous that consumers would pay for a social network?
Although the average revenue per user who would be willing to spend $7/quarter is probably much higher (these users are disproportionately likely to have disposable income which probably makes them more attractive to advertisers)
I think nobody would mind advertisers being able to target to "subscribers". What people don't want is the ability of advertisers to target "white male who works at ACME, lives in north Fairview and bought a car last week" (which might narrow it down to just you).
That said, I definitely believe that collecting subscription money would not stop them from trying to collect data about you, for advertising purposes. They'd view subscription as just a new revenue stream (yay!).
If Facebook were to charge just $1/month, I'd be willing to bet they'd still lose 80% of their users, at which point, the value would be decreased enough for the remaining 20% most of them would leave too.
Sure, but then they should at least give me the choice of matching the "lost" ad money as a subscription. At Facebook scale we are talking about millions of users, who would probably choose that path instead.
Yeah currently $164 a year for a US user and growing [1]. What percentage of users would be willing to pay $13.67 a month? Probably not very many unfortunately. It's an order of magnitude more than what OP said he would to pay
$13.67/month for a tool that includes chat, voice/video calling (accessible from any platform), social networking, the ability to maintain a page for yourself or business (equivalent of a blog/web hosting), near-unlimited cloud storage for photos and videos both on Facebook and Instagram (and probably a lot more features that I'm forgetting) is an absolute bargain.
I probabl would be down to paying that for Facebook, especially considering the product would be massively better than their current offering. No ads + optimising for platform utility instead of eyeball time would do wonders for Facebook.
Why do you think there would be no ads? There's just no way that 100% of FB users would be willing to pay for it like you are. As an example, Hulu membership costs money AND you still have ads. Newspapers cost money AND have ads (the ads subsidized the cost but didn't make it free).
The problem is that data collection still wouldn't stop just cause you're paying.
The trackers they build into sites would still exist to track non-paying customers, and they'd have to track the paying customers enough to differentiate from non-paying.
And if you're saying that all of Facebook becomes a subscription, you still end up with the problem that Facebook has pointed out: small sites that earn income from Facebook by implementing their tracking widget would lose that source of income.
I think we should be more vocal about the extensions and products that help block FB (and other) web trackers, to force their model to change, but I think we're a long way away from anything truly effective.
Nor do I, but it's worth noting that these sites would go out of business or have their revenue severely impacted or force their customer base to offset the financial losses in order to stay afloat.
If you don't browse sites that do this tracking, then you shouldn't care either way about this whole FB/Apple controversy/dispute.
If you do browse these sites, get ready for the potential of a major shift in those sites' business model.
"Pay up or we'll spy on you" seems like it would have bad optics.
Also, they can't sell privacy, just that they won't track using their network. If your information is being taken by multiple parties and they are all pouring it into the same data soup, the value of paying any particular spy off seems pretty limited. Apple can try to sell privacy, because they are in the position to fight all the spies simultaneously (we'll see how effective it is, seems like a really hard task but it is a good sign that they've got Facebook worried).
AlsoAlso it is possible that the value of tracking is non-linearly related to the number of people you are tracking (if three people are somehow similar I might be able to apply some insight gleaned from one to the other two). So, they might fundamentally want quite a bit more than any reasonable person would be willing to pay for their service, to stop tracking.
> Also it is possible that the value of tracking is non-linearly related to the number of people you are tracking (if three people are somehow similar I might be able to apply some insight gleaned from one to the other two). So, they might fundamentally want quite a bit more than any reasonable person would be willing to pay for their service, to stop tracking.
Not my problem. Price it in and be transparent about how they are using data.
"Not my problem" is a funny expression, because there's an implied "to solve" at the end there. Yes, it is your problem to solve. But you do have a problem if you want a transparent and reasonably priced social media service: nobody in the market is willing to sell that, because doing it the shady way instead is more profitable. You've just got an unsolvable problem.
The way FB tracks non-users is one of the parts that bothers me the most. One old article I read talked about a "shadow profile" that would track you across sites, ready and waiting for the day you signed up. That way they would have profile data on you from before you ever consented.
If only this were true. "But every techie hates facebook at this point." might be more accurate. Or, "But techies and tweenies who think FB if for old people hate facebook." might be even more accurate. However, there are millions upon millions of people that do love it. They don't know/don't care about the actual price of FB's 'free and always will be' service. To them it is free because it doesn't cost them money, and that's as far as they want to think about it. Any further discussion makes you one of the conspiracy people.
That’s social media except only founders and ceos post because disagreement doesn't affect their ability to exchange time for food and shelter, unlike all the employees and candidates
Some people would pay for Facebook
But Facebook’s cash cow is every small business or even idea will pay to target ads. Any corporate-led disruption to how many people that would target will be a massive deterrent to use Facebook’s platforms.
LinkedIn is a terrible example of a premium social network. The main reason that people pay for LinkedIn is for recruiting. So LinkedIn is selling their (free) users to recruiters and by doing so it completely destroys the experience. I always have tons of InMail and Friend Requests whenever I open LinkedIn, however they are rarely from ex-coworkers or friends. It is just a steady stream of low-effort "You'd be a perfect fit" messages.
I had the LinkedIn Premium trial. I expected the ads and dark patterns (such as the constant nags to add a picture, follow bullshit people or hashtags and resetting the feed to algorithmic instead of chronological) to cease but no. Needless to say I'm not paying a single penny to this terrible company.
I deleted my fb account 5 years ago and I hate fb. But so many of my friends are semi active on fb. Most of them hate fb but still use it cause it provides them some relevant info. For e.g; I know a mom who finds answers on her local moms group that makes her life super easy.
Pay $1500 for a laptop and it will often have crapware installed. Buy a $1000 Samsung TV and it will track your viewing, sell the data, and show you ads. Buy a high end dishwasher and seemingly 50% of the logic on the device is to encourage you to use Jet Dry (because they get a kickback per unit from the Finish people, not because it's more than marginally beneficial).
Simply paying alone often isn't enough -- this sort of sleezy behavior is endemic.
I avoid buying anything "smart." Very few things need to be connected to the internet or have an OS. There's no reason I've seen for a TV or fridge to be smart except for nefarious purposes.
There are various home automation tasks that might be neat (hit the remote and the lights dim and the room goes into movie mode) but
* Nobody seems to implement these
* The risk of smart devices actively working against us is too high
* I have 0% faith in Samsung's ability to keep a fridge OS updated over the, whatever, 20 year lifespan of a fridge.
Unfortunately so many things are "smart" nowadays that it can be hard to avoid, but at least I can keep the wifi password away from the devices. For now. Until the manufacturers start including cell modems in the things.
