I would say that's a false equivalency. In the Apple case, it's possibly gaining via marketing and driving people to paid apps that Apple gains revenue from.
Please don't misread me though--I'm glad Apple is doing this, I just don't think they're heroes for it.
I like how you say it's false equivalency but then kind of fail to actually show that... maybe because it's not?
In the real world there are few "heroic" deeds that don't benefit the entity doing them.
The doctor doing the transplant gets professional acclaim that is not worthless, would you say the doctor did it to market themselves?
Turns out doing good things can be profitable, it's not an either or.
This tired cynicism any time a company does something good and people admire them for it (ie consider the action heroic) is not novel or useful. Companies at the size of Apple and co are never going to be pure forces of good with no bad deeds, but they are still capable of being heroes in a specific context. Right now Apple is being a hero of their customer's right to privacy
Hero has become something of a joke word these days. It's used to describe acts as mundane as getting out of bed in the morning and going to a salaried job. It's too bad, because it's nice to have a word to describe people of near godlike achievement. Chuck Yeager would be an example of what I consider a bona-fide modern hero. Alexander would be an example from antiquity.
What people consider heroic is a personal choice. I had no issue with someone saying what Apple did isn't heroic, what I was against was the specific reason.
After all, to me Chuck Yeager is less of a hero than someone who helps out at a soup kitchen every weekend. One was doing their job (and a questionable person honestly) and the other is taking their own time to help others.
One reason that people buy and use Apple devices is because they want to use Facebook. If this ended in a situation where Facebook was no longer on Apple devices, or somehow crippled on them, Apple could significantly damage their own revenue.
The fact that Facebook appears to consider user consent an existential threat to their business model tells me everything I need to know about them right now.
At scale? Margin of error at best. I will tell you what my interests are by vising web properties that cater to them in that specific time. You deciding to keep showing me ads for a Nespresso machine when I'm reading about circular saws is idiotic.
That doesn’t pass the sniff test. Would you say that in general, you wouldn’t expect a difference in results if you sold Taylor swift albums to white suburban women in Iowa, versus black urban men in Atlanta?
You know what would blow both of those out of the water? Selling it to those that have indicated that they are interested in Taylor Swift as white suburban women in Iowa do not buy Taylor Swift albums. They buy mom jeans. Instead they are getting ads for Taylor Swift.
How do you increase your market past people who have already liked Ms. Swift?
The argument still stands - just replace TS with mom jeans. My point wasn't actually about Taylor Swift marketing - it was that demographic targeting is a reasonable way to identify an audience. Those mom jeans are not going to sell very well in a younger, urban demographic compared to Iowa.
Given that ebay is a worldwide company that is relevant to pretty much everyone on the plant, it seems like they are exactly the case for targeted ads being least useful.
Nearly every company in the world does not fit that description, and I would bet that the vast majority of them would benefit from targeted advertising. One example being local stores targeted only to local people.
Ebay didn't stop buying targeted ads, afaik they stopped buying a specific type of ad in google search that had the keyword 'ebay' in it. Most companies bid up their own searches with the theory that they have to or else their competitor would, but ebay showed that people who search 'ebay magic cards' would most likely skip the search ads and go straight to ebay.
No they completely stopped buying ads. The brand keyword experiment gave them the confidence to run an experiment to completely turn everything off.
>TADELIS: Yes. So, for non-branded search, we actually had no idea what the results are going to be. Because here, if I am searching for, example, a studio microphone I’m sure that on eBay I might find a variety of used ones. But if I’m not thinking about eBay, and I just search for “studio microphone,” if eBay doesn’t pay an ad, they might not even show up on the first page. And by the way, the automated machines at eBay that were doing the online bidding, they had a basic library of close to 100 million different combinations of keywords, because eBay has practically everything you could imagine for sale on the site. So, we really had no idea what the returns for the non-branded searches would be.
>TADELIS: And we took a third of these D.M.A.’s, and we turned off all paid-search advertising. This was an extremely blunt experiment where we’re saying, “What would happen if we didn’t advertise at all?” And to our surprise the impact on average was pretty much zero.
Be careful not to conflate necessary with convenient. Static ads can still be local, e.g. in the local newspaper, on the radio station, on a sign post, or websites for local businesses/communities.
Agree. The spying part is what is wrong (and should be illegal without a consent and paid compensation). Ad agencies should not be allowed to track and model my behavior, and then use these models to sell me stuff. Or if they do they should pay me for it.
Facebook should just make a user's location required - not the ios permission to constantly track a user all over... but just a field on a user - city/state/country.
Or make it optional and just show that ad to users that have set their location field.
I don't think that's relevant here: the new prompts aren't about collecting gps data but correlating your identity across contexts. If you manually chose a city in Facebook, I think the ad in the other random app which used fb ad network would only be able to use it if the user said "yes" to the prompt.
I think theres a spectrum of techniques and no bright line. If you are temporarily in NY but live in LA, is it location based advertising to show the user an ad targeted to LA? What if you're at a regional airport and the only flights today are to LA? What if the ad network knows you have a flight booked to LA today? What if you have a lot of friends in LA so there's a good chance you will be there soon?
People would call the last one personalized and not "location targeted", but it's pretty hard to see where that flips.
It’s an insidious racket at worst, and at best a case of an emperor with no clothes.
Mass advertising needs to die off already. Just hold better search and filtering tools and empower people to discover what they want instead of telling them what they should want.
There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that happily pay for ads on Facebook over other platforms and see improved results after tweaking the targeting.
The issue is the privacy loss we get, not the efficacy of targeting.
I’m also skeptical of the claim that targeted ads don’t work better then static ads. However I think the default assumption should be that they don’t until we find evidence that they do. That is the burden of proof should be on the targeted ads.
All that said, I am not an authority on if any evidence exists, I have never looked into the literature my self, so perhaps this evidence already exists and I just don’t know about it.
to be fair, that could in part be the Baader-Meinhoff effect [1], where you'll only remember the ones that were scarily accurate (though I do agree with you).
I don't know what the hit rate was, because as you suggest I likely ignored the irrelevant ads. However, the ads that were relevant were so eerily accurate (including things many of my friends and acquaintances wouldn't know about me) that I didn't want anything more to do with the platform.
Targeted ads don’t work any better then static ads. This is new for me. Actually now that I think about it, all evidence I remember at the moment is anecdotal. So perhaps you are right.
Regardless of its efficacy, the legality should be out of the question.
I’m not sure it makes sense to speak this broadly about efficacy, since there are probably variations in returns amongst different targeting groups and value props. Execution matters.
I’m also not sure if it matters whether they are actually effective. At least for the short term. If people believe they are effective, is there any difference in the dynamic?
Yes they do. It really bugs me all these HN threads state this and rely on their own personal experience not as an ad buyer but as a consumer. It's not true.
One can directly measure ROI and prove the value of this advertising. Especially FB provides for my business (political marketing) at least 10X better direct response value and that is mostly using 1:1 targeting and lookalike modeling.
Cool. Just as I thought. It seemed wrong that such an easily measurable thing would never have been tested and a whole industry (arguable the biggest industry in the western world at the moment) had never measured it (or they had and found no effect).
What I like about the HN discourse is that if someone slings out a statement which is demonstrably false, someone that knows better might respond with a correction. That is why I left this comment, as I all my knowledge with the targeted ad business was anecdotal, and I desperately needed a correction.
i know... and so do probably most major and direct response marketers.
there are a lot of ways to measure outside of FBs analytics tools.
including the very simple simply using a refcode or even a specific product/url. How many purchases did you get / how much did you spend?
this is what i'm referencing. like that's so incredibly basic and it bugs me HN just either doesn't understand or lets their opinion on it go first
In my experience FBs inaccurate reporting is just a tiny amount of impressions delivered and they refund the $1 or whatever it is a couple times a year. Have they ever had a reporting anomaly on their analytics tools for tracking off FB conversions? they very well could have but I haven't heard of one.
> there are a lot of ways to measure outside of FBs analytics tools.
There is no way to validate their impression/click data that all the downstream metrics are reliant on. If you have a way, I'd love to know about it. The claim isn't that they make up conversions, the claim is that they overstate the ROI and cv% based on the denominator.
I have routinely gotten over 100% immediate last-click roi from fb ads, for many clients.
I know for a fact many others have too. There are a ton of direct to consumer online-only products that easily measure this. Just make a page or item which you only use to advertise on FB. sales/spend. Game developers track this closely too.
This is anecdotal evidence. Nobody is disputing those exists. However I think FB and Google owe their existence a little better evidence, such as A/B testing, control group studies and even experiments to actually demonstrate their effectiveness. Until we have those (and perhaps we do; I seriously know nothing of the existing literature) the anecdotal evidence we do have should be taken only as indicative of effect, not proof of effect. Anecdotal evidence come with a ton of bias.
I think it's less to do with targeting and more to do with a noxious business model. When your business model literally relies on wasting people's time and/or compromising their privacy, it shouldn't be surprising that people eventually develop workarounds (ad blocking) or provide a business incentive for a third-party company (like Apple) to implement countermeasures.
It is clear that an ad on a search page for a product works much better than something that is not relevant. What I’ve seen from my wife’s Facebook is that Facebook heavily promotes ads based on your search activity elsewhere. If they know that you are more likely to buy a product than a random person, it would definitely improve the ad effectiveness. In other words they’re skimming intent based on google searches.
Why would I need to be saved? I'll just buy a device from a different manufacturer. If there are literally no privacy-respecting options, and a majority of people think there should be one, either a company will form on its own, or constituents will make enough noise that the government will step in.
If not in the US, the EU still seems to have some basic respect for the rights of their citizens.
In this case the incentives led to an action with a positive impact for the user, so we should keep up those incentives regardless of which corporation ends up capitalizing on them.
"You're Apple's customer and Facebook's product" is often repeated but completely true in this case. It's all about incentives.
Apple makes money by selling more products which means they innovate by making Watches, Earpods, M1, etc. Facebook makes money by selling your attention and data, which meants they innovate by extracting data from every experience they can (Oculus, Whatsapp, ...), using more complex technologies (Facebook AI), and encouraging whatever behaviors create more ad spend (hint: outrage).
Add in the fact that Apple has made privacy a core part of their brand promise and it means that Apple has strong incentives to protect their customers in a way that most companies, especially Facebook, do not.
Also, you literally are Apple’s product to their iOS developer ecosystem, in the sense that developers fork over 30% of their revenue to Apple for access to you.
This is absolutely true. Both companies play the game of selling customer acquisition. But we seem to be generally more okay with middlemen squeezing a two sided market. Sometimes. If it’s DoorDash or Amazon then public opinion seems to go the other way.
But regardless it’s not Facebook’s value prop to business that people have an issue with but ya know, how they actually deliver it.
No, devs don't buy customers from apple. Customers buy apps, and Apple takes a commission. No money flows from Developer to Apple (apart from to 100$ annual fee if you want to be anal about it).
