I think the only way around it (besides owning everything as you said) is to either have more competitors in the mobile phone space, or the few that control the market will have to have their power to pick and choose winners restricted.
Millions of people are moving away from their ubiquitous chat app due to privacy concerns. I think Facebook is going to have a pretty hard time selling phones.
As much as I dislike the effects of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit on the world, it is equally alarming that the actions of platform providers like Apple and Google can have such broad impact. Apple’s recent history in political manipulations includes swapping the gun emoji for a squirt gun emoji, banning Parler, and more. Now, I’m no less alarmed that they could “end” Facebook even if I’m not a fan of Facebook and even if privacy protections help me.
This issue is that there simply isn’t much choice in the market here - between Google and Apple it’s two companies from the same area espousing the same political culture. Having them influence and control the entire world between them is dangerous. Unfortunately I don’t see viable competition for them on mobile devices. Who would we look to - Purism?
It wouldn't be something to get excited about but three major players is greater than two. I believe there are still some open source phones out there but they are currently a minority so tiny their existence is deniable.
Windows phone is a third major player. How did that work out for us? Anything improve at all?
Facebook is not going to provide any meaningful competition to improve things. An additional player when that player is facebook is utterly meaningless to enhancing customer power at best. More likely speeds the race to the bottom of "we can get away with that" because "this is already being done by facebook and we're not doing it as much so it's fine."
The odds of looking at it and rationally thinking "I'll buy a facebook phone for its enhanced privacy compared to apple and google" are so vanishingly small they are indistinguishable from zero.
It's like choosing which crime syndicate you want to to pay protection to and thinking it's a positive thing there's a new crime syndicate with a different dress code now.
Anyway these are the companies who are right this minute, spending up big in washington to put your interests well behind theirs because you pay tax and they don't, they pay lobbying and political donations and you can't compete with that even if you were that dishonest which you probably aren't.
Why? Nobody is forcing you to use FB, are they? I have to make a google account in order to work with certain clients, which is dreadful, but have not encountered the same with FB.
In the realm of lack of choice, WhatsApp (also a FB property!) is pretty hard to avoid in certain countries. So FB the company is hard to avoid, but FB the site doesn't seem so to me.
Access to information and easier communication will do that all by itself. When I started using Twitter I followed lots of people of differing political viewpoints to avoid an echo chamber. It was a hideous reminder that there are many, many people who genuinely hate me and what I believe in and that there are an incredible number of idiots with strongly held wrong opinions and no grasp of basic economics and politics. People hating each other because they have radically different views, priorities and goals is normal. The flattening of opinion that happened between the birth of radio and broadcast tv and that of cable was the result of a determined effort to control the narrative, not something natural.
Twitter and Facebook make money by selling engagement. Placidity of the user base, for companies that sell engagement, is a lost opportunity. They have an incentive to rile people up -- especially in an election year like 2020 when they were selling political advertisements to demagogue politicians.
Nobody’s forcing anyone to use any tech but one tech giant standing up to another on valid moral principles with little beyond mindshare to gain is welcome.
This is something Apple has always flirted with and I’d welcome it as part of their brand. So what they might not actually take down FB. But clearly establishing their values isn’t just an opportunity to buy a product, it’s part of the conversation about what role we want technology to have in our lives and our society.
Actually many are - my wife's college did a lot of scheduling and event planning on Facebook because "everyone has a FB account". That's why she had to create an account.
Right, no one ever has to do anything: there’s no such thing as absolute imperative; there’s always a consequence implied in the verb. So why do we even have this word? Maybe because eliding the consequence is useful?
uh, given they were arranging things that where attendance was graded on FB she didn't have a choice. There was no convenience factor, it was literally the way things were communicated to students.
Yep, similar situation in schools. They are using Facebook for a lot of stuff now. That, and I was doing at least three training/apprenticeship where we used Facebook so I had to have an account. It is quite unavoidable today, I dunno why people make it sound like it is.