Let's say 20% of users outright refuse to pay. I don't think this is unrealistic. Now there will be people with a lot of friends who left, and they ask themselves, "if my friends aren't on here, why am I paying??", so they leave too. It keeps rippling through the social graph like this until there only a hardcore facebook fanbase remains.
If they were forced to find an alternative income source, they'd be better off going with freemium.
> It keeps rippling through the social graph like this until
this is a very hand-wavy slippery-slope argument. You think the entire social network crumbles because of 20% of users? The lack of right not to be part of a network (shadow profiles) is one of the problems with FB, so if SNs can't exist without payment, maybe they just shouldn't exist. I personally think society values SNs to the extent that this *won't8 happen, but let it be an exercise in seeing how much SNs are truly valued.
Can envision this turning into “let us track you for free access” or pay some sort of monthly subscription for denied tracking + access. If socially engineered in just the right way, would not be surprised if majority of people would allow this.
Now I wonder if this goes against an App Store policy somewhere or if this is one way Apple will combat such an attempt.
One of the huge problems at the moments is that it tracks you even if you don’t use it. We’ve never been at “let us track you for free access”, we jumped directly to “we track you and you can’t do a thing to avoid it”.
As despicable as Facebook’s behaviour is as far as its users are concerned, at least one could claim that there is an implicit contract (I am sure everything is explained clearly in 2pt white font on a white background on a page that’s not linked to and not indexed by Google). There is no such excuse for non-users who are tracked all the same.
I think a lot of people, at least in the western world, wouldn't mind paying say $1-2 dollars a month maybe even more..
The problem is that Facebook only represents good value (paid in ad views, personal data, or money as you suggest) if lots of your friends stay on it. It needs the "network" aspect of social networking to operate. Consequently, even if you're willing to pay $1/month if your friends aren't to pay then that $1 represents terrible value and you'll leave because there's no value in paying.
This is the inherent problem in charging for any 'network' product - it has to represent good value for everyone not just a few people.
Here's the issue, Whatsapp had a system like that but then Facebook bought it up and it's hard to think of a reason beyond 'we want to crush our competition'
So why are they not doing it now? There are three possible explanations:
1. They haven't thought of it.
2. They underestimate how profitable it would be.
3. It would be less profitable than what they're doing now.
Option 1 seems ridiculous. Option 2 is possible if Facebook is blinded by corporate inertia, or if enough people working directly on the ads feel threatened. But there are a lot of smart people working there, who stand to make a lot of money by increasing profits.
So I'm going with option 3. They don't do it because spying on everyone is more profitable.
Well, Epic also has an easier case to make: People need Fortnite (and the Unreal Engine). They don't need personalized ads, no matter how much Facebook wants to claim Mom & Pop shops only exist because of personalized advertising. (Last I checked, history books show small businesses existing for centuries before that.)
Wont really solve anything. Social connection and interaction is a fundamental human need and if FB goes away some other company would be fulfilling that and we probably would be going through a similar cycle again.
Edit: Assuming there are no laws or regulations in place from the learnings we have got from FB. If there are effective laws in place, then FB stays or go does not matter much.
I sure hope we get a better company. Though I dont know if good people want to start such companies and if the VCs want to fund them (dont see a way for a big social network without VC money. I may be wrong)
I think the money is the problem. Before Facebook was profitable, it was fun to use and I enjoyed using it. But any competitor to Facebook must be more profitable than Facebook, and if you can’t do that while remaining ethical, then you will lose out. This is why I’m such a fan of regulation because it can level this particular playing field.
We need the GDPR to actually be enforced, which is not currently the case. Before someone posts the seemingly mandatory link to https://enforcementtracker.com, let me preempt your arguments:
* Google has so far been fined peanuts compared to the revenue they make breaching the GDPR
* Facebook has been fined pennies based on a technicality rather than their actual privacy violations
* Facebook does not respect the GDPR with regards to providing data subjects a full copy of their data, and does so in total impunity by the looks of it: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/
* Currently neither Facebook nor Google have been fined regarding the omnipresence of their analytics/advertising SDKs on the web and in mobile apps despite them not only collecting more data than necessary but not asking for user consent
To your last point, it might be more effective to fine the people using those SDK’s.
Facebook and Google just shrug off relatively large fines and are rewarded for it by the stock market.
Small app companies and independent devs probably could not. Drive a few dozen out of business and you might just make the SDK toxic enough nobody will use it.
Hard disagree. This is in fact how society advances. We do something and make mistakes. We learn from those mistakes and try again. Our current society is a system of rules and conventions built on thousands of years of humans trying things, making mistakes, learning and trying again. Just look how food safety laws have changed over the last 200 years or how labor laws have evolved. The same will happen with Internet companies like Facebook if we are diligent and work to make the system of society better (instead of the current fad of thinking we could ditch society altogether and not end up in disaster).
Then the solution is not wishing for FB to die but to ask for new laws and regulations thus defining the boundary where any FB like company can operate in the future. In my reply I decoupled the two. I thought not wanting anything from regulation side but just wishing for FB to be gone is what the comment intended. That does not do anything since the new company would still do the same things and may do it even more aggressively. Regulation and laws put these powers of any company in check.
Thinking that the need for social media must be met by a single monolithic corporation is a failure of imagination.
It's like being on AOL, blissfully aware of the wider Internet, and thinking the need for email must be met by a single monolithic corporation.
The cycle you're referring to isn't inevitable, we can do better and we must.
I happen to think Mastodon can be improved on architecturally, but if Twitter were to close up shop tomorrow, I reckon more people would move there than, say, Parler.
In a way there's something very interesting in this situation. Facebook is known for cutting the API access to competitors, like it happen in the past with Vine. Today it's the other way around.
Except this has even nothing to do with getting API cut for them or actually losing a functionality. They can do exactly everything they did as before, but they have to ask the users' permission. All they have to bake into their service is a fallback for when a user doesn't give them permission, which should be technically trivial (if it's not, it would be another sign of their unacceptable hubris).
They are implicitly admitting that no user would ever accept what Facebook does as acceptable, if you properly inform them about how Facebook works.
What a morally bankrupt company.
I don't think this properly describes the situation. If this goes through, Facebook doesn't have to "bake into their service is a fallback for when a user doesn't give them permission", they can just make sites require this permission. If the user declines, the site won't load. Alternatively, the do what you're suggesting, but the site gets no revenue for that user, this will pressure the sites to continually ask for the user to re-enable the permission or change the way the notice shows up so that they eventually accidentally allow it. Either way, nothing will change.