No they buy access to customers. You can't sell to Apple's customer base unless you give them 30% of gross. The world where Apple charges that 30% commission to the devs after the sale or collects it from the customer during the sale is irrelevant. We fork over a lot of money to Apple for the privilege of selling to their customers.
I think that nowadays most profitable software is cross-platform and is also available on other platforms, thus their developers see access to the iOS market as added value rather than their primary customer acquisition channel.
Well, you can't sell peaches to Walmart customers without Walmart taking a cut either. But we don't say the peach growers are buying customers from Walmart, do we?
On one hand, it's argued that Apple has an incentive to act against their customers because they want to sell apps on the app store.
On the other hand, it's argued that Apple doesn't care about their developers because they enforce draconian regulations on what iOS developers are allowed and not allowed to do, and don't hesitate even to shut down billion dollar apps (i.e., Fortnite).
I have mixed feelings about Apple's walled garden, both as a developer and a user, but when it comes to user privacy, I'm firmly in Apple's camp. I can't think of a single other large tech company that has a strong stand in favor of user privacy and acted on that. Basically, if Privacy is a killer feature for a consumer, then Apple is literally the only game in town.
We just need to look at how they handled the San Bernadino shooting and requests for a phone unlock to find a supposed "lying dormant cyber pathogen".
Every other company would have been falling over themselves to unlock a terrorists iPhone.
Apple said no, hired Ted Olsen, and litigated (along with lots of other less well known cases).
This may have even hurt them in some consumers eyes (hard to understand them protecting someone who killed a bunch of people). So the PR risk was very significant.
So they do seem to have a pretty committed consumer focus (and now make money because of that).
It is virtually inevitable though that someone will go after them (anti-trust etc) because this is a game of billions and folks who for example do in-game loot boxes (fortnite) and marketing (facebook) etc are going to be in regulators ears and in ny times ads and op-eds calling for this horrible situation to be broken up.
> and don't hesitate even to shut down billion dollar apps (i.e., Fortnite).
It's fairly obvious that, given Epic was saying "you can pay $2 less to get the same amount of vbucks" that Apple was going to lose a huge portion of revenue from the App if they didn't pull it, and if they actually left it up, they'd have to allow every other app to institute third-party payment processors as well to not appear like they're playing favorites and the PR nightmare that would come from that.
I'm saying that Apple was going to get shafted on payments and making money from Epic anyways if they left it up because Epic was charging $2 less when paying directly via a card and bypassing in-app purchases.
No, that's not right. The app is the product, the customer is the buyer of the app, and the split of revenue is 70/30 (or 85/15 for small devs).
Saying that developers are "buying" users makes no sense. Devs are not a customer of apple. If anything, devs are a supplier to apple. Since the net money flow is from Apple to Dev.
On the other hand, devs wouldn't be able to sell to iPhone users if there was no iPhone, or no App Store, or the appleid.apple.com identity verification system, or iOS 14, or anything else that is paramount to devs even having those users as customers in the first place. In this scenario, the iPhone is the product and the App Store is a feature of the iPhone, and the fact that it moves money around (or doesn't, most of the time) is irrelevant.
Now, the legal view of Apple's ecosystem is being litigated right now. What I posted above might be how the court sees it, or what you posted might be how the court sees it. We won't get a definitive answer until either Epic or Apple go home with the key to processing payments on iOS and all of the other systems that are effectively an iPhone with a different form factor (eg PS5, xbox series).
Whether you consider the developers a customer of Apple paying for distribution, or a supplier to Apple who takes a cut, is ultimately a semantic distinction. But the conflict of interest it creates — that Apple retains a monopoly on how software is distributed to a device that you ostensibly “own” and sets rates to optimize for their own gain - is the case regardless of the semantics we use.
(I’m not entirely opposed to this arrangement; I’m typing this on my iPhone. But I bought it knowing and accepting that I’m partly the product)
If this is true about Apple, it is true in any retail situation.
It’s not what people mean when they say ‘you are the product’.
What they mean is that if you aren’t paying, then the company is only interested in retaining you as a user so that they can satisfy their actual customers.
When you are paying, you are the customer
It’s also true that iOS developers are customers of Apple’s distribution service.
Buy Apple’s users are not a product in the sense that anyone uses this phrase.
That's a wrong view. Customer in app market is the buyer of the app. Both Apple and devs are suppliers who each take a split. (Devs supply app itself, Apple supplies infrastructure and supporting services.)
Tell me more. So what would the nomenclature for the actual revenue generating side. I guess more generally, in a two sided marketplace is there specific verbiage for each “customer”?
I don't know, I'm just using common sense really. Look where money flows.
First the money flows from from end user to Apple, and then from Apple to developer.
The simplest way to model it is as a supply from dev to apple, plus a value-adding supply from apple to end user.
People here are arguing it is a supply from end user to dev, plus a supply from Apple to dev. That's obtuse way to model it IMO. Then again those are the kind of people who probably devising tax avoidance schemes and making big bucks so what to I know.
Google had the advantage that their service was separable from the physical devices using it.
I doubt you would be arguing that, if Apple bricked basically every iPhone in China, it would be evidence that their "incentives are aligned with their customers".
Being a separate device, as you said, means the phones would still work independent of Apple.
The Chinese government would block updates and sales, hencecustomers would blame them, not Apple, because Apple was incentivized with customers instead of the government moving forward.
Basically everyone with an iPhone uses an Apple ID. It is certainly not hyperbole that the devices usability would be very severely impacted without access to Apple's servers.
They would lose iCloud access. That's what the Chinese Government threatened them with.
It is not "bricking phones" as you said. As much as you don't like this fact, Apple had a choice and decided to put the Chinese government before it's users.
An iPhone that cannot connect to Apple’s servers is essentially bricked. Not only do a significant number of critical features on the phone require reaching out to Apple to function, but IIRC, after a certain period of time without being able to contact Apple, the phone will require you to log in with your Apple ID. I believe this is to prevent activation lock bypasses by blocking network resources.
I remember reading about an issue a while back, where a person got locked out of their phone at sea, because they didn’t have network access for an extended period of time.
I disagree. Apple's incentives is to make everybody that has an iPhone pay for apps instead of using advertising supported apps, essentially making things more expensive for the customers.
You can think of it as a common. Blocking tracking essentially is a destruction of a bit of commons; the app developer will get less revenue. By systematically encouraging this block, Apple is making it comparatively less worthwhile to have an ad-supported app instead of a paid app, thus moving revenue to the app store (where Apple can tax it) instead of the advertising side (where it is monetarily free for the user.)
If we really wanted to find out what is right for the user[1], the correct thing is to see if users want to buy their way out of tracking. Offer the apps with advertising with tracking, with advertising without tracking, and without advertising - at different prices, representing the value of the advertising and tracking. My bet is that a majority of users would not want to pay the cost of non-tracked advertising - either they'll want to buy away advertising (and that will only be a small fraction) or they'll want the free variant. Basically, all data I've seen indicate that most people don't want to buy their way out of advertising - it's too expensive. I expect the same applies to tracking.
[1] Under the assumption that we've got an efficient market and will see an equilibrium of development that correspond to value created.
It seems people can do just that now on the new iOS. The app is free to switch off / charge for features if the user is not allowing tracking. Don't know how this works together with GDPR though.
Apple makes money by you being trapped in the Apple ecosystem.
Everything in it is structured around forcing you to pay Apple for access to things you want. Microtransactions, apps etc. All of it must go through Apple and they must have a cut of everything.
You can say they're more honest because they're taking your money up front as opposed to facebook selling you to advertisers, but I don't think it's in Apple's customers' best interests to be milked like cows
That's true for the time being, but considering Apple has a stranglehold on the app store and are therefore facing anti-competitive questions, they are maneuvering from an entirely different anchor point.
It's in Apple's short-term best interest to win over public opinion. It not only cools down anti-competitive rhetoric, but it also helps sell phones.
Facebook users (at least a portion) seem to be incentivized by having a large, free social network. It is the advertisements which make it free to consumers. Facebook's monetization strategy may not align with your tastes, but most people have not problem using free services with ads. That said their customers over time are going to want to preserve more of their privacy and advertisers are going to expect the same effectiveness, Facebook is going to have to figure out how to please all parties.
If you cared about ethical treatment of labour in China, presumably you’d prefer to buy products from a company that rigorously audited its supply chain, excluded suppliers they caught violating it, ensured workers were paid above average industry wages and had below average suicide rates in their suppliers, right?
Presumably if you were going to criticise companies using Chinese suppliers, a company like that wouldn’t be top of your list. Or is there something else going on here?
I don't know why people are like this. You can be pro human rights and also not dedicate your entire life to supply chain audits.
I'm making a point that the largest company in the world not only does so but actively took steps to ensure they wouldn't be legally prevented from doing so in the future.
This is not correct, I've seen it said here several times so I looked into it. Apple lobbied for some amendments to the act on the grounds of practicality but did not oppose it and said they thought it should become law.
I don't know how to label this other than lazy shit post response. This isn't Whataboutism in the sense that I am trying to justify the otherwise guilty party here. I literally opened saying Facebook is terrible and made no effort to defend them.
I am pointing out that there is more than one dimension (privacy) on which we should think about these companies and the moment you do it's interesting to note how only one of them has a bad public image and the other is a hero.
everyone seems to conveniently forget about the absolute moral nightmare that is Apple’s supply chain
No, everyone hasn't. Apple has its problems, too, and nobody denies that. But arguments like yours amount to no more than "Hey, look over there! Don't look at Facebook, look at this other thing!"
If Apple genuinely though that, you’d expect them to be selling access to their customer data to the highest bidder, but they aren’t.
In fact they were offered billions of dollars in revenue by Google for customer location data in Google Maps. Apple turned it down and instead spent billions of dollars and several years building Apple Maps instead.
Well, they still need a search provider, a lot of people would change it to Google anyway. Arguably locking down the browser to limit tracking as much as possible is reasonable even though it potentially makes that Google deal less lucrative.
If they were intent on monetising users data, you’d expect them to make a deal with Google to allow tracking in Safari in exchange for a higher fee for default search.
In other words they don’t seem to be doing any of the things We would expect to see if this theory was correct.
But apple (and Android) allowing search providers to bid/buy that default spot is a barrier to entry for new search providers and only makes the dominant search provider stronger. How could a new Google emerge today when people lazily accept the default? When Google started there was not built in browser default - users had to manually type in altavista.com or google.com.
A big company like Coca Cola being able to buy huge advertising campaigns is a barrier to entry for new Cola makers. I suppose there are cases where buying or selling placement might be unethical, but I don't see it here. For example for a long time Google funded Firefox by buying a place as the search default. Was that unethical by Mozilla?
Normally, I'd ignore any marketing touting new privacy features in iOS, but Facebook's response has convinced me this isn't just an empty gesture from Apple.