Despite the fact that Tim Cook's attack on Facebook and its business model is really just another round in the ongoing fight between Apple and Facebook, he hits on an important point.
Facebook, et al are engaged in an effort to co-opt the freedom and privacy of people the world over and make our entire lives data points to increase their profitability.
By depriving us of privacy and choice around our information spheres, these practices derail and stultify our liberty and ability to knowledgeably practice self-determination.
This has been done with the tacit support (with a few notable exceptions) of frightened government officials who don't want to be blamed for another 9/11-like occurrence.
As Shoshanna Zhuboff put it in her recent OpEd Piece[0]:
"The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.
The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.
The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.
In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last."
This article makes no goddamned sense. Android is the one with the majority and killer apps attract people to platforms. I don't like Facebook but it is far more likely that a full block would harm Apple way more.
They say he's taking a swing at facebook without naming them.
They've missed the fact that every single thing they've excerpted there applies equally to google. Algorithm, engagement, conspiracy theory, disinformation, recommendations to more of the same is precisely what YouTube does. For both "With a computer" in the description which is necessary for how recommendation algorithms work has again caused the overwhelming majority of politicians, public servants, commentators to have their brain fall out of their ear. These recommendation algos were censoriship before censorship suddenly got cool a few weeks ago.
Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple. You'd have to be stone cold crazy to trust Apple now and forever into the future and they are hoarding your data every chance they get themselves with zero consequences beyond PR if they change their policy tomorrow, next year or in 5 years time.
Separately to that, I've never seen a (directly paid for) advert for apple product on the internet. Plenty on the tv. A plethora of manipulated 3rd rate news pieces [1]. Do they advertise on the internet at all? They seem to be very good at advertising.
[1] Is there anyone in Apple's league for convincing news outlets to run their advertisments for free? Elon Musk, for sure. Is he even better? Anyone else? Donald Trump's political advertising maybe? What have you noticed that I might have missed here?
>Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple
The demands from privacy by Apple are right, just combine them with anti-trust measures like open APIs that break Apples walled garden down and the internet would be useable again. It'd be pretty easy to get rid of both censorship and restore people's privacy if the will was there.
>>Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple
>The demands from privacy by Apple are right
Apple still collect the data. They can change their policies to do literally anything with that data anytime they like. Apple deciding what is good for me is something I neither need nor want.
Apple don't pay tax, they do pay lobbying and political donations while courting the favour of politicians. That's a problem in my eyes. Apple have a huge interest in downplaying it. Do you really think they won't? They could do that quite thoroughly without the people at apple who see it differently to me even noticiing they were doing it. Tweak some algos, back test, that's great there's no problem there, push the release button.
I think Facebook is going to go after them on antitrust. I know a lot of the scam billers are going to be as well.
There have also been outcrys against the non genuine battery notices - getting rid of that will let the China battery folks in more for better and worse.
The big risk to apple - right now you don't have to think too much - there's a lot of trust. If the open everything up they may lose what people are willing to pay for in terms of trust as folks have to navigate more complicated business relationships
For me forcing them to open up APIs doesn't mean they lose anything. It'd simply separate the frontend from the backend. They could still provide their own clients and people who love the Apple brand and trust them can use them, I wouldn't even object to them shipping as the default experience on their phones. (something windows got punished for heavily when they bundled browsers, but think about how much less serious that was compared to the restrictions on phones)
All it'd do is offer up an alternative of stores or apps to interface with Apple for people who want it. For example have a chat app that seemingly bridges Android services and iMessage.
This is a big part of Apple's appeal for a lot of folks. They do not allow carriers to put ANY software AT ALL onto their phones. There is NO "open API" for carriers to load malware or replacement app stores through or root level apps or anything.
If you want that fair enough - plenty of android phones allow you to root them and do whatever (and of course the carriers use these open API's to do the same). I know some lifeline phones came with Android/Trojan.HiddenAds. and Android/Trojan.Dropper.Agent.UMX and plenty of other phones use these open api's for "enhancements" many of which are not removable.