Dan Levy, Facebook’s head of advertising, on Apple: “This is about a long-term view that is about anti-personalised advertising, and we think is trying to take the world back 10 or 20 years.”
Who does he think he’s winning over here? That’s not a rhetorical question. To me, that sounds brilliant
Believe it or not, some people love personalised ads. I know several (they all happen to be women, but I'm sure many men also like them). It's a bit of a tautology - they wouldn't be so profitable and dominant if people weren't clicking on them, so somebody is doing it, and in massive numbers. They wouldn't like going back - my mom is already angry that using my home wifi messes up the ads she gets.
Obviously this shouldn't be read as an endorsement for FB's practices - I think they are as scummy as Apple's anti-competitive bullying of iOS developers. It's unbelievable that we're now openly longing for something that looks a lot like the Windows software market circa 2001: compared to today, it was a paradise of open competition and almost-entire privacy.
If they love them so much, they can easily enable them for facebook on iOS, just because these people exist doesn't mean it should be the default setting.
Personalized ads used to be "hey this specific item is great for you". Now the targeting is leading to the equivalent of harassment as ad-targeting retargets again and again.
So yeah, I'll take the less harassing version of ads (or no ads even if I have to pay).
Also I don't want to allow FB to pull another Cambridge Analytica.
> Also I don't want to allow FB to pull another Cambridge Analytica.
Yeah.
So many people took away the wrong lesson from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook wants everyone to see "Cambridge Analytica did something bad and Facebook stopped it", when the real story was "Cambridge Analytica did something bad, convinced us it made money, and Facebook stopped it by platforming it and charging Cambridge Analytica for it". The Cambridge Analytica models led directly to Facebook's personalized ads system, with almost everything Cambridge Analytica asked for being added to the ads platform itself. Almost everything that was shady and questionably ethical about what Cambridge Analytica was doing didn't stop being shady and questionably ethical when Facebook simply in housed all of that tracking for "ad personalization" and started selling it as a service to any advertiser willing to pay for it.
Yes, it’s just a very simple point to make to the people who say they like targeted ads (which I have seen quite often, although this sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me). I see my wording could have been better.
I've known them for years, we shared the best and worst moments of our lives, they are all intelligent people, at least for my standards, but when they use my phone to browse a website they think my phone is broken because I use an ad blocker and they see white squares were ads were supposed to appear.
They think ads are normal and their absence means something is wrong with the software.
They've watched them on TV and do the same with YouTube, they've listened to them on the radio and are not bothered if they hear them on Spotify.
But most of all they actually click on them and buy stuff through them.
I think getting rids of personalized ads is an uphill battle.
As a resident of Alberta, CA (deep oil country) - That happens. We apparently cannot and never will be able to subsist on renewables, and oil is our past, present, and future.
Even as a vocal Apple critic, I'm not sure I understand the support for Facebook here. Apple isn't blocking anything w.r.t Facebook. All they're simply doing is exposing to the user what Facebook are trying to collect about the user. And then, the user gets full power to approve or disapprove what information goes to Facebook. I think this is a great win for the users. I don't understand how Apple is blocking small businesses here. Apple isn't blocking tracking here at all, the user is, if at all they choose to.
If your business model involves fraudulently spying on the users and making money out of it, then too bad, that's your problem.
And about the arguments on "Facebook is free".
I agree that Facebook is a free service, and they need to be compensated somewhat, but, if a user disables ad tracking, Facebook can simply block them from accessing their free service, which is fair, right? It's only a problem if Facebook continues to allow their free service to such users.
Well, even then I would think charging iOS users who block Facebook tracking is a fair deal, especially if there is a premium version of Facebook with no spyware in it, I totally see myself and many others paying for it.
But Facebook won't do that, because their core philosophy is just criminal - spy the users as much as you can without their consent. So, fuck them. I support Apple here. I hope Android follows suit as well and we can slowly kill Facebook together.
I think Facebook prefers the business model where users (their product) think their service is free. This is partially how they've taken the entire digital social world over with their services. With this change, Apple is now forcing them to expose their business model to users (their product). This transparency will inevitably cost them dearly.
As a heavy apple critic, who refuses to buy an iPhone. Facebook is 100% in the wrong here. Apple is not blocking jack shit. Apple is just forcing Facebook to ask permission before exploiting their users. This will be harder on android because google is gonna want to make an exception for themselves. But that won't exactly stand up in court.
This entire debacle is making me lean towards switching to an iPhone just for this feature alone.
Having said that, I currently use system-wide adblockers on my android so even if facebook was to try, they couldn't get this info (granted, I don't have fb installed).
Edit: as far as I understand it:
- you must ask for permission before gathering/serving personalized data/ads
- you must NOT disable any features of the app if the uses says no (similar to the tracking cookie stuff in EU)
- you can still display generalized ads that are not personalized.
(I am replying to a comment because I want to add on to it, not because I am debating against it)
It's a close call between my dislike for Facebook's model, and my dislike for Apple's walled-garden, which this move is absolutely intended to reinforce.
The only objection IMO would be if Apple allowed their own ads platform to have different treatment. Then it would look like Apple using platform power to manipulate the ad market.
Right, but tracking being about ads does not make showing ads equivalent to tracking, although Facebook wants you to believe that.
IOW, (A => B) does not imply (A <= B). Or (A <=> B), for that matter.
Based on Facebooks history of choosing profit over ethics, I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to productize surveillance of citizens to authoritarian governments, if they haven't already.
Watch to see if they have the notification for News or other apps that show their app install ads which seem to use data, not as much/well as FB, but still tracks users and for sure tracks install conversions
Agreed. Apple is not blocking anything. They are simply giving full transparency to the user as to what is happening. If Facebook's tracking is indeed so great for the user, then users will overwhelmingly and enthusiastically opt-in, and Facebook has nothing to worry about.
Once again anti-trust arguements are used because another business is impacted, ignoring user preferences or impact.
Heads up - some users WANT to have more transparency into how their data is exploited, and to be able to turn it off easily.
I know folks are saying this is apple abusing its position to hurt facebook or "small businesses". Who cares? I as a user like this approach apple is taking.
The same issue comes up with google and some of their behavior around spammers / scammers and others. I wish more of the anti-trust / abusing their position things kept a focus on user benefit and impact. Letting match.com and ancestry.com do their own billing and subscription renewals on iOS sounds like a nightmare from hell (having dealt with ancestry billing before!)
I just had to submit for a refund for an annual subscription that was misleading on the app store (10 minutes after I purchased). The process could not be simpler and MUCH preferable to sitting on hold for hours (as I have with others).