I wholly internalized that there was a real problem when I started taking my phone to other parts of the house, placing it in a drawer before returning and shutting the door to have an in person conversation with someone.
I'm not sure why this is getting down-voted, but I think the point here is the _fact_ that you have been put in a situation where, as an individual, you are concerned enough to do this is telling, crazy or not
You are right on - the fact that I even needed to think about whether I should have to be concerned with it is where I was headed.
Devices do listen to all sounds to listen for their "prompt" - how do I know what is actually discarded? And with precedence, I don't think it is 'crazy'.
Anybody that doesn’t know the code their device is running is a fool to trust it by default. Even knowing the code well, devices are compromised all the time. Yours seems like the lone sane opinion here.
We don't know the code of HN but we trust it because we can see the inputs, outputs, and trust the admins running it. A lot of people trust Google/Apple for the same reason to keep their devices secure but are aware that they might need to stay up-to-date and give up freedom [to install unverified apps] to achieve that security.
HN also does not have a microphone sitting here for me constantly listening for me to say "OK HN, post response". It is running as a pull HTTP connection in a sandboxed browser. I do not need to imply any trust in them provided they don't have some zero day exploit running to escape my browser and hijack my system.
Just as if my location/microphone were able to be physically turned off on my phone I would not have to trust that someone isn't always listening in on me. If I can't do that it is not unreasonable not to trust it. There have been plenty of instances of these things being abused.
I didn't downvote, but "It doesn't matter if it's true, It's bad that I'm concerned" is used to justify all sorts of alarmist policies. Right now that's what's being used to restrict voting rights across the US and has been used for a long time to justify NIMBY and tough on crime policies regardless of evidence.
There are differences between these scenarios. In one case we have an individual who made a personal decision that does not affect anyone else. The contrary examples are of people imposing their will upon others to restrict the rights of others. There is very little one should do about the beliefs of others, regardless of what the evidence supports, unless it affects the rights of others.
I do have precedence in logic, right? Alexa/Siri/etc must listen for their voice cue prompts to activate, and discarding all other discussion. So I must trust that corporation would discard if not applicable. Without a hardware cutoff switch for a mic - it is blind trust, isn't it?
This is really, really bad reasoning. Basically you're saying that there's no point in countering wildly untrue conspiracies with facts or evidence, the mere fact that people believe the conspiracies means they might as well be true?
(I'm not making a claim either way on whether or not in this case it's true that devices are spying on us, just that this line or thinking is absurd that it doesn't really matter if a given thing is true)
I remember back in 2002 when I took a college course on Computer Security and the prof told story after harrowing story of the lengths to which spy agencies went to get the information they were after. I remember thinking, "Well if the NSA really wanted to track everyone and record everything that was ever transmitted over the internet, I suppose they could. But nah, that's crazy."
Fast forward to 2013 and Snowden.
Our defaults for "they wouldn't do that" when it comes to your privacy are all wrong.
If that's a "conspiracy theory" that you need to dismiss so that you can go about your life, fine. But the truth is, these people are constantly up to no good and you can't trust closed software nor hardware. The technical capability for draconian mass surveillance exists.
The poster you're replying to did not say that AMZN/GOOG/AAPL wouldn't spy on you, they simply stated that evidence should be considered to justify claims, especially if you're trying to spread those claims to other people. Your argument "we should sound alarms without evidence because tomorrow we'll have evidence" is classic conspiracy theory reasoning, which is why people will classify you as one. In essence, we shouldn't throw people in jail for crimes they haven't committed yet.
I believe the post in question believes they have enough evidence to justify the actions and is speaking from a position of surprise/resignation at the state of things.
Kind if like, 'I cant believe it's come to this, but given all the evidence, it's justified."
The issue is: We can't prove it either way. We can make law which increases the risk if they are uncovered and hope they abide to it (see GDPR and California Law for attempts in that direction) but a prove is hard.
At the same time we see the incentives, and the incentives are to collect and analyze things.
That's a pretty big leap. The OP was talking about putting their phone in a drawer, not throwing people in jail without a trial. I, for one, don't blame them one bit.
Is it absurd? My leap seems smaller and more logical than the alternative. The technical fact is that each of these features exist, and are used daily.
A device which does not have a hardware cutoff switch, which you've allowed to listen for it's own prompts ("Hey Siri, etc") can listen to you. So far we're all speaking "current knowns". Nothing about that is conspiracy.
The trust part is "storage of data received" and "use of that data". Sure it probably does not today - but will the terms of service change tomorrow?
An example parallel are Alexa devices listening, and accidentally storing whole convos.
This logic could be used to say there is a problem that some people believe they need to wear tinfoil hats to stop mind-reading. No, we should help them seek medical help. It's easily verifiable to check if your phone is sending data, so if they're concerned, they can check that like many people do and find out what data is being sent. But stopping a conversation midway through to hide your phone to continue to talk while not being a major underworld criminal is a worrying level of paranoia. If you are an underworld criminal, what are you doing with a phone? Didn't you see what happened to encrochat?
Ha - nothing subversive or illegitimate! I'm an engineer ha. The effort cost is minimal (walking to another room) - the downside cost if I was wrong (data mining by a social app for ads) was worth it.
Insurance companies analyze purchase records for modeling lifestyle risk.... if I were discussing a family member who had a health scare how do I know that info isn't 'surfaced' to insurers, etc?
Apps cannot use the microphone on iOS 14 without your awareness. There is a little dot that will show up at the top of the screen if an app has recently used microphone or camera. Hopefully this can assuage your paranoia.
The dot is just for the foreground app. If a background app uses the mic, your clock turns red (for recording) or green (for a phone call) in an even more obvious way, and tapping it takes you to the app that is doing so.
I've started using the mobile sites for companies like Facebook that I kind of need to use occasionally but really don't want their horrifying app on my phone.
It's kind of fascinating how hard they (not just Facebook) push you to use their "so much better" app even when their HTML version seems just as good if not better. It's just so much better for them. If you try the app and it's not better then you know what it's really about.
My daughter uses Messenger Kids to interact with her friends, now that COVID means she can’t see any of them in real life. (It wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it’s what all the other kids are on, so we have no real choice.)
If she adds a friend, it’ll send me a messenger message telling me I have to approve it, with a link. If I try to follow that link, it will tell me that my desktop browser can’t be used to manage Messenger Kids and that I have to install the app on my phone. Although it seems like in most cases you can open up Messenger Kids in the panel on the left, and then there will be an approve/deny button, so it’s mostly lies that you can’t do this on desktop.
I don't think the "threat" is the obvious one... Nobody trusts Facebook -- many, if not most, people honestly believe they listen to their conversations already. The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight.
A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers, and some label won't stop Facebook users or meaningfully impact Facebook. Hell, when Microsoft faced anti-trust breakup, the company didn't sit and whine. They fought the threat and sold billions of dollars of software and solutions to their antagonist.
I'm not sure "Cigarettes will kill you" was ever meant to stop smokers from smoking. It was part of a generations long campaign to change the entire perception and culture behind smoking. And it seems to be working very well.
I think there are parallels here. I see a focus on getting _current_ users to stop tolerating naked privacy. I think that ship has sailed. But in time the entire culture can shift where future generations do not accept naked privacy.
Totally, but look at how smart (and evil) the tobacco companies were. They pivoted between strategies in smart ways.
Once reality started setting in and denial didn't cut it, they acted to protect the shareholders. Phillip Morris bought things like Kraft that they could spin-out later. They settled claims and paid states billions of dollars for healthcare costs a few years before healthcare started going up 30% a year... which capped their liability AND made it politically impossible to put them out of business.
Google seems to at least attempt to do something similar by entering and investing billions into businesses like Cloud, cars, etc. I don't see that with Facebook... Facebook digs in and spouts some nonsense about connecting people, like the capitalist version of Soviet PR people.
Well, I'm by no means defending Facebook's business, but they did open-source a couple little projects called React, GraphQL, and PyTorch (and a bunch of other lesser-known stuff), so technically it's not _all_ bad. :P
The point isn't doing good, the point is having multiple viable lines of business. No one does that better than Microsoft - they have, what, a dozen billion dollar products now? Google is trying but has this far been less successful, and Facebook isn't even really trying at all. The closest they have is Oculus, but hardware isn't going to cut it.
I think people forget how ubiquitous smoking was. I remember back in the 80s, you basically couldn't go anywhere without ending up stinking like an ashtray. And it was even worse decades earlier before I was born. Everyone bellyached as anti-smoking laws kicked in, but slowly, attitudes changed, and now, it's not such a big deal. I bet if you got rid of anti-smoking laws, you wouldn't even see a huge uptake in public smoking or smoking in workplaces these days, because people's minds have been changed and there are a lot fewer smokers.
It's probably hard to fathom now but while working at Chevron in 1990 / 1991 the two smokers in my group got their own office so no one else had to share with them while they smoked at their respective desks. Thankfully they kept the door closed, but any time you had to go in there everything - the walls, the ceiling, their keyboards and monitors, their books - everything had an odiferous brown patina. It was like walking into a bar. The fact that last comparison no longer really works tells me how much the world has changed for the better.
I had to do some work at a customer datacenter, which was a converted print/mainframe room in a 70s high-rise with lots of windows.
The customer had built a wall blocking all of the windows in the late 80s (this was circa 2000), we had to go in the the area inbetween.... 10-15 years of no interior cleaning and high temps resulted in these weird formations of tar drips. It almost looked like a cave formation. Absolutely vile.
The story from the site staff was that the print and mainframe operators back in the day would essentially sit and continuously smoke, all day, all night. IIRC, we found a half dozen defunct cigarette machines.
Hahahhaah. That's cool and disgusting at the same time. A former coworker shared with me he was tasked to investigate why the mainframe was throwing errors only at night. He discovered a couple of operators were rolling a couple and then disconnecting the air ducting to the mainframe to use as a covert way to vent their own exhaust.
>A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers
Nicotine is as hard to quit as heroin. The fact that we still punished smokers through public shaming, exclusion and excessive fines just shows how unsympathetic our culture is to perceived "moral failings."
Perhaps we should advocate consistency. Either shaming and punishment works to discourage unwanted behaviour or it doesn't. If it does, then perhaps we should start shaming obese people and crack addicts.
P.S. Before the downvotes come, I'm rather fat and a mostly ex-smoker, so I'm not attacking obese people, just wondering at the inconsistency.
I think the two are not quite equivalent. Smoking is the action, while obesity is the condition. The equivalent would be shaming smokers for getting cancer or shaming obese people for overeating (to nitpickers: yes, this is a simplification).
The main difference seems to be that smoking in public inflicts secondhand smoke on others, while obesity inflicts... taking up more room on public transit? IF shaming is effective at curbing public smoking, and there is no shaming for smoking in private, then I think you could have a logically consistent position.