Apple does not have any open API, and so distributors, carriers etc cannot "enhance" the phone. That turns out to be something that people are paying EXTRA for. The margins on apple's phones are nuts as a result - they charge FAR more for the same spec as another provider - because you can trust that phone through the supply chain FAR more than you can trust any other phone provider currently. Similarly, you can be an older phone, you can give them to your kids, etc and the quality is there. Resold iphones hold value much MORE, not less, then the more open phones from others (which often have a trash battery installed just before sale which dies in a few weeks).
In your open API world would facebook have to follow app store policies on data collection, user permissions, single point of cancelation?
On Apple's own store, sure. In fact in an open-API world Apple could make their store as secure, as walled, and as privacy respecting as they wanted and we would never need to even debate if Apple abuses their market position. I'd also be perfectly fine with letting Apple demand that phones ship in a factory default state or alternatively outlaw pre-installed apps because you're right that most of it is trash.
However once the phone has reached the user I do not see at all how open protocols reduce Apple's appeal to people who want to exclusively use Apple software. You can simply do just that.
Would Microsoft be more valuable if we all could only install software through the windows store and the OS was locked down? Nobody would claim that. Third party apps are what adds marginal value to the phone. This is precisely why Apple let's third party developers put apps on their phone, something that Jobs for example initially opposed. He wanted to build everything in-house.
I think Apple is valuable for a lot of reasons. They have a great sense of aesthetic, user friendliness, UX, great hardware, but I do not believe at all that a lack of software raises the value of the phone. If you had a universal chat app that interfaces with all other proprietary protocols on your phone right now, your phone would be worth more.
I think you vastly overestimate power individual users have to force change on people like facebook.
What you propose means that if facebook doesn't like the anti-tracking rules, they can go around them. If your cable company doesn't like the anti-location awareness features to target ads to you if you stream their show, they can go around that. If a biller doesn't like that users can ask for a 30 day heads up on subscription renewals, they can do their own app store.
It is only because Apple (as a whole) as enough market power that - my subscription show notifications prior to renewal. That all of a sudden I can sign in to a bunch of apps with an apple sign in THAT DOES NOT RELEASE MY EMAIL. That all of a sudden privacy labels are appearing next to apps. And the list goes on. NONE of this would happen if these other folks were in charge, there is much more money in exploiting users.
So yes, apple is using its market power to push back on behavior they don't believe makes sense for their average user base. You are a power user, able to navigate all options - jump on andorid, root it, and do what you want.
It seems like Facebook is getting the most bad press, but anything that hurts Facebook hurts google even more, because Google is basically the same formula but twice as big as Facebook.
I think they're just trying to sound "cool" by using millennial colloquialisms. However, besides being less informative than a more nuanced alternative, it ends up sounding cringeworthy to me in a business/finance publication.
No, this is about Apple iPhone and iPads disallowing the Facebook app from collecting a large portion of the data that Facebook believes that it needs to collect in order to do business.
This is not an article about a speech that itself may end Facebook. This is an article about a speech given to formally announce a decision Apple has made to protect its users from Facebook's insane data collection.
FB definitely having an existential moment there. Not just because Apple but because this is getting more attention. Tracking is a lot more acceptable if it’s invisible / unknown.
A bit like how eco friendliness of products creeped its way into more mindshare. And one day manufacturers wake up and realise it has critical mass
it seems like every time one company of the technofeudalist leaders got itself into a scandal, fanboys tend to forget the previous ones. When did apple become the "lifestyle brand", the good guys? Not so long ago HN was full of the storm how apps stopped working when tracking servers went down. Apple shares the very same interests around your personal data, it's just that facebook is a reseller and apple is an enduser of your privacy.