Whenever there's a market that's "zero-sum"--one company's market gain is a loss for someone else--then you see efforts to shut down the competition through regulation and mis-information campaigns.
This is not sour grapes; sour grapes is trying to get something, failing, and then pretending you didn't actually want it in the first place.
It's from one of the "Aesop's Fables". A fox sees a bunch of grapes hanging a ways over his head. He spends a while jumping and trying his best to reach them, then gives up and stalks away muttering "they're obviously sour".
The original fable is so short that it merits recounting the entire thing here:
"Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked 'Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.' People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this story to themselves."
For those towing the line of "small business will be destroyed": businesses are there to make profit but they have to serve their consumers if they want to continue making those profits which also means taking the privacy of the consumers seriously.
As a consumer, if I don't like the privacy-invading practices a "small business" is supporting (directly or via Facebook), I have the right to know about it and deny such practices (atleast on a device I own, which Apple plans to enable in this case). Businesses do not live in a vacuum and if they don't fit in the ecosystem by ignoring their consumers' privacy needs, it should be ok for them to go extinct so that those who follow a more "well adjusted" approach can evolve and thrive.
Facebook is just giving more attention and free marketing for Apple here. They are trying to cloud the issue and spin it as a small market thing but this is not some trump/Theil political strategy to implement. It doesn't work in the valley where the tech crowd and blogs are more influential. All of them lean towards tech and merit. They could be buying some companies out like Epic but the message will always fall flat.
The more they go this route, regular people who don't care about privacy will begin to understand the nuances and that is never a good thing for FB.
Do content-based ads really perform that much more poorly than personalized ads?
I mean, I guess they must given the shear amount more effort and infrastructure they require and companies fight to have them, but it boggles my mind that they're that much more effective. Maybe I'm just not thr roght demographic and my (not good) experiences on the consumer side of personalized ads don't encompass a large enough portion of the market?
Is that backed up by any data? Targeted ads always seem to be for goods or services I've already purchased. As I said, I find targeted ads to be atrocious at introducing me to new deals or items I might find interesting.
I have not for many years encountered (personally or professionally) _any_ defense of Facebook which did not amount to an acknowledgement of brutal amorality, and its consequences,
tempered by some usuall-shamedfaced appeal to a mix of [fatalistic, resigned, or blasé] self-interest, what-aboutism, and/or appeals to neatness [usually the result of acquisitions].
Not one. Not even from current employees.
The most vitriolic summaries typically from former employees, or those forced to do business with them.
I actually understand Facebook's point here, because the fact is they are just too good as what they do. The deal is, give up all your users' info, and we'll give you some very similar people we know are very likely to also become users from our (billions? trillions?) of on- and offline observations we have about them. For me, it's a deal with the devil, but I also sympathize with those who take it if it means the difference between staying afloat and going out of business.
I don't think any real small businesses will be going out of business due to this change.
The only "small businesses" that are threatened by this change are dropshippers who have built a business around whitelabeling cheap Chinese goods with some fancy marketing and selling it at 5x the price.
They are both at fault here. Facebook are trying to get your soul for free, so they cam resell it to the world. Apple are trying to wall it in so they keep it to themselves. Both are deeply cynical moves.
Apple walling it off would actually be them completely disabling it. They are merely providing the user with the information and option to disable it. Very different from walking off. It’s not equivalent to what Facebook wants.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadApple wields too much power.
If you don’t agree, then how else do you propose Apple enforces said privacy?
I mean these third party apps are running on Apple’s platform and using Apple’s APIs to track Apple’s customers. Who else can fix this problem?
No. I think our freedom is more important than both.
> If you don’t agree, then how else do you propose Apple enforces said privacy?
Apple is making decisions that are too big for it. The DOJ needs to break them up. Computing needs to be free.
I'm fine if the platform makes these notices apparent, but Apple can't be the arbiter.
Both freedoms cannot exist simultaneously. So are you saying that Apple should not be allowed to decide which freedom to prioritise? Despite the fact that every other comparable company is effectively on the side of Facebook?
Or is there some other kind of freedom you care about? You seem to say that “our freedom” is more important than our privacy, but privacy is a most fundamental type of freedom - literally, the freedom to think our own thoughts.
What other freedom could be more important than that?
I could understand if there was really an overlap somewhere, but I don't really see it. They have different business models, Apple doesn't have any social media property that compete with Facebook or Instagram and if Apple really wanted iMessage to crush WhatsApp they should at least show their interest in dominance by having an Android version of it.
Maybe they are competing on resources? but I don't see it either. They don't seem to be going after the same acquisitions.
Maybe Apple is doing this because pleasing or pissing off ad-based companies has no effect on their bottom line and they see it as a good marketing campaign to woo the privacy conscious an earn some brownie points for practically zero expense.
More so, Apple is #3 in the world in game revenue and guess what, Apple doesn’t even make games.
I can't buy an Apple device because of the ideology behind their products. Why expect Apple to put other storefronts on their platform? They have all the rights not to but this also implies that their ecosystem is less liberal, which is also fine. They made the OS and the device. If you hate the App Store, don’t use iOS. It's simple. They run 1984 ads but they are the core of 1984.
There is basically no reason for not providing an OS interface for others to build their own storefronts on your platform. Android showed that it's possible, there's no excuse. Period.
Have you come across criticism of the chaebol system or Samsung as a company before? It’s pretty intense what has been going on and what Samsung has been convicted of doing. The wikis give a good overview.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/facebook-scraping-call-m...
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-permissions-bypass-pl...
These spyware kits are hardcoded into the first-party apps on Samsung phones that you cannot remove without replacing it with a custom ROM.
Samsung is also the point of the spear on pushing advertising into their television sets and scraping your viewing for marketing purposes.
Buying Samsung products is as bad as using Google or Facebook products in terms of your privacy.
Facebook is objecting to allowing people to know that they're being tracked everywhere by them. Lots of people don't really understand how that works. I think this is a good thing Apple is doing in this particular case.
are you sure about this? "Apple blocks Facebook update that called out 30-percent App Store ‘tax’" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301332]
disclaimer: I work for fb
Does any of this make you want to reconsider that?
If I were marketing to youths, I'd have to deal with Apple's 90% market share among my customers!
In this particular case I don't care because FB is garbage IMO but the point stands - Apple has too much power in the US and we need to force them to allow third party app stores.
It absolutely is hidden. Apps are not allowed to be transparent with the user, for how much money is being taken by Apple, directly in the app purchase screen.
That is against the app store TOS, to show as a line item, the cost of the Apple cut.