I don't know if the first of those is true, and the second definitely isn't (although maybe a different level of intensity), so I'm not saying there is consistency, just that it's possible.
We can all agree that "shaming" is not good; but at the same time we should not promote/encourage behaviors that leads to negative outcomes.
So, generic "smoke is bad for you", "overeating is bad for you", "junk food is bad for you"; and positive reinforcements like "say no to smoke", "say no to junk food" would be a good start.
And if some groups comes out and state that those messages are "shaming" well, those people are idiots.
>and positive reinforcements like "say no to smoke", "say no to junk food" would be a good start.
I mean why do people feel it's their duty to get into someone else's life? How about assume fat people and people who smoke know it's bad for them and just leave them alone. I think people in society would be much better off of they worried themselves with their own lives. I guess that's a lot harder than pointing out other people's problems though.
Yes, it is odd that many who deem shaming an effective strategy where smoking is concerned deem it ineffective and counter-productive for obesity, narcotic addition, and other undesirable behaviors.
Well I've kicked heroin but not nicotine. Not because the nicotine is more addictive, but because its harms are orders of magnitude less. I've tried both and I would rather go cold-turkey off nicotine than a strong opiate.
I agree 100% with the "perceived moral failings" part. Shaming people does not help. I couldn't kick the H until I stopped shaming myself. The guilt made my usage worse. It was caused by complex mental health issues, dealing with those got me healthy.
The whole ordeal has made me a much more understanding, compassionate person. I'm extremely grateful to be one of the few that made it out.
It won’t cause Facebook to go bankrupt (less well-targeted ads can still be sold but aren’t worth as much), but it will meaningfully impact them. Most high level Facebook employees have significant amounts of Facebook stock. Even the implication that Facebook’s ad revenue will decrease is going to lower their stock price. So of course they are going to try to prevent this change- if it becomes permanent they are taking a hit to their retirement savings.
If Android follows suit (not guaranteed but iOS and Android often converge on features within a few versions of each other), then they are going to take another hit. Executives want to prevent this change in the interest of their personal wealth.
While I welcome the change as an iOS user (for privacy with my other apps, I don’t even have a Facebook account) I can understand why Facebook is coming out hard against the change.
>If Android follows suit (not guaranteed but iOS and Android often converge on features within a few versions of each other), then they are going to take another hit. Executives want to prevent this change in the interest of their personal wealth.
Google might be incentivized to do it, as doing so would harm the effectiveness of other ad networks without affecting their own (as long as the user has a Google account)
Facebook’s attempts to legally challenge Apples UX changes seem fruitless, but they would definitely have a case against Google if they tried to pull this to benefit their ad network and data collection efforts over Facebook’s.
>if it becomes permanent they are taking a hit to their retirement savings.
This would be amazing. Imagine all the talent that would be freed into real problems.
BTW: I remember while working in the financial sector, in the financial bubble, how terrified they were if markets were to be corrected, like they did.
Given the fact that the 5 C-suite execs have escape hatches from their bullet proof offices to SUVs below, and the remainder of the 3,000 engineers are in an open space just tells you what those people value.
Calling it now: for all the hate Zuckerberg gets now, he's going to be Bill Gates in 25 years, and they only people who won't trust him are the vaccine mind control nuts.
MS "just" used it's behavior to ensure it was the dominate OS, and made some hardware products to boot. They had some questionable telemetry stuff going on, and with the latest OS joined the slimey ad stuff after everyone else had already paved that particular road to hell for them.
FB is much much creepier in all of the information they gather about people without them being aware of it. Not just what/who they follow, but they have insights into their user's financial/spending info, health/medical, and plenty of other stuff that is just too damn much. And they way the implemented it so that they follow you around to gather that info without you even coming close to using their site.
In my opinion, it's just not even the same sport let alone ballpark.
> The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight.
I don't agree with this. It seems less of an emotional response than a business one: the changes from iOS will have a large, material impact on Facebook's business, and it will get even worse if other gatekeepers follow suit (not likely, as Google's model is pretty close to Facebook's).
I think the real takeaway is how much money is riding on surveillance capitalism, and how these business models take a real hit when you just explain clearly to the user what's going on and give them a choice.
The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight
It's very telling that personal privacy has Facebook's leadership fudging its collective Huggies, while every other company — even Google — is going along with it.
One unexplored possibility is that they actually needed to do quite a bit of analysis to determine all the uses the data is put to within their organization and doing a legal review so that they didn’t end up making a false statement.
> A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers
That's the opposite of true. It didn't stop _every_ smoker, but research has established that anti-smoking marketing and labeling has a massive impact on how many people smoke overall.
Apple taking on this issue is worthy of respect, but let's not pretend that Apple respects all user consent. They're constantly forcing things on their users with thinly veiled justifications like "security".
I wonder if Apple is in a sort of competition with Facebook.
Probably they are competing for engineers, Messenger / WhatsApp vs iMessage, time spent on Facebook content vs on Apple content and other things I'm missing.
On the other side they benefitted from the popularity of Facebook (and many other internet properties companies) because they gave an extra reason to people to buy smartphones and using them a lot.
Your description "a sort of competition" seems an accurate way to describe it, in my opinion.
They're both huge companies whose largest risk of disruption comes not from the marketplace (they can monitor, acquire and influence challengers), but from regulators. The appearance of competition helps both companies to reduce that risk.
Devil advocating attempt: they obviously did a measure how much of their userbase will allow the app to serve personalized ads and how it will impact their revenue. Even if it is in a ballpark of 10%, it is still a ton of money and, as a commercial enterprise acting in the interests of its shareholders, FB should do it's best to avoid or reduce potential damage.
should do it's best to avoid or reduce potential damage.
The way to reduce potential damage is to evolve, adapt, pivot, and diversify. Not to kick and scream.
Facebook has enough money and enough smart people to do and be anything it wants. It chooses to be the neighborhood creep in the bushes watching your daughter through your windows.
Facebook is sufficiently loathed on HN that I would caution against using absurd emotion inducing analogies like “watching your daughter through your windows”. Not only is this needlessly gendered (would I not be upset by someone watching my son?), but it’s also a call to rally base and pure emotion. It almost feels as if you want to whip up a mob of digital citizens.
It is enough to highlight the policies and products of Facebook that you disapprove of.
Still devil advocating. Imagine you have a well developed silver mine, which produces a metric ton of silver every week. And you have an idea that there can be a gold vein somewhere on your land plot. But to find and develop it you should spend a lot of resources, including your well trained miner workforce. Rational decision would be to maybe do some research on a "last served" basis and continue to expand your silver mine, which is your primary source of income, until it depleted (if it will deplete at all, you don't know it for sure).
> Nothing existential about it at all. It's an actual threat to Facebook's business model.
"Existential threat" means a threat to the very existence of a thing, so a thing that is an "existential threat" is a very big actual threat. I think maybe you're confusing "Existential" with "Hypothetical"?
> ...and the internet has latched onto it and now misuses it all the time.
I can't decide if this comment is very clever ironic satire or... not ;-)
> Politicians started using that phrase en masse about a year ago
"Existential threat" has been in wide-spread use for a really long time. The first time I heard the phrase used was probably some time in the late 90s. And that's more a function of my age than of how long the term has been used. The cliche is at least half a century old and has been used by politicians for at least decades.
For example, the phrase was commonly used in anti-proliferation and denuclearization advocacy during the last quarter of the 20th century, when nuclear weapons were characterized as an "existential threat" to humanity. This use persists today; see, for example, https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/nuclear-weapons-and-ex...
But the term isn't particularly partisan or limited to extinction-level threats. it's also been used throughout modern history by right-wing populists to refer to one group or another being an "existential threat to our way of life". See for example https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44498438
The point is, the phrase has been used for a long time, always with the same meaning, and its use hasn't been particularly partisan as far as I can ever remember. Both sides use the phrase for various things. But they all definitely mean the same thing -- a threat to the existence of something (humanity, dominant cultural norms, the country, etc.). Not a "perceived" threat.
I'm genuinely and sincerely curious where you got the idea that "Existential threat means an implied, or perceived threat" rather than "a threat to the existence of a thing". The former has never been anywhere close to the dominant accepted meaning. Possibly you heard a politician or pundit use the term in a sarcastic way and misunderstood their sarcasm as literal? Or you heard someone use the phrase in a hyperbolic way?
Can you share one or more sources where people are using the phrase in the way you describe?
> The fact that Facebook appears to consider user consent an existential threat to their business model tells me everything I need to know about them right now.
They see it as the beginning of a slippery slope. And I hope they're right!
The concept of social media and living our lives on the internet is new, in the scale of things. The last ~10 years have been like the period of time where the sun goes in but the thermostat hasn't noticed yet. Now people have decided they don't like being cold (having their data harvested) and are pushing back.
Facebook is one of the worst, but to be fair, lots of software companies seem to have difficulty grasping the concept of consent. How many times have you been asked to install or turn on something you didn’t want, where the options are “Yes” and “Ask me later”? What happened to “No”? Why can’t software companies accept a no from the user and treat it respectfully? No means no, right?
This, and the fact that (EFF and a few others aside) they're fought against only by an entity whose core business has nothing to do with mining users personal data, speaks loudly about pretty much every other corporation out there.
Do I qualify as too much alarmist when I'm horrified from seeing doctors and lawyers happily exchanging photos of clients sensitive documents using Whatsapp? (read: forgetting them in their phone gallery, ready to be exfiltrated by any malicious software or repair technician).
The sad part is that people is slowly adapting to not give a damn about their and others privacy because today's electronic gadgets and services are designed in a way so they're almost unusable by privacy conscious users.
So do most news websites, anyone that sells targeted ads.
Is this really a surprise from people here that companies that sell ads earn most of it with targeted advertisements?
> Some apps, like Facebook, allow for some data tracking to be manually disabled. But by default, it is turned on. That gives the company reams of personal data on who we are and what we are doing, which it then vacuums up, packages and sells.
My understanding is that Facebook does not sell this data, but rather lets advertisers create hyper-targeted ads, which are only possible because of this data.
Edit: Certainly not trying to defend Facebook here (in the slightest). Just trying to correct an inaccuracy in the article.
I would attribute this to the "packaging" the article references. As you correctly point out advertisers don't want "the data" they want the hyper-targeted ads that it allows. That's the FB value-add.
I agree, with the addition that Facebook wants to keep control of their user data and repeatedly sell it via ads, rather than directly sell it to some third party org to repackage.
It's a nice bit of semantic ju-jitsu to say "they take this data and sell a service that wouldn't be possible without it" isn't the same as "selling this data," isn't it? Especially given that the targeting mechanisms don't have any k-anonymity guarantees, and I'm aware of at least one paper showing information leaks through the ad portal [1]
Because that wasn't a data selling scandal? Cambridge Analytica didn't buy data on millions of people from Facebook, they harvested it for free due to lax permissions.