The piece you're missing is that there are different groups of "fanboys". When a particular news story reinforces one group's ideas, you hear a lot from them in the comments. When news is ambiguous or non-threatening to a group, they stay silent in the comments. (If it's threatening they come out to defend)
It depends on the issue. When it comes to privacy apple are the good guys AFAIK, they aren't in the surveillance tech business like google, facebook, and half of silicon valley.
When it comes to empowering users to control and modify/repair their own devices and the software running on them apple are the bad guys.
You'll see different responses depending on the topic at hand.
Well, the hats drop to the floor and the scuffle begins. After all, it's reported Facebook is preparing a blockbuster lawsuit against Apple for being a monopoly.
As much as I dislike Apple, I dislike Facebook even more.
And as much as I dislike Facebook, I dislike even more the more evil alternatives that could exist.
We're lucky that it's just Zuckerberg - some nerd that lucked his way into a lot of money. There are plenty of people that could be more nefarious - particularly if the power is shared among a group of people where blame can even further be distributed.
I don't want to get too political and name names, but there are certain companies that are magnitudes worse - that can be tied directly to concentration camps, cartels, war crimes, mass scale environmental destruction. And they don't get held accountable because they're made up of boards of shadowy people that know how to stay out of the public eye and grease the right wheels.
It’s not so much the ads that are the problem, I think. Its the data collected and the content promoted so you see those ads.
Facebook sows discord because people are more engaged. They collect data to know exactly what makes you furious and keep screaming.
It’s interesting actually that Facebook could make gobs of money by not trying to optimize for engagement and just let people naturally follow all their friends and family and waste time. All this extra harm is caused for just an extra few percent on top of a pile of money.
I wonder if Facebook will be able to find a way to collect not exactly same amount of data but most of the data it captures atm. Ok, if you like to access to uniq identifier that's going to trigger a confirmation modal but as we all know Facebook doesn't necessarily need to capture all the data from the mobile phone directly with their SDK.
Especially, if the user is logged in app owner can send data to their backend and send it to Facebook from there. Like many of those marketing / analytics companies ask you to do.
For the long term tracking, the app owners can still generate uniq identifier and store on device storage, can't they? I guess the only functionality Facebook or any ad network would lose will be cross-app tracking. But I'm not sure how important is that.
The initial reaction Facebook gave to this was too aggressive and Apple will push back for sure with their own way. We all have bloody cookie confirmation on all websites and people mostly just click ok. Isn't that gonna be the same for the apps? In iOS14 modal asking you for confirmation, is it gonna say "Facebook wants to access idfa?" or "X application wants to access idfa?"
51 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 95.9 ms ] threadThis issue is that there simply isn’t much choice in the market here - between Google and Apple it’s two companies from the same area espousing the same political culture. Having them influence and control the entire world between them is dangerous. Unfortunately I don’t see viable competition for them on mobile devices. Who would we look to - Purism?
Nokia n900 is still peak smartphone a decade after it was killed.
Facebook is not going to provide any meaningful competition to improve things. An additional player when that player is facebook is utterly meaningless to enhancing customer power at best. More likely speeds the race to the bottom of "we can get away with that" because "this is already being done by facebook and we're not doing it as much so it's fine."
The odds of looking at it and rationally thinking "I'll buy a facebook phone for its enhanced privacy compared to apple and google" are so vanishingly small they are indistinguishable from zero.
It's like choosing which crime syndicate you want to to pay protection to and thinking it's a positive thing there's a new crime syndicate with a different dress code now.
Anyway these are the companies who are right this minute, spending up big in washington to put your interests well behind theirs because you pay tax and they don't, they pay lobbying and political donations and you can't compete with that even if you were that dishonest which you probably aren't.
In the realm of lack of choice, WhatsApp (also a FB property!) is pretty hard to avoid in certain countries. So FB the company is hard to avoid, but FB the site doesn't seem so to me.
Twitter and Facebook make money by selling engagement. Placidity of the user base, for companies that sell engagement, is a lost opportunity. They have an incentive to rile people up -- especially in an election year like 2020 when they were selling political advertisements to demagogue politicians.