However, let's not ignore the massive market for apps supported by ads. iOS developers had a way to be modestly compensated (without the Apple tax) in return for an app that is available to anyone for free. How much less profitable are ads going to be because people can opt-out of IDFA? I don't know. But I'm sure many developers are going to think twice about developing free apps for iOS.
Conspicuously, Apple also just reduced it's commission from 30% to 15% overnight for these developers. It seems to me like Apple really wants to nudge developers into creating paid apps. Is it because of privacy, or because it's better for Apple's bottom line? Probably both.
I'm glad Apple found a way to monetize privacy, but I didn't mind installing a free app with a few ads if I knew that I'd only use it a few times.
Furthermore, there are plenty of unjust/unethical systems in this world that - if dismantled - would cost the jobs of honest, hardworking people. That doesn't seem like a valid argument against the question of whether or not tracking people without their consent is itself unethical.
Edit: I want to bring up another point: You mention that using FB ads can allow developers to avoid the "Apple Tax." But not only does the Facebook Audience Network apply its own tax (via revenue share) to app developers, it also refuses to disclose that number! So if you monetize a free app with Facebook, you're paying an undisclosed Facebook tax. Given the Google tax for AdSense is 32%, it's likely that FB's secret tax is higher.
I'm sure ad-supported apps are still going to exist, but the pros are a bit muddier now. The perceived devaluation of ads caused by removing IDFA, compounded by the lower Apple tax, are probably going to decrease the number of free apps in the App Store.
The race-to-the-bottom with regard to price meant conditioned users to expect free - to be unwilling to pay even $0.99 for an app.
I would love to see free disappear completely from the AppStore.
Imagine I had a free app, I was showing ads, when there was IDFA, Facebook audience network was pricing individuals, you had value $1 (for sake of argument lets say 10% chance to buy what is advertised) for some advertisement, I had maybe $0.01 (0.1% chance to buy).
Imagine I had 1000 users, 10 like you, 990 like me. Total value was $19.9 ( will net approx 2 sales )
Now we are a 1000 user pool with chance to buy (0.2%), and will be priced accordingly, will be like approx $0.02.
Actually nothing will be changed. Except, the middle man, facebook, will compete with other ad networks with commission, it means more revenue for developers. More privacy for consumers.
For advertisers, on bigger ones, there will be not much effect.
For smaller advertisers, there will be more work involved, but ad networks will manage that (from opt-in IDFA users). Ad networks eventually will discover you sources (apps you can advertise on positive ROI)
Eventually some small advertisers may have small disadvantage on this.
They're saying no to certain privacy violations on their platform. This being detrimental to Facebook's revenue says a lot more about Facebook's business model than it says about Apple's policies.
If anything apple is setting a precedent for it's actual competition that user privacy is something people are willing to pay a premium for.
They already have some expertise in their Oculus line.
The AR OS battleground is going to be very interesting.
Interestingly, 3d TV had the same problem as VR now: lack of content. A single movie (Avatar) created the whole industry, and there was little follow up.
You might say the same about VR and Beat Saber.
Not really, once Apple steps in with their own AR headset then Oculus is done. Not only does Apple build their own hardware, they also have the trust needed to make it mainstream.
Trust in the parent company is a core requirement of AR, one that FB will never be able to deliver, their brand is kaputt in that regard. In FBs position I'd try to sell it, the team they have working on it is great, they don't deserve the backlash from the trust issues of the parent company.
This is the opinion of yourself and your bubble. Millions of people trust and use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp many times a day.
Like it or not, that's the (non-augmented) reality or it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home
I wonder if they'd take another stab at that as a workaround to tracking protection, assuming Android follows suit on this in a year or two. Get users to sign in and now you have all of their installed apps and know what they launch, all tied to a Facebook account.
https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopp...
Unrelatedly it's not clear from that quote who did the declaring, which makes me believe it was "declared a disaster" by the author... just classic journalism tricks.
If you look at the documentation in the app store around the Apple privacy policy (which is required for any new app version right now) you'll see a bunch of language that, to me, seems squarely aimed at Facebook and the Facebook SDK.
For example, it specifically calls out third-party auth SDKs, sharing hashed email addresses with third parties, and sharing identities so third parties can optimize their advertising for you.
These are all functionalities where Facebook is the clear industry leader. Especially the language around "hashed email addresses" seemed quite clearly targeting Facebook to me.
I'm surprised Apple's weaponization of the App Store (for example, forcing Sign in with Apple on any developers who use Facebook or Google SSO) hasn't drawn more anti-trust attention.
I definitely applaud Apple's push to be more transparent about the privacy you give up when installing these apps! I just wonder if the rollout could have been done in a more app-publisher-friendly manner.
For years it has been painfully clear that facebook has been a net negative for society.
Bring back the days of being able to trust your device and services you use without have to skim through TOS and hope they didn't throw a Facebook auth sdk in somewhere.
Did that time ever really exist?
Nowadays, most software out there comes with some kind of spyware (Facebook SDK, extremely granular analytics sometimes going as far as screen recording, etc) and nobody seems to care.
What the web has become since the rise of weaponized ad-tech is a tragedy.
On the one hand, yes.
On the other hand, I don't think it's a healthy situation if companies need to own the entire hardware platform to be safe from another company's whims.
Maybe we (as humans) shouldn't have tried to over-optimize everything and squeeze every bit of whatever we wanted out from something.
Edit: Have people not seen Austin Powers? Do I need to add the /s?
Then, after a random time, it gets back to 0 and gets a small or a big bump depending on support, converting my comment to a small battleground which is kinda amusing. :D
In a perfect world we'd have regulation (such as the GDPR, but with actual enforcement) that would prevent such nefarious activities.
We're not in a perfect world, so a company who owns the hardware and whose incentives happen to align with their customers' privacy steps in.
They don't really align so well, see IDFA. Yes, you can opt-out, but there's no reason Apple couldn't change that in the future if shareholders want that.
What about users? What do I need to own to be safe from the whims of a company like Facebook?
Also, you don't have to audit apps yourself if there's an entire community of volunteers doing it for you, and perhaps even writing alternative FOSS apps.
The web browser sandbox was created to solve lots of problems with security of executables, it didn't solve all of them but it did make content by third parties more secure.
Granted the web probably tracks you as much as mobile, but it will need permission to use your camera/mic/etc and you can more easily see what is being tracked, at least the scripts and states.
All Apple is doing it creating a similar security sandbox to the web and they should.
It's either privacy or not being parented. Perhaps you don't care but many people think it's pretty ridiculous.
Didn’t OpenSSL with Heartbleed show that the “many eyes” argument for FOSS doesn’t hold water?