I guess they paid for that service and the reason they paid why they paid was the possibility to gather data. they had to gather the data themselves, but that is the difference between robbing an house and opening someone else door to robbers
They may not "sell" access to user data, but they certainly allow access to it:
"In total, it said the social network had special arrangements with more than 150 companies to share its members' personal data. Most of these, it said, were other tech firms, but the list also included online retailers, car-makers and media organisations, including the NYT itself, among others."
And Facebook can absolutely go fuck itself. Whether they're collecting data for their own usage, to resell to other directly or indirectly, or for any other usage, they can get royally fucked. Especially when they are still tracking me even after deleting my account.
A plain fact that requires looking realistically at how colloquialisms are used combined with a little bit of technical know how. How many businesses do you know actually "sell data"? The only market I can think of are companies like Zoominfo. Outside of that there really aren't that many companies that "sell your data". However, you'll see a ton of social justice campaigns against "stop companies selling your data". They aren't going after Zoominfo, they're going after Facebook.
Does facebook capture data? Yes.
Do they literally take that data and sell it byte for byte to other people? No.
Is that data absolutely necessary to sell their products or services? Yes.
So, in effect, its easier to say to the common person "they're selling your data" than "they're harvesting their data so they can sell products and services". Facebook is trying to defend itself in the public eye by responding to this slogan - not by the real factor that matters.
There are thousands of companies like ZoomInfo. They all trade csvs of data of dubious origins, mash and resell it to the highest bidder. There is a tranche of these companies who build algorithms to do fuzzy linking between huge datasets, including sources like data breaches (where name/address info is included).
There are conferences. Much of the data can be obtained as Salesforce "apps" - connect your CRM to our massive data portal and we'll fill in information that you don't have. The biggest of these is owned by SF and called Data.com.
Not to hand waive away anyone's pre-baked hatred of Google/FB/etc., but there is an actual data industry that does buy and sell your data, with no controls over it and what it can be used for. By comparison, FB and Google are much better stewards.
Right, I mean prostitutes don’t sell sex right, they just sell access to their private parts temporarily.
From a user privacy perspective, I’m skeeved out that Facebook sells access to data rather than giving out copies. The only difference is that Facebook makes more money.
It’s like those asshole companies that say they don’t sell data, but only rent it. That’s not the point that I care about.
It isn't the same. At least only FB has my data instead of thousands of advertisers who paid for a copy. Leaks may be an issue, but it still isn't the same as selling the data to anyone who will pay.
Well I guess there's a distinction required between what Facebook does and actual adtech/data broker companies that do outright sell .csvs of user data.
You certainly say they exploit it on behalf of their customers, but we need to maintain the distinction between this, and the companies that actually do sell the data they collect, because once sold, you can never trace who is using the data, whereas with Facebook and Google’s model, you can.
It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not in Facebook’s interest to sell the data. If they did, they would lose their advantage quite quickly.
For example Telegram has a very specific approach to security based on "you can trust us", by default chats are not end-to-end encrypted, they use non-standard encryption and the app is free, but they are upfront on why such tradeoffs are made and their point of view in making them.
Facebook could have a position of "personalized advertising is the future" and allow ipertargeted marketing by means of gathering every scrap of data they could find. But they could draw the line to keeping it within their own databases and never distributing any of it. Apparently their main line of bussiness is exactly like that, but they do not do only that, they also partake in sharing that data.
The thing is, localised advertising is the sweet spot that i've identified in advertising value. If you forget all other data, this is one piece of information that can provide value to both consumer and small businesses.
Facebook, if you know any small business that have a specific region of operation (e.g. one city) derive significant benefit and growth from Facebook's targeted advertising that they just were not seeing before.
Of course, if anyone logs in and fetches their data from facebook as a download and go through it, it is really rather unbelievable how much data there is beyond geographical data. Some of it pretty scary.
What intrigues me further, after i tried to do the same with google, i don't believe google are nearly as open to how much data they hold on a person. There doesn't seem to be any takeaway service that indicates the same depth of information. But of course we know for a fact they do hold some of it.
Anyway, the long and short of it is advertising is all we have to support enormous social networks and I feel some level of personalised data provides mutual benefit. It should of course all be opt in with no exceptions.
I'm actually conceptualising a service/product around this concept right now.
There's no incentives for Facebook to "sell" their user data as long as this is the primary advantage over their competitors including Google, Amazon, MS, etc. Big techs naturally tend to monopolize connections to its users and FB is no exception.
In fact, if they "sell" their user data, anti-trust regulators will be very happy; they want big techs to share user data to its competitors but the big techs are using user privacy and security as their excuses to rule out new competitions in the industry. Apple took the lead and other big techs are now following.
> My understanding is that Facebook does not sell this data
Even if they don't, Facebook is not the only app in the world. Tracking being disabled by default is a good thing, no matter what Facebook does with it.
"We never sell your data" is a meaningless statement. It's the online service equivalent of saying that a bottle of water is "fat free". It is consistently and prominently written because it is a definitive statement. Facebook used to feature it on the signup screen with some other statements that sound principled like "We don't charge for Facebook, and we never will", etc.
But when you parse out what it means you are left with something more accurately stated as: "<Company> will not sell its proprietary assets."
It sort of like the operator of a hotel saying "I don't sell rooms".
The often-quoted statement 'if you aren't paying, you are the product' is closer to the truth but is actually misleading. As per the book on Surveillance Capitalism, our interactions with Facebook (or Google) are the raw material from which they create their products, which are sold to advertisers, namely the ability to target ads at specific groups of people.
I don't care if they sell it. I don't want their business partners to have my data, but I'm not any more ok with Facebook having it in the first place.
It is not that simple. Facebook can also customer data from a variety of sources and parties. In addition, it will share measurement data to outside parties. Even if the data shared outside its walls is translated to a new ID, you still end up with an open loop where a user ID is used for targeting, measured, and potentially shared. That user ID is based on their iOS device ID and we know those are unique.
Data does not change hands. Facebook is selling services that internally operate because of processing on that data. Even then they do not sell the processed data or access to read the processed data.
It's the "why is" in the original title that makes it not substantively different from the headline here. Both make the assumption facebook is in fact going to war
What a fascinating story about an ALL-OUT WAR guys! You'll learn so much about cyber plots, tanks, politics, maneuvers and constant bombing between Apple and Facebook, actually even Mr. Zuck and Mr. Cook themselves taking massive risks in this sick conflict, a really crazy read! I felt like I was a soldier during WW2, no...even WW4? The title is so well chosen!
I was thinking about that the other day when Snap reached $100B in market cap. That’s a mobile app whose continued success rides entirely on the good graces of Apple and Google.
It’s even more interesting when you consider that most people block ads, or they block them in their vision. How many of us actually look at ads anymore? I would say that very few people even pay attention to them, and we sort of block them out of our attention. Online advertising does not work, and the metrics are inflated. I would love to see a major company stop spending on Facebook advertising, and doing analysis to see if their sales actually drop.
"which is increasingly going to move to a paid experience"
We already pay but with data instead of money. But we neither know the real cost nor the real consequences.
Apple should be applauded for this. Their revenue does not depend on software to clandestinely steal and sell users data.
One day, we will look back at history and see facebook similar as to how people view myspace now (junkyard of software).
Good on Apple not selling devices with a facebook backdoor in them.
I know apple probably has deals with malicious governments regarding data access, but at least they are standing up to FB and exposing their vulnerable points where it hurts badly, Zuckerberg has no clothes.
If it was dominant, the ads would come sooner or later. MySpace is only thought of sympathetically today because News Corp acquired it early and let it rot. Facebook didn't start out with ads, it introduced them in 2008 or later. By that time MySpace was well into its death throes.
Between this privacy fight and the form factor of the iPhone Mini, there's a 90% chance my next phone will be an iPhone after more than a decade on Android. I'm done with this ad-sponsored trash ecosystem.
the problem here is that every single one of these alternate OSs requires advanced knowledge. Granted, it's not difficult to flash your phone via a USB cable + web interface but consider that the average smartphone user isn't even interested in removing bloatware like facebook.
The advanced knowledge i'm referring to is to first know that GrapheneOS exists, know how to enable OEM unlocking, know how to select the correct factory image and so on.
People don't care and cannot be expected to care. Apple, as much as i dislike several of their practices, provide a phone that works when you need it to. AFAIK, the iphone's primary purpose as a phone - has never had an incident where a software bug prevented someone from placing a call.
Apple are also assholes to users in places (no own software, no simple customization, absurd seeming prices, extremely limited and proprietary connectivity) ... but they also protect them like nobody else and are unusually reasonable in places, like with their software update policy.
It's a reason I keep thinking about replacing my current phone with a used iPhone X, though the 12 mini would be nicer for the screen size.
Apple isn't perfect, I'll admit that all day long. But, frankly, the "absurd prices" argument just doesn't hold water to me. I paid almost $3000 for the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on--eight years ago. Meanwhile, everyone I know that has had PC's have gone through at least two replacements during that time. A little over $300/year for a computer is a bargain. I pay three times more for Internet access!
I think you will find most people with PCs replace them because they think they need to. My friend just replaced his 12yo asus laptop which he had to keep plugged in to work as the battery no longer held a charge.
People with apple products tend to keep better care of the products than the latter too.
> most people with PCs replace them because they think they need to
Why is this important. Are you saying that PC users are stupider than Mac users or something? The end result is that PC users go through more hardware than Macs. I consider myself pretty decent with computers and use both. My five year old MacBook Air runs fine, I’ve gone through two PC laptops (that were always bigger) and they don’t tend to survive windows updates. I’ve even churned through yearly chrome books that seem to be made out of paper mache or something.
Perhaps people are trainable to do the right thing. But it’s been decades, maybe we think about why this training fails on aggregate.
In the meantime, my personal experience of cost/year being cheaper with Mac vs PC stands for me.
> In the meantime, my personal experience of cost/year being cheaper with Mac vs PC stands for me.
My personal experience is my all my laptops last. People have problems with macs. People have problems with PCs. Doesn’t mean any are better than the other. But people with pc laptops will more often update their laptop for next to no gain over what they already had.
I hate Android, too, but there's no way I'm going to pay iPhone prices. Smartphones don't matter. They exist to tide me over until I can get to a proper computer. Even then I leave mine on airplane mode 90% of the time.
I'm worried the iPhone mini will be canned next update cycle. I wish I was in a position to buy one, but I only got an iPhone X in Jan 2020 to replace my dying iPhone SE with great reluctance. It's too soon for me to replace, as it works perfectly and I can't justify the cost or the waste. I just hope there's a mini iPhone in 2 or 3 years when I need to upgrade.
I waited a long time for a new small iPhone and eventually got to the point where I had to buy a new phone, because my SE lasted about 15 minutes & I needed to carry around battery packs just to use it.