This is something Apple has always flirted with and I’d welcome it as part of their brand. So what they might not actually take down FB. But clearly establishing their values isn’t just an opportunity to buy a product, it’s part of the conversation about what role we want technology to have in our lives and our society.
Facebook, et al are engaged in an effort to co-opt the freedom and privacy of people the world over and make our entire lives data points to increase their profitability.
By depriving us of privacy and choice around our information spheres, these practices derail and stultify our liberty and ability to knowledgeably practice self-determination.
This has been done with the tacit support (with a few notable exceptions) of frightened government officials who don't want to be blamed for another 9/11-like occurrence.
As Shoshanna Zhuboff put it in her recent OpEd Piece[0]:
"The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.
The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.
The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.
In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last."
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-s...
They've missed the fact that every single thing they've excerpted there applies equally to google. Algorithm, engagement, conspiracy theory, disinformation, recommendations to more of the same is precisely what YouTube does. For both "With a computer" in the description which is necessary for how recommendation algorithms work has again caused the overwhelming majority of politicians, public servants, commentators to have their brain fall out of their ear. These recommendation algos were censoriship before censorship suddenly got cool a few weeks ago.
Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple. You'd have to be stone cold crazy to trust Apple now and forever into the future and they are hoarding your data every chance they get themselves with zero consequences beyond PR if they change their policy tomorrow, next year or in 5 years time.
Separately to that, I've never seen a (directly paid for) advert for apple product on the internet. Plenty on the tv. A plethora of manipulated 3rd rate news pieces [1]. Do they advertise on the internet at all? They seem to be very good at advertising.
[1] Is there anyone in Apple's league for convincing news outlets to run their advertisments for free? Elon Musk, for sure. Is he even better? Anyone else? Donald Trump's political advertising maybe? What have you noticed that I might have missed here?
The demands from privacy by Apple are right, just combine them with anti-trust measures like open APIs that break Apples walled garden down and the internet would be useable again. It'd be pretty easy to get rid of both censorship and restore people's privacy if the will was there.
>The demands from privacy by Apple are right
Apple still collect the data. They can change their policies to do literally anything with that data anytime they like. Apple deciding what is good for me is something I neither need nor want.
Apple don't pay tax, they do pay lobbying and political donations while courting the favour of politicians. That's a problem in my eyes. Apple have a huge interest in downplaying it. Do you really think they won't? They could do that quite thoroughly without the people at apple who see it differently to me even noticiing they were doing it. Tweak some algos, back test, that's great there's no problem there, push the release button.
There have also been outcrys against the non genuine battery notices - getting rid of that will let the China battery folks in more for better and worse.
The big risk to apple - right now you don't have to think too much - there's a lot of trust. If the open everything up they may lose what people are willing to pay for in terms of trust as folks have to navigate more complicated business relationships
All it'd do is offer up an alternative of stores or apps to interface with Apple for people who want it. For example have a chat app that seemingly bridges Android services and iMessage.
If you want that fair enough - plenty of android phones allow you to root them and do whatever (and of course the carriers use these open API's to do the same). I know some lifeline phones came with Android/Trojan.HiddenAds. and Android/Trojan.Dropper.Agent.UMX and plenty of other phones use these open api's for "enhancements" many of which are not removable.
Apple does not have any open API, and so distributors, carriers etc cannot "enhance" the phone. That turns out to be something that people are paying EXTRA for. The margins on apple's phones are nuts as a result - they charge FAR more for the same spec as another provider - because you can trust that phone through the supply chain FAR more than you can trust any other phone provider currently. Similarly, you can be an older phone, you can give them to your kids, etc and the quality is there. Resold iphones hold value much MORE, not less, then the more open phones from others (which often have a trash battery installed just before sale which dies in a few weeks).
In your open API world would facebook have to follow app store policies on data collection, user permissions, single point of cancelation?