It’s much improved since then though. Huge portions audited and rewritten.
Thats fine if you trust Apple to do that. All you'd have to do is continue to only use the Apple app store.
The issue is when you want to take away my right to install different app stores.
Librem and Purism sound interesting, but without apple and ios there would be literally no hope in getting away from the toxic business model the ad-tech giants are shoving down our throats.
That's the risk you take working on someone else's platform. If you don't like it, start your own or conform to the new, privacy-enhancing features.
Apple is making a choice, and I support it and will gladly move back to buying apple products if it means they are willing to fight facebook and google over user privacy.
Facebook has done a lot to connect people that we don’t read about in news articles.
There are indeed plenty of other ways to connect people without intrusions into privacy, and hopefully Facebook will be forced into those corners (chat apps broken up, content-based advertising instead, offering a subscription, etc.)
People seem to think that the whole thing is rotten and we need to get rid of it, and it’s a great first instinct – but frankly Facebook is here to stay. We need to figure out how we can make that more sustainable.
I think net-negative still stands. I deleted FB years ago.
I have a very hard time socializing that that half of my family any more because they bring up politics constantly and their beliefs on race, healthcare, etc. are frankly embarrassing to be associated with. And I say this as somebody who is overall very moderate and willing to engage with both left and right-leaning beliefs.
Facebook made half of my family unbearable to deal with. I don't think that's a unique situation by any means. So I'd say that they're an awful awful cancer on society that needs to die.
No users under 21. ID needed for registration. Warning labels on every page. Refusing service to people clearly under the influence. Heavy fines, jail-time, and possible destruction of service if found to be in willful noncompliance.
(Just as a start.)
This shouldn't be news to you if you frequent tech forums.
I also think, but am not sure, that if you sell alcohol to an intoxicated person you might get in troubles.
I know for sure it's unlawful in Italy.
If Facebook somehow disappeared overnight, would Fox, OANN and the like throw up their hands and stop? Or would your family just find them on YouTube or Twitter some other platform instead? Or does your family already watch those news sources on TV? Facebook's news feed is certainly a part of the problem here, but it is not the underlying cause for polarization. I haven't studied in depth where the distrust in our institutions is coming from, but as long as there are people seeking to capitalize on it, they _will_ capitalize on it.
The reason I am bringing this up and getting a bunch of downvotes is not because I like Facebook. It is because I want to make sure we focus on the right solutions to solve the actual problem at hand. So, if the problem is radicalization specifically, algorithmic news feeds (plural) are an important piece to focus on. But it's not the entire story: the rest of the news media and other platforms also have things to fix.
If the problem is a concentration of monopoly power, or blatant abuses of privacy, then those bring different problems that warrant different solutions. People like to combine all of these concerns into a single bucket and say "Facebook is bad" but when we do that we lose sight of the other trouble makers: the news networks, the other tech monopolies, and credit card companies who actually sell user data.
Despite all of this, I still think a global network of people connected with real identity has a lot of benefits for society. Maybe a better way of phrasing it: if you haven't deleted your Facebook account yet, then why not?
Perhaps the most dangerous "feature" of Facebook is how effectively it radicalizes its users.
This coupled with Facebook's strong push into the developing world is extremely dangerous.
Just look at what happened in Myanmar for a clear example of how even Facebook was stunned by the monster it created.
Just so happened that common interest was genocide.
When you build a radicalization engine, you are responsible for the radicals it creates.
Agreed. If you make money from invading my privacy I hope you go bankrupt when your ability to spy is stripped from you.
This is just hyperbolic and probably not true.
Why do we, ostensibly smart people, so susceptible to such dramatic thinking?
Zillions of people use FB every day to read about stuff, connect, organize things.
Some of it is a little heated, some of it misinformation, it's a problem.
But these bandwagon statements are just too much.
This is literally a bandwagon bias argument.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you aren't living in the US and haven't logged into facebook during the recent election year.
I use FB when required for family events, and for niche advertising.
The vast majority of my family and peers use it, for a variety of reasons, almost none of which is toxic or insidious.
Facebook is a reflection of the the internet itself: you have your ice cream blogs, videos about cats, your CNNs, Foxs and the occasional Newsmax turds, very angry social justice types, weddings, funerals, sales, new toys, new interiors, babies, graduations etc. etc. That's life.
I was wary of Facebook right form the start, with Millenials foolishly handing over every little bit of their personal lives thinking 'this was the future' ... but also wary of Facebook now, largely for the same reasons, though the evolution was always a little bit obvious if you think about it.
People were way too upbeat about it then and way to downbeat about it now. Realize what a narrative and try to get off of it.
Facebook was always gossip, prone to bits of otherwise tawdry trash, but otherwise normal for any given era.
There is nothing normal about Facebook and the impact it has had on society.
You can try to paint it as just the salt of the earth sharing baby pics and conspiracy theories if you want, but that is pretty naive, especially for this forum.
Facebook has spent billions building an engagement engine that has radicalized millions of people all over the world.
Talk to burmese refugees about what Facebook means to them and then tell me about my "bubble".
Zillions of people used to smoke and still do. And even though I assume people were coughing their lungs out for everyone to see because of it since time immemorial, till the 70s people were ridiculed for suggesting that smoking is dangerous rather than cool.
Organizing the family Christmas event is not.
Comparing FB to smoking is beyond pale - these bits of HN zealotry are a serious detriment to sober thinking, it's anti-intellectual and tiring frankly.
General social media use however actually is scientifically associated with quite a lot of negative effects. From increased self-harm in teenage girls (and to a lesser but significant degree boys), to anxiety disorders, bullying, and well we don't need a phd to see the negative effects of having genocides arranged on the website.
I don't really see what's anti-intellectual about just looking at the evidence of how these industries manipulate human behaviour, spread misinformation, and cause psychological harm.
I think what's deeply anti-intellectual is talking down the degree to which these digital services have changed and intruded into our lives because "it's just an app on your phone bro" which has been the prevailing attitude, that is only slowly changing.
I actually suspect that just like smoking, or drinking, we're going to look at how we interacted with online media in the early 21st century with a lot of dismay in the not so far future.
My primary account got auto-shadow banned because I got so many downvotes that my karma went a lot below zero.
With the risk of this account going the same way, I want to add that even the ad part of Facebook is a net positive to everyone involved.
Targeting allows small businesses to advertise their niche products or services... and helps the user be aware of the product or services. Before Facebook, the same thing existed but in a different form. You as a small business owner would have to buy placement in niche TV shows or radio programs or a local niche magazine... but for some small businesses, it could be a no go because they'd have to consider a much bigger than required marketing budget. Targeting solves this problem, for small businesses and for users who get suggested the things they're likely to buy and use. In fact, it's not just good for users being targeted, it's even better for those who are not being targeted because they don't have to be bombarded with products they'd never be interested in.