I got an iPhone 12 mini (my first iPhone since the original) I’m also worried they won’t keep the form factor around. It hasn’t performed well in the market. I like the size, but apparently most people prefer the larger size and battery life.
My hope is that Apple realizes they created the apparent scarce demand by not having the mini format for so long. They need to keep the format over several years so the demand can materialize as people finally upgrade their old 5S and SE devices now that there's a viable iPhone for them. But those same people are clearly patient and are not in a collective rush to go out and buy new phones, it will take several years of availability and their old devices succumbing to age or physical damage.
Apple released a $400 to $550 iPhone SE in Apr 2020 after years of not having an updated small phone option, so I imagine many who really wanted a smaller phone jumped on that. And then 6 months later they came out with 12 mini, so I wouldn’t expect a size able amount of demand for the 12 mini would have been sucked up by the new SE.
The SE is fantastic as it’s much cheaper and works well. I switched from an XS and years of latest models and forgot how much I love thumb reader over face.
Apple Pay in particular is better with thumb reader instead of the tap, look at, tap again buggy process.
The pricing is killing it, and Apple probably knew it would, but they don't want to cannibalize margins here. There really isn't a competitive product, so they have no incentive to lower prices.
I know there have been reports of low sales of the mini but I'm hoping that Apple continues to make new ones for at least 1-2 more cycles before giving up. The mini isn't for me (I use a Max) but with the recent release of the SE2 I have to assume some people just weren't ready to upgrade (like you). One thing Apple needs to understand is just because a product line isn't a smashing success doesn't mean it's not needed to provide options for all their customers.
Similar to how they let the Mac line languish for a while because it wasn't their top seller without realizing if they sleep on that segment it will hurt the iPhone in the long run.
Yeah because of exactly these two reasons, I switched to iPhone Mini. Love it so far. Now working on removing Google and Facebook dependencies from rest of my life.
I've been on Android for a decade as well but just got an iPad mini. The one thing I still cannot figure out how to do on iOS is block ads at the system level. Android has lots of apps that act as a VPN that block ads/trackers via DNS. It blocks ads in the browser, but also in apps.
I can't find the equivalent on iOS. All my searches lead to ad blockers using Safari's content blocking, but the VPN-style ad blockers appear to violate Apple's terms, and so aren't in the app store. I've also seen recommendations to use Pi hole on my network, which is fine until I leave the house.
If anyone has recommendations for system-wide VPN/DNS-based blockers for iOS, please share. That's the last real thing keeping me on Android.
You could set your DNS server IP address to one of AdGuard's public DNS servers that are configured to operate like a PiHole without installing anything.
I use NextDNS [1] and I’m very happy with it so far. It works on the DNS level. So far for our entire home we’ve never gone above the free level once, but I’m happy to pay as soon as we do.
I'm moving to Apple after being a long time iPhone hater. With how insidious Google is getting with Android they should be paying me to use my flagship phone, not me paying roughly the same amount of an iPhone. I do everything I can to not feed into the (free*) services with the cost being sucking down more data about me than I know about myself.
I've never used anything but spotify on my iphones for years and this has never been an issue for me - i wouldn't have known or cared until reading these links.
This is true, but in practice on an iPhone the "default" music app didn't make a difference for me. I always had Spotify running (not necessarily playing, just the app open in the background) so when I pressed play it always played Spotify rather than Apple Music.
Then Apple is bad and Android is bad too. So the ethical choice is to buy neither. I'm not being facetious. I'm considering moving to pure AOSP based, Linux based, or just foregoing a smartphone entirely.
I moved to iOS for the specific reason of getting the Apple watch because of some heart issues I was having. Did it a year ago. I wasn't thrilled, but I was sick of the Android adware/malware problem (every time I installed an ad-supported app I got malware within a week or two).
How do I feel now? I absolutely love this ecosystem. I don't fear OS updates like I used to with Android. I don't fear my device will be stranded without updates. The UI is clean. The 11 is as fast today as when I got it. It seamlessly works the watch and my Bose headphones. BT was always finicky with the Android phones I had.
The m1 is honestly selling me to move back to apple stuff again. Also I'm sick of trash process handling on Android where apps just stop running because some other one is sucking down the ram in the background. I could have every app opened on my iphone even on 1gb with an SE and no issues noticed whatsoever. I really think apple is delivering an upswing they need to after the whole trash 12 in macbooks and butterfly switches.
It's already like myspace. Facebook is giving me super trashy friend suggestions of random foreign women with slightly suggestive pictures, and aside from my demographic I can't think of anything I've personally done on or off the internet which would make them good friend suggestions.
Instagram would do this to my discovery feeds. Every month or so I’d mark the photos with sexy women as something I don’t want to see, but they’d inevitably come back. I figure I lingered too long at a photo that featured an attractive woman. Deleted Instagram after this annoyed me too much.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe Facebook’s algorithm is amazing and these people could become best friends. But I tried this a few times and they all sucked.
I suspect it’s as stupid as ranking all members based on some dumb algorithm like “25 year olds like females, this is a female” and just shoveling garbage.
Years ago Facebook just kept recommending people I hated over and over. I wish they would have a mode of “you’re good, we can’t think of anyone else you like.”
It’s like going into a store and the salesperson says “this is perfect for you” and they are just showing you every item in their store.
I remember that years ago they had a page like "we will delete this page if we are forced to give out data under the so and so act of the USA because we can't tell you explicitly". Does anyone remember more details?
> [FB revenue model] depend[s] on software to clandestinely steal and sell users data
Isn't it opt-in by using their platform? Or is your argument that targeted ads are not common knowledge to Facebook users? I likely wouldn't use Facebook or Google etc. if I had to pay cash; fine with paying with personal data; but for people who aren't fine with that, they shouldn't use it.
I realize that any attempt to discuss this is inviting downvotes, but I just ask for a quick comment if you do choose to downvote. I try to be very open minded.
The real problem here, and what Apple is getting at, is lack of consent. The willingness or not to "pay" with personal data is meaningless if there's no awareness. Sure, tech-savvy people are aware and can make informed decisions... but my grandma is not aware that Facebook is tracking her. And most non-techy people are like that: I closed all my Facebook accounts last year and people were surprised. I had to explain it to them! I can't wait to see their reaction when I tell them I closed my Google account as well.
The iPhone update doesn't even immediately forbid tracking, it just requests apps to ask for permission. That simple change pushed Facebook to buy newspaper, radio and TV ads to try to get people to reject the update. Think about it: they feel threatened by user awareness.
I don't think this is an entirely fair argument unless it is exceedingly clear what you are opting in to. The fact that FB (and others) are so resistant to being more transparent about this is in itself informative.
Yes. Apple has its own problems though. The only reason it can do this is that it has a generally authoritarian behavior wrt app access (see Fortnite), as with closed standards for accessory connection, etc. This is a company that uses platform-exclusive APIs as a cudgel for compliance.
I applaud the fight in that it hopefully makes Facebook weaker but I'm not cheering for Apple having this power either. I'd rather wish for their greed to cause these two to destroy each other.
One of my coworkers shared an interesting thought with me the other day.
Apple is positioning itself as The Privacy Company today, but they've benefited immensely from the attention economy over the last 15 years.
They would not have sold as many millions of iPhones, iPods (heck, even Macbooks) in the last decade, if Instagram & Facebook weren't there to suck people in to their platform (clearly, the same is true for Android). Now that the iDevices are a self-sustaining status symbol with mass adoption and institutionally-ingrained utility outside of social media, Apple no longer needs to trade user privacy to build their moat, and they can pretend that they've been on the user's side all along.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's motions here are very good. But the entire mobile computing industry was bootstrapped with addiction. Facebook and its ilk might have been the perpetrators, but they were not the only beneficiaries.
I doubt the iPhone's long-term success was dictated by Facebook et al whoring out user data. There are plenty of useful apps that don't hinge on violating the privacy of users.
I think there is also another part to it. The smart phone market has so many options for users, and there is a limit to camera improvements they can make. For many people (including me) privacy can be another reason to chose IPhone over Pixel. With so many options differences like this matter.
I think it’s really the only true difference they can have with Android.
Google can’t provide privacy that users want as it would bankrupt them. Apple can. Other than that, they can both do the same hardware, software, apps, etc.
I’m surprised it took them this long to really start driving it home. I think they were either trying to figure out if monetarily they wanted to start selling data. Or the buying public finally started caring.
Instagram was created by 10 people, and it was already good enough at that stage to get hypergrowth.
The truth is that all the huge advertising revenue is just a plus for the investors, the apps would have been created anyways, and then network effects take care of the content.
> They would not have sold as many millions of iPhones, iPods (heck, even Macbooks) in the last decade, if Instagram & Facebook weren't there to suck people in to their platform
I really don’t see the logic in this.
It’s pretty obvious these devices were useful for many things - messaging and the web would have been enough to guarantee growth.
I think you have the causality the wrong way round.
People only use Facebook so much because the iPhone put it in their pocket rather than on their desk.
It’s so hard to feel bad for Facebook. They’ve made shadow profiles for non-Facebook users for crying out loud! But they are really going out of their way to oppose Apple on this move.
The burger restaurant clip in the audio...couldn’t they still target users just based on interests? And not actually linking those interests to a specific person?
And on the other hand, I don’t hear much from Google.
Does Google’s tracking rely on iOS to the extent facebook’s does? I don’t use either but I would assume nearly all iPhones accessing fb are via app while a ton of iPhones accessing Google are via Safari, mail, and even iMessage now that you can play a linked YouTube video directly in the Messages app.
I can't get that article to load, so I'm hoping they address how she knows that 90% of her business comes from facebook, and how hyper targeted ads are more effective than just geo-located tags.
It seems like ads for her business would be good for users within 'x' number of miles/blocks/whatever of her business, and not necessarily based on their interests, correct?
Yup. The only way to implement Facebook login is through the SDK, so unless you are willing to give up all your users that use Facebook login, you are stuck with the invasive, crashing SDK.
No developer should tie themselves to Facebook. I sympathize with the existing developers, but no new developer should be insane enough to rely on Facebook.
The actual quote: Facebook has also launched a website and taken out full-page advertisements in newspapers, in addition to a recent TV and radio ad push, to put a spotlight on how many small business owners depend on targeted ads.
This is definitely a true statement. The vast majority of small businesses who advertise on FB will be hurt by this change. The best estimate to date is a 20-30% drop in marketing efficiency due to worse targeting capabilities. Some of these small businesses will inevitably go out of business due to this change (for better or worse).
I'm just biased. I hate advertising and I hate tracking even more. I'm sure some companies will be slightly hurt, but I believe it will be a net gain for society.
I worked at a small hardware store as a kid and we got all our business from word of mouth. IDK what the best argument here is, so I suppose I'm just admitting my feelings with this comment.