However once the phone has reached the user I do not see at all how open protocols reduce Apple's appeal to people who want to exclusively use Apple software. You can simply do just that.
Would Microsoft be more valuable if we all could only install software through the windows store and the OS was locked down? Nobody would claim that. Third party apps are what adds marginal value to the phone. This is precisely why Apple let's third party developers put apps on their phone, something that Jobs for example initially opposed. He wanted to build everything in-house.
I think Apple is valuable for a lot of reasons. They have a great sense of aesthetic, user friendliness, UX, great hardware, but I do not believe at all that a lack of software raises the value of the phone. If you had a universal chat app that interfaces with all other proprietary protocols on your phone right now, your phone would be worth more.
What you propose means that if facebook doesn't like the anti-tracking rules, they can go around them. If your cable company doesn't like the anti-location awareness features to target ads to you if you stream their show, they can go around that. If a biller doesn't like that users can ask for a 30 day heads up on subscription renewals, they can do their own app store.
It is only because Apple (as a whole) as enough market power that - my subscription show notifications prior to renewal. That all of a sudden I can sign in to a bunch of apps with an apple sign in THAT DOES NOT RELEASE MY EMAIL. That all of a sudden privacy labels are appearing next to apps. And the list goes on. NONE of this would happen if these other folks were in charge, there is much more money in exploiting users.
So yes, apple is using its market power to push back on behavior they don't believe makes sense for their average user base. You are a power user, able to navigate all options - jump on andorid, root it, and do what you want.
This is not an article about a speech that itself may end Facebook. This is an article about a speech given to formally announce a decision Apple has made to protect its users from Facebook's insane data collection.
A bit like how eco friendliness of products creeped its way into more mindshare. And one day manufacturers wake up and realise it has critical mass
The piece you're missing is that there are different groups of "fanboys". When a particular news story reinforces one group's ideas, you hear a lot from them in the comments. When news is ambiguous or non-threatening to a group, they stay silent in the comments. (If it's threatening they come out to defend)
When it comes to empowering users to control and modify/repair their own devices and the software running on them apple are the bad guys.
You'll see different responses depending on the topic at hand.
The incitement of violence is such a cope out too. People decide to be violent, punish those that are.
Telling people to go "peacefully and patriotically" is obviously not inciting violence.
And as much as I dislike Facebook, I dislike even more the more evil alternatives that could exist.
We're lucky that it's just Zuckerberg - some nerd that lucked his way into a lot of money. There are plenty of people that could be more nefarious - particularly if the power is shared among a group of people where blame can even further be distributed.
I don't want to get too political and name names, but there are certain companies that are magnitudes worse - that can be tied directly to concentration camps, cartels, war crimes, mass scale environmental destruction. And they don't get held accountable because they're made up of boards of shadowy people that know how to stay out of the public eye and grease the right wheels.
and yet, you
> don't want to get too political and name names
So they stay shadowy, and continue to be out of the public eye.
Facebook sows discord because people are more engaged. They collect data to know exactly what makes you furious and keep screaming.
It’s interesting actually that Facebook could make gobs of money by not trying to optimize for engagement and just let people naturally follow all their friends and family and waste time. All this extra harm is caused for just an extra few percent on top of a pile of money.
Especially, if the user is logged in app owner can send data to their backend and send it to Facebook from there. Like many of those marketing / analytics companies ask you to do.
For the long term tracking, the app owners can still generate uniq identifier and store on device storage, can't they? I guess the only functionality Facebook or any ad network would lose will be cross-app tracking. But I'm not sure how important is that.
The initial reaction Facebook gave to this was too aggressive and Apple will push back for sure with their own way. We all have bloody cookie confirmation on all websites and people mostly just click ok. Isn't that gonna be the same for the apps? In iOS14 modal asking you for confirmation, is it gonna say "Facebook wants to access idfa?" or "X application wants to access idfa?"