The reason Apple is deciding the default for the users when it comes to Facebook learning about the user is to deliberately hurt small businesses and give their users fake sense of "privacy"... and to not let other platforms flourish.
Apple needs to be legally challanged for monopolistic practices i.e. disallowing users to choose what software they get to run on devices they purchase. Users should be able to download and install Microsoft App Store, Samsung App Store, Epic Games Store... and install any software they want. Why is Apple allowed to restrict what software users can run? Apple is big and too much of a monopoly. Its hardware and software divisions need to be separated and other companies should be allowed to license and sell their hardware with whatever software they want. Users should be able to choose what software comes with their devices.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/facebooks-average-revenue-pe...
That said, I definitely believe that collecting subscription money would not stop them from trying to collect data about you, for advertising purposes. They'd view subscription as just a new revenue stream (yay!).
Facebook will never stop collecting data on its users as long as it exists.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
Eg build new products that work with Facebook and sell them.
An ethical Facebook may find it could enter new markets.
https://whotargets.me/en/much-facebook-makes-per-user-per-mi...
The trackers they build into sites would still exist to track non-paying customers, and they'd have to track the paying customers enough to differentiate from non-paying.
And if you're saying that all of Facebook becomes a subscription, you still end up with the problem that Facebook has pointed out: small sites that earn income from Facebook by implementing their tracking widget would lose that source of income.
I think we should be more vocal about the extensions and products that help block FB (and other) web trackers, to force their model to change, but I think we're a long way away from anything truly effective.
Completely agree! There's cannot be any grey area here. It must be all ad-based or all-subscription. But the move seems impossible
If you don't browse sites that do this tracking, then you shouldn't care either way about this whole FB/Apple controversy/dispute.
If you do browse these sites, get ready for the potential of a major shift in those sites' business model.
Also, they can't sell privacy, just that they won't track using their network. If your information is being taken by multiple parties and they are all pouring it into the same data soup, the value of paying any particular spy off seems pretty limited. Apple can try to sell privacy, because they are in the position to fight all the spies simultaneously (we'll see how effective it is, seems like a really hard task but it is a good sign that they've got Facebook worried).
AlsoAlso it is possible that the value of tracking is non-linearly related to the number of people you are tracking (if three people are somehow similar I might be able to apply some insight gleaned from one to the other two). So, they might fundamentally want quite a bit more than any reasonable person would be willing to pay for their service, to stop tracking.
Not my problem. Price it in and be transparent about how they are using data.
Smart shareholders/CEO's think about brand as well, think long term as well.
That’s social media except only founders and ceos post because disagreement doesn't affect their ability to exchange time for food and shelter, unlike all the employees and candidates
Some people would pay for Facebook
But Facebook’s cash cow is every small business or even idea will pay to target ads. Any corporate-led disruption to how many people that would target will be a massive deterrent to use Facebook’s platforms.
I need inmail, I’m not a recruiter or candidate
Also read this
https://notboring.substack.com/p/everybody-hates-facebook
Simply paying alone often isn't enough -- this sort of sleezy behavior is endemic.
* Nobody seems to implement these
* The risk of smart devices actively working against us is too high
* I have 0% faith in Samsung's ability to keep a fridge OS updated over the, whatever, 20 year lifespan of a fridge.
Unfortunately so many things are "smart" nowadays that it can be hard to avoid, but at least I can keep the wifi password away from the devices. For now. Until the manufacturers start including cell modems in the things.
"Connect to WiFi?"
[Skip]
"Please connect to Wi-Fi."
If they were forced to find an alternative income source, they'd be better off going with freemium.
this is a very hand-wavy slippery-slope argument. You think the entire social network crumbles because of 20% of users? The lack of right not to be part of a network (shadow profiles) is one of the problems with FB, so if SNs can't exist without payment, maybe they just shouldn't exist. I personally think society values SNs to the extent that this *won't8 happen, but let it be an exercise in seeing how much SNs are truly valued.
I don't think people are as indifferent to "being the product", or are becoming less so.
Now I wonder if this goes against an App Store policy somewhere or if this is one way Apple will combat such an attempt.
That's exactly what it already is and we're past the point where ignorance is an acceptable excuse.
As despicable as Facebook’s behaviour is as far as its users are concerned, at least one could claim that there is an implicit contract (I am sure everything is explained clearly in 2pt white font on a white background on a page that’s not linked to and not indexed by Google). There is no such excuse for non-users who are tracked all the same.
The problem is that Facebook only represents good value (paid in ad views, personal data, or money as you suggest) if lots of your friends stay on it. It needs the "network" aspect of social networking to operate. Consequently, even if you're willing to pay $1/month if your friends aren't to pay then that $1 represents terrible value and you'll leave because there's no value in paying.
This is the inherent problem in charging for any 'network' product - it has to represent good value for everyone not just a few people.
1. They haven't thought of it.
2. They underestimate how profitable it would be.
3. It would be less profitable than what they're doing now.
Option 1 seems ridiculous. Option 2 is possible if Facebook is blinded by corporate inertia, or if enough people working directly on the ads feel threatened. But there are a lot of smart people working there, who stand to make a lot of money by increasing profits.
So I'm going with option 3. They don't do it because spying on everyone is more profitable.
Edit: Assuming there are no laws or regulations in place from the learnings we have got from FB. If there are effective laws in place, then FB stays or go does not matter much.
* Google has so far been fined peanuts compared to the revenue they make breaching the GDPR
* Facebook has been fined pennies based on a technicality rather than their actual privacy violations
* Facebook does not respect the GDPR with regards to providing data subjects a full copy of their data, and does so in total impunity by the looks of it: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/
* Currently neither Facebook nor Google have been fined regarding the omnipresence of their analytics/advertising SDKs on the web and in mobile apps despite them not only collecting more data than necessary but not asking for user consent
Facebook and Google just shrug off relatively large fines and are rewarded for it by the stock market.
Small app companies and independent devs probably could not. Drive a few dozen out of business and you might just make the SDK toxic enough nobody will use it.
Or, I’m practicing wishful thinking.
It's like being on AOL, blissfully aware of the wider Internet, and thinking the need for email must be met by a single monolithic corporation.
The cycle you're referring to isn't inevitable, we can do better and we must.
I happen to think Mastodon can be improved on architecturally, but if Twitter were to close up shop tomorrow, I reckon more people would move there than, say, Parler.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/apple-delays-contr...