I don't see why we need to compromise our privacy to support advertising for small business. If I want to opt-in in order to get ads for services that would likely be relevant to me then sure, let me do that. But to be forced to opt-in and then create a moral hazard claiming I "don't support small business" - yeah, screw that! I don't see why Zuckerberg et. al.'s failed business model should be my problem.
Oh the irony that one of the most profitable and largest companies (facebook) is making the claim that small businesses will be impacted.
I think the honest answer is, yes if facebook protects their profit margins then it will impact small business as they pay more to get the same results. OR Facebook could reduce their margins since Apple's change will reduce their product effectiveness.
Once we frame it that way it is clear what the battle is about. Facebook is fighting apple to protect their own profitability and is using a sympathetic actor (small business) as a shield.
> This is definitely a true statement. The vast majority of small businesses who advertise on FB will be hurt by this change.
I don't think I've ever seen a source for this. Could you post one, ideally one which is not subject to conflicts of interest (e.g. funded by the advertising industry)?
Imo, the conclusion around "worse marketing efficiency" is a logical extension from how Facebook's ad ecosystem works.
That is, Facebook is a behemoth in advertising because of its capabilities to predict which users will convert from an ad unit. By predicting conversion rate accurately, FB empower small businesses to get more conversions out of fewer ad impressions and spend.
FB's ability to predict conversion rate is driven by a ML algorithm that takes as inputs: all the user data it tracks via the Facebook Pixel, all the user data it collects through its own domains, and data sent via server API's from advertisers.
Apple's tracking change reduces the amount of available user data to its ML algo by a large percentage.
As a result, prediction power will decrease. And therefore, marketing efficiency.
The actual 20-30% estimate is just that, an estimate. But, directionally, there's no question efficiency will decrease.
You’re making some assumptions along the way though. There’s been multiple articles published about how the data that FB shows to advertisers is not accurate:
The assumption that small businesses would see a drop in marketing efficiency might assume that advertising costs on Facebook remain constant. In a perfect world, I would think that a reduction in ROAS on Facebook would precipitate a decrease in ad costs, as businesses would be less willing to pay a premium for Facebook ads.
In the long term, I think Facebook is the biggest loser in this scenario, not the small businesses.
I think you're definitely right that Facebook stands to lose the most.
And, I also agree that most businesses will be willing to pay less of a premium for FB ads after this change. But, even for the businesses that adapt their spend accordingly, their final marketing budget will be smaller, and therefore, their net income/profit from ads.
> Apple says in the coming weeks, it will update its iOS software for iPhones to require apps to get explicit consent to track what people are doing on their phones for the purposes of sharing it with third-parties.
That's all they are doing. They aren't preventing companies from tracking users in this way. They are just requiring them to get permission.
Says a lot about Facebook's business model that this is a cause for "all-out war," and that they'd rather try to stop the feature than convince their users to enable it. I guess they know that at the end of they day if they can't do this behind their users' backs, they probably aren't going to be able to do it at all.
What is to stop Facebook from making a picture show up all fuzzy and then tell the user that they should opt-in to tracking to get the highest resolution pictures.
Honestly If apple can't afford to stand up to FB who can ?
I dislike Apples closed ecosystem (anf google trying to do the same), but if it can weaken FB's grip on people, it might bring some benefit even to non apple customers.
I appreciate this kind of a view. You may disagree with a few policies of a company and remain in favor of some. Works for people, brands, governments equally.
I don't know how it was received (if at all) in the rest of the world, but in Australia at least Facebook is still reeling from their news ban, I suspect the populace would support Apple for a few days, and that's realistically as long as the ban would last if implemented.
Without a doubt. They nuked Fortnite from orbit, and had to be stopped by a judge from nuking Epic's developer cert, which would have killed any app using the unreal engine.
Apple pulled FB's enterprise cert a while back, basically pulling FB's internal apps offline. I don't think it's a huge leap to pulling the app from the App Store if it comes down to it. In fact, I'd argue that pulling the cert was a shot across FB's bow: "oh, you think we don't have the balls, do you? Anything else you think we don't have the testicular fortitude for?"
Facebook isn't concerned with what happens within the Facebook App itself. Everything there is already tracked and filtered. What they are most concerned about is that a huge pile of outside apps which are feeding them data by including their APIs will opt out of including Facebook's APIs because the indie apps don't want to display this warning.
Honest question here, as this story almost got me to buy an iPhone. And really don't like them, just a personal taste thing. If I don't install apps, say facebook, it can't collect this data right? So by being careful of what I install, and staying clear of facebook, which I am already, using an Android should have a similar effect, right? Or am I getting this wrong?
Not entirely, Facebook collects a lot of information about you when you're browsing third-party sites. This tracking is done through the Facebook Pixel, which is loaded via javascript on ~15% of sites you visit.
I don't think there will be such thing as a war. Rules are the same for every company, Apple are just telling FB in advance that they are not making an exception.
If personalized ads are really so beneficial to their customers, Facebook should have no problem convincing them to allow the tracking they need and opt-in.
Part of the messaging (the title and buttons) is built-in, but in all of these sorts of dialogs apps provide their own strings to explain why they're asking for permission. The screenshot in the original article shows where Facebook can explain to end-users why they need to track them across other apps and websites.
In addition to my sibling comment, most apps now have pre-prompts for permissions, like where you see a full-pager telling you why the app wants to use notifications where you consent before getting the real consent prompt.
User can still easily opt-in to tracking - so saying this is bankrupting small businesses is really admitting that they need users to be tracked without their knowledge and/or against their will.
I mean, it was always kinda obvious, but seeing them confirm it out right is interesting, to say the least.
I could be wrong, but I think the argument is against the framing of "do you want this app to track you" being one-sided, rather than against an opt-in interstitial in general.
E.g. if anti-vaxxers started pushing a campaign saying "doctors want to stab your arms with needles", I'd expect a similar pushback from the medical community about the perception-coloring of this phrasing (even if it's technically true). In both cases, it seems like the argument is more of "Yes people can opt in to that, but the opt-in process shouldn't bias you against opting in"
Whether that's a fair argument or not, I'll leave to society.
I think the prompt's phrasing is completely fair, especially since facebook can make their case in their pre-consent screen and in the string in the system popup.
This is a fair point. I hold that there are still scenarios in which opt-in text could sway users one way or another, but given that individual apps can make their case before the user sees the interstitial here, I don't personally see anything wrong with the phrasing of "Can this app track you?"
"This owners of this app are looking to gather as much information about you as possible so they can use it as leverage against you. They will sell that information to political agents who will use your demographics against you. There will be advertisers who know when you are having your period, when you are pregnant, and that you've searched for penis enhancing tools. While they probably won't share this information around, they will let advertisers buy adverts discretely targeting your race, gender, and sexual preferences."
Is that a better message?
I think Apple is being quite generous here myself. I'd have the dialog be bright red with a toxic logo on the yes button.
> Facebook says Apple is attempting to push free apps, which often sweep data up and feed it to advertisers, to move to subscription models.
And I think most users will see no problem with this.
If I value the service enough, I'll pay for it. That Apple gets 30% is another discussion and as a user, not my problem.
If I don't value the service that much, I now get to be informed and can decide whether I value using it more than my privacy. Facebook's all out propaganda campaign shows which choice they think most users will make in this instance.
In fact, I would say apps would get a lot more revenue by switching to a paid model. I don't know the exact numbers, but I think I've heard monthly revenue from tracking is less than a cent per user.
Now imagine they charge $1 monthly for their app subscription. Hell, even a couple of cents would be an improvement. Or even better: they charge a one-time payment to buy the app.
I don't have Facebook and I'm generally skeptical of Apple's pro-privacy messaging. However, seeing this response from Facebook has gotten me very excited for this update. There must be more to it then Apple's generic 'Most Advanced Update Ever' marketing. I'm still skeptical of Apple's commitment to privacy, but I'm certainly happy to get this update. Apple should thank Facebook for the free marketing.
For some reason I have a bad feeling about this update actually getting released. I'm worried that FB is going to convince some judge to tell Apple they can't do this, and delay it for months or years. Maybe (hopefully) this is an irrational worry, but you never know the extent to which people will go when billions of dollars are on the line.
I know nothing about legal system, but it seems like Apple could make an argument that they are helping their apps be GDPR and CCPA compliant? That could explain the strange wording "Ask app not to track" - apps can still track, just not as much as before, so perhaps more of a compliance permission. Just speculation.
I think they say “Ask app not to track” because, if they say “Make app not track you” or something similar, they open themselves to huge lawsuits if (much more likely when) any app turns out to keep tracking users.
I don’t have the link handy, but Apple’s policies on this require apps not to track users across apps through other means if a user chooses “Ask App not to Track” at the prompt. The prompt text is just to show that Apple cannot technically prevent tracking even when a user tells the app they don’t want to be tracked across apps. There are a lot of shady practices being spread through common/popular SDKs used by apps.
I think what's more likely than any kind of legal injunction is that FB and Apple will come to a "mutual understanding". Maybe Facebook will license Apple Maps (for a princely sum) and make some symbolic compromise on data collection that lets Apple water down the permission dialogs.
I’d argue that Apple executives realize that privacy is one of the unique USPs of Apple compared to their main competitor, since the value exchange between Apple and their customers is simpler (customer pays Apple money, Apple delivers hardware/software).
Now that so much news has spread about these privacy additions, Apple selling out will actively hurt this image they have spent a lot of time building. It’s going to have to be an extremely lucrative agreement between them and Facebook for it to be worth it.
The problem is Apple relies on hardware sales. FB's entire business from the top down is ad money. And source for a billion dollar ad business? That sounds way higher than my initial impression. (And google paying to be the default SE is not advertising imo)
> Apple’s most recent earnings report revealed that it earned $12.51B from Services in calendar Q3/fiscal Q4, though there is no breakdown on how much of this comes from ad revenue.
Notice the 'could's:
> Samik Chatterjee argued the company could leverage the millions of users who search its App Store and Safari browser daily to generate the stellar growth seen by Facebook and Google in recent years.
> he launch of Apple TV+, coupled with Apple Inc’s foray into digital services, could help the company increase its income from advertising by more than five fold to $11 billion annually
This article is literally just speculation. Actually, it's quoting someone's speculation.
There’s a lot of guesswork there. It’s even worse than that actually, they assume that their advertising operation will grow as Facebook’s. It is extremely implausible under current conditions (no tracking and ads limited to the stores). So yeah, if Apple were Facebook, ads would be important to them.
And even the wildest estimates put it far short on the actual money maker, which is hardware sales. When push comes to shove, if they have to choose between ad and devices, they won’t hesitate long.
I saw a few articles when I searched from the previous year which also projected growth to the $2b number the next year but as Apple bundles it all in services who knows?
This is honestly pretty reasonable. Apple already knows which apps I download and this is made fairly clear (you're logged into the App Store and your account lists all apps you obtained).
Apple also knows which App Store ads I saw given that their server sent them to me in the first place. The ads are (at least for now) limited to the App Store and don't carry over across the web or other Apple apps.
Thus I don't see the problem with Apple using the data they've already got to provide anonymized conversion metrics to app developers.
I see what you mean, but iPhone says are something like 150x that. If privacy concerns weaken even 1%, that wouldn't be worth it. Maybe that's unlikely, I'm not sure.
This looks like simply naive thinking. Without evidence to backup your statement about Apple, everything about it breaks the cardinal rule of the ads business.
On the contrary—I’m not sure if you’ve ever watched Mad Men, but there are some pretty good examples of ads in there that didn’t use tracking at all.
Calling tracking a cardinal rule of ads is like calling HTML a cardinal rule of communication. Sure it might be ubiquitous now, but if HTML were to suddenly disappear I guarantee communication between humans won’t stop — it would adapt. Tracking isn’t a foundation, it is merely what has worked this past decade or so.
My point is that advertising right now uses tracking because it can be used, and it makes money.
But in no way does it need it. We could easily go back to untargeted, reasonably effective ads that appeal to broad markets instead of extremely specific ones.
I think they would. Facebook products are a huge part of any app ecosystem, and without them, Apple customers would be pissed.
Ecosystem concerns aren’t as relevant today, since both Android and iOS have everything you’d want, but in the olden days of Blackberry, Microsoft, and many other mobile operating system vendors trying to compete, they were always seriously hampered by their lack of ecosystem.
You’d be surprised how many fb users (mostly less technical) just use a browser to access fb..
They don’t need an app in the App Store to do so..
So this might actually be a fight against the strange people working at Facebook that will get them to rethink what it is they do everyday..
I think this is a good case for what Apps bring to the table and highlighting what the cost is privacy wise. As a developer I think apps are cool, the way they're leaking data is awful. This is something the platforms need to step up control over and I think that because this isn't the case there's an incentive to keep things as they are. Like automotive and the iterative improvements.
I tell my mom she needs to use FF containers for FB. I set it up so she can't do anything else. She's happy & gets to see her extended family pics/updates.
Isn't this done automatically now in Firefox? As in, you don't need to even install the containers add-on as Facebook and related properties are automatically opened in a default Facebook container?
I use the low bandwidth option if I need to get on there. mbasic.facebook.com no nagging about apps and you can actually use the messenger web interface.
I would be delighted to have that sh-t gone from everyone's iPhone,
because it would create an obvious a compelling opportunity for someone to finally break the stranglehold of FB's monopoly.
I miss my friend and family connections, but most people in my community won't go near that ecosystem with a flaming 10' pole any longer, and many friends like me, despair that our loved ones' reaction to e.g. the Social Dilemma and ongoing revelation after revelation of sociopathic corporate amorality is "yes that is sad but I have choice" because "all my friends are only insta" or "my cottage business depends entirely on my pages" etc etc.
Apple customers generate a large chunk of the content there is to see in Facebook products, so losing them would diminish engagement across all remaining platforms. If competitors can capitalize on the opportunity, that could very well trigger a death spiral that would destroy Facebook within mere months, whereas Apple could weather that easily.
Few things could flat out annihilate Facebook, but punching a large hole in their network is probably one of them.
Facebook could not afford not to as they would lose a huge amount of users. Apple is just doing to them what FB does to people: Accept these terms, be tracked everywhere, or miss out on all the people providing us free content on our platform. Many people accept that because they don't want to be unable to communicate or view things in their garden. That is leveraging their huge scope to push less favorable terms.
So FB has Apple with some leverage over them saying accept this or else. FB is in a weak position because it would be hard to tell your users hey leave Apple because they won't let us take all your data without permission. I don't feel for them at all.
That Apple is unfairly privileging its own ads business. It's a tough cookie though; the offending behavior is simply Apple's truthful (if arguably hyperbolic) notice and consent popup.
It could work if they demonstrate that Apple does track its user across apps for advertising purposes without showing consent dialogs. I am more than a bit skeptical, but you never know.
iAds will definitely be privileged. If you read the documentation on what is available to Apple vs. others, you will see Apple's own ad business will definitely benefit from this.
Apple isn't a monopoly -- they're a walled garden.
I'm all for regulations that force Apple to open up their hardware so that people can install different software on it, or to disable the walled-garden mode of their software platform akin to how you can install lineageOS or freedroid on android devices but I don't think it's reasonable to mandate that Apple must allow Facebook to do something with their software simply because Apple does it with theirs.
They are almost certainly doing this; question is whether they will file it.
FB's noise around this feels very out of character, even for something that's devolved into a personal conflict. They may be truly scared of the update.
FB undoubtedly knows enough about powerful judges and politicians to get what they want. J. Edgar Hoover's wildest dreams didn't contemplate what Facebook can do.
Facebook has been reported as assisting Epic Games in its lawsuit and been preparing for months for lawsuits against Apple. For the kind of company it is, it might pull a “Peter Thiel on Gawker” move, though it won’t reflect well on its name. But not enough people seem to care much about Facebook’s practices or what it does. After the uproar over WhatsApp’s upcoming policy change on data sharing with Facebook, several people moved to other chat platforms. But I still see those people stuck with WhatsApp and also using Facebook and Instagram even while knowing that these are all part of the same company.
The more likely scenario in the long run is that Apple is forced to allow alternative App stores, which will probably be riddled with malware and spyware.
I'm skeptical as well considering Apple selectively leaves gaping holes depending on levels of public knowledge (e.g. talk a big game on encryption, but don't encrypt iCloud backups while using dark patterns nudging users towards using iCloud backups).
This is definitely good for privacy in the short term, but long term will depend on if Apple decides to monetize this data themselves.
iPhone users must login to use the phone. Those users need to provide valid identification info considering the phone is linked to their phone service account. Combine that with apple defining every single action the phone takes, they could easily flip a switch to start collecting "anonymized" data.
Or they could simply update the data-sharing default to "Yes" and 75%+ would never disable it.
> The don’t collect this data. How could they monetize it?
Your answer is essentially -
“in principle they could build tracking into all their software”
You seem to be suggesting that their plan is to fein interest in privacy to undermine all the tracking companies first, and then reverse their stance and become a super-intrusive tracking company.
That seems very far fetched and weirdly conspiracy like.
Also obviously not true, given that they have been lobbying for privacy legislation.
Most of iCloud backups are encrypted with your PIN — the one you unlock your phone.
Some more sensitive data are backup only if you choose backup locally
It's one giant fighting another. Apple wants to destroy ad revenue and shift everyone to a paid App model because Apple can get its 30%. I bet you if Apple loses control of the AppStore for anti trust reasons, they would be all for ads.
This is Facebook’s narrative, but if Facebook makes a bit less money, how exactly does that “shift everyone to a paid App model”? Facebook’s annual net profit is an 11-digit number. Apple’s move is bad for Facebook’s stock price and good for users, and that’s probably all the noticeable impact.
Even if Apple’s motives are somehow nefarious, Facebook is being scummy in the first place, so it’s a fair move for Apple to take advantage of that, IMO.
> how exactly does that “shift everyone to a paid App model
You nailed it. Facebook wants to confuse and distract. There's absolutely no reason why Apple's push for user permission on tracking would cause the Facebook app to become subscription-based. WTF?
That's Facebook's claim, yes. And when it comes to Apple News and even the App Store, Apple also serves advertising on behalf of its partners. It's also true that Apple themselves runs a lot of ads, and benefit from ad networks through the services they've integrated in the past. In fact, Apple justifies their 15-30% cut by suggesting that the App Store is itself a platform that promotes apps, and has featured apps in its own advertising on billboards and television.
So it's hard to come to a conclusion that Apple hates ads. It's easier to say that Apple dislikes advertiser networks, since their own attempt at a generic network (iAds) failed miserably. It's not even clear to me that blocking tracking is going to kill ads as a revenue stream, all it will do is make ads more expensive because they're slightly less targeted on iOS?
Also, Apple runs their own seemingly successful ad market within the App Store app — something I'm reminded of each time I search for an app and see a competitor's app I don't want at the top of my search results, filling my screen with the new design. So it's hard to say that Apple does this for the best user experience. Showing extra popups isn't great UX. And Apple likes free apps, it makes their phone and platform more valuable, so they can charge more for the hardware knowing folks can get great apps inexpensively or free.
While I'm in favour of Apple losing its complete monopoly over App Stores and apps that compete with its own, I actually am in favour of Apple enforcing these policies on apps from its own App Store and platform. And while I would say that third-party stores could have different stances on permissions, the idea that a third-party app store could prevent a popup asking to share a phone's identifier, for example, is frankly a security bypass. The same is true if apps want to communicate with other apps without the operating system knowing.
Personally, I'd love it if Apple went a step farther and used the network layer and code signing to identify which apps actively use which trackers and tracking networks the same way they currently identify apps that use the microphone and camera. It'd be fascinating to see an operating system feature that says 50% of my network traffic in Application X was telemetry being sent to Facebook, for example.
> Personally, I'd love it if Apple went a step farther and used the network layer and code signing to identify which apps actively use which trackers and tracking networks the same way they currently identify apps that use the microphone and camera. It'd be fascinating to see an operating system feature that says 50% of my network traffic in Application X was telemetry being sent to Facebook, for example.
If you had broken this paragraph out into a separate post, it might get more and highly deserved attention.
It already is ‘unviable’ for most companies because Facebook and Google dominate it.
It wouldn’t become unviable for Facebook because even with a smaller number of users consenting to tracking they would still have a gigantic ad market.
> I'm generally skeptical of Apple's pro-privacy messaging
That's a very healthy attitude towards Apple's claims. They developed all these APIs that allow app makers to spy on their users, and then blame the app makers for spying.
For example, why does any app need to know which other apps I have installed, and how long I use them? This permission should very sparingly pass the review process, and only for apps in specific categories.
> why does any app need to know which other apps I have installed, and how long I use them
What are you referring to? As far as I know, one app can't query the list and usage time of other installed apps on iOS. This stackoverflow question[1] seems to confirm this. But please enlighten me if I'm misunderstanding what you're referring to.
APIs are great.. i want an app to be able to list all the apps installed. I just don't want facebook app to do it, because it really doesn't need that data, and I don't want to give it to them.
This should be done the same as with location and microphone access... ie. "ask the user". "Flashlight 2000 DX app wants to access list of apps installed - allow once, allow always, deny now, deny always". Facebook wants to track 50 different things? Well.. ask the user 50 different times and try to explain why you want access to their call history and calendar data (adding calendar entries could also be a write-only option, with optional unique ids to change/remove entries).... and give your UX team a headache. Also, "deny" should be the "bolded" default. Maybe even give the user a list of unchecked permission the app wants, with explanations why it needs them, and have the user check the ones they want to give to the app (default state is unchecked (deny)).
Also granularity is key... giving location access for bluetooth connections, giving "