But this is what user wants.
Obviously this shouldn't be read as an endorsement for FB's practices - I think they are as scummy as Apple's anti-competitive bullying of iOS developers. It's unbelievable that we're now openly longing for something that looks a lot like the Windows software market circa 2001: compared to today, it was a paradise of open competition and almost-entire privacy.
If someone is in favor of being tracked, they can allow it.
Facebook's objection is to letting people know about the tracking, and giving them an easier way to avoid it if they so choose.
So yeah, I'll take the less harassing version of ads (or no ads even if I have to pay).
Also I don't want to allow FB to pull another Cambridge Analytica.
Yeah.
So many people took away the wrong lesson from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook wants everyone to see "Cambridge Analytica did something bad and Facebook stopped it", when the real story was "Cambridge Analytica did something bad, convinced us it made money, and Facebook stopped it by platforming it and charging Cambridge Analytica for it". The Cambridge Analytica models led directly to Facebook's personalized ads system, with almost everything Cambridge Analytica asked for being added to the ads platform itself. Almost everything that was shady and questionably ethical about what Cambridge Analytica was doing didn't stop being shady and questionably ethical when Facebook simply in housed all of that tracking for "ad personalization" and started selling it as a service to any advertiser willing to pay for it.
I actually heard that a site got rid of personalized ads and their click rate was better due to the ads being more relevant for that page.
I someone wonder if personalized ads are better for the middleman or if it depends on the site
Then, they can opt in. Why complain about someone asking for consent?
I've known them for years, we shared the best and worst moments of our lives, they are all intelligent people, at least for my standards, but when they use my phone to browse a website they think my phone is broken because I use an ad blocker and they see white squares were ads were supposed to appear.
They think ads are normal and their absence means something is wrong with the software.
They've watched them on TV and do the same with YouTube, they've listened to them on the radio and are not bothered if they hear them on Spotify.
But most of all they actually click on them and buy stuff through them.
I think getting rids of personalized ads is an uphill battle.
That is almost Orwellianly hilarious.
That's like someone from the oil industry claiming using renewables is like going back to the 19th century.
Privacy is (hopefully) the future, not the past.
If your business model involves fraudulently spying on the users and making money out of it, then too bad, that's your problem.
And about the arguments on "Facebook is free". I agree that Facebook is a free service, and they need to be compensated somewhat, but, if a user disables ad tracking, Facebook can simply block them from accessing their free service, which is fair, right? It's only a problem if Facebook continues to allow their free service to such users.
Well, even then I would think charging iOS users who block Facebook tracking is a fair deal, especially if there is a premium version of Facebook with no spyware in it, I totally see myself and many others paying for it.
But Facebook won't do that, because their core philosophy is just criminal - spy the users as much as you can without their consent. So, fuck them. I support Apple here. I hope Android follows suit as well and we can slowly kill Facebook together.
This entire debacle is making me lean towards switching to an iPhone just for this feature alone.
Having said that, I currently use system-wide adblockers on my android so even if facebook was to try, they couldn't get this info (granted, I don't have fb installed).
Edit: as far as I understand it:
- you must ask for permission before gathering/serving personalized data/ads
- you must NOT disable any features of the app if the uses says no (similar to the tracking cookie stuff in EU)
- you can still display generalized ads that are not personalized.
(I am replying to a comment because I want to add on to it, not because I am debating against it)
Apple explains explained what they track and asks users to opt-in.
They have already been doing this.
All they are doing now is requiring other apps to be similarly opt-in.
That's the experience Facebook, Google & others will face, and it's not what Apple does in iOS 14.
There's also a different setting specifically to disable tracking in Apple Apps whereas all the others are lumped together:
https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare...
Heads up - some users WANT to have more transparency into how their data is exploited, and to be able to turn it off easily.
I know folks are saying this is apple abusing its position to hurt facebook or "small businesses". Who cares? I as a user like this approach apple is taking.
The same issue comes up with google and some of their behavior around spammers / scammers and others. I wish more of the anti-trust / abusing their position things kept a focus on user benefit and impact. Letting match.com and ancestry.com do their own billing and subscription renewals on iOS sounds like a nightmare from hell (having dealt with ancestry billing before!)
I just had to submit for a refund for an annual subscription that was misleading on the app store (10 minutes after I purchased). The process could not be simpler and MUCH preferable to sitting on hold for hours (as I have with others).
Sure, thats fine! And you should continue to be able to follow Apple's direction.
The issue is not that. Instead, the problem is when you are trying to force me to accept all of Apple's decisions.
Instead, I should be allowed to install apps on different app stores as well, that ignore Apple's opinion on the matter.
It's from one of the "Aesop's Fables". A fox sees a bunch of grapes hanging a ways over his head. He spends a while jumping and trying his best to reach them, then gives up and stalks away muttering "they're obviously sour".
At their best, they seem to describe timeless patterns in human behavior. http://read.gov/aesop/001.html
(note, the library of congress version has the 'moral' spelled out at the end, in a way that sucks the life out of what you just read)
"Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked 'Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.' People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this story to themselves."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
As a consumer, if I don't like the privacy-invading practices a "small business" is supporting (directly or via Facebook), I have the right to know about it and deny such practices (atleast on a device I own, which Apple plans to enable in this case). Businesses do not live in a vacuum and if they don't fit in the ecosystem by ignoring their consumers' privacy needs, it should be ok for them to go extinct so that those who follow a more "well adjusted" approach can evolve and thrive.
The more they go this route, regular people who don't care about privacy will begin to understand the nuances and that is never a good thing for FB.
I mean, I guess they must given the shear amount more effort and infrastructure they require and companies fight to have them, but it boggles my mind that they're that much more effective. Maybe I'm just not thr roght demographic and my (not good) experiences on the consumer side of personalized ads don't encompass a large enough portion of the market?
Advertiser - Ad Network - Publisher - Consumer
In the end it is multiplication of happiness factor for each actor optimised.
It is basically explore/exploit algorithm + trying to predict your behavior with similar segment of people like you.
That's why you are mostly stuck in exploit phase, cause explore part is costly to other actors (even negative ROI)
tempered by some usuall-shamedfaced appeal to a mix of [fatalistic, resigned, or blasé] self-interest, what-aboutism, and/or appeals to neatness [usually the result of acquisitions].
Not one. Not even from current employees.
The most vitriolic summaries typically from former employees, or those forced to do business with them.
The only "small businesses" that are threatened by this change are dropshippers who have built a business around whitelabeling cheap Chinese goods with some fancy marketing and selling it at 5x the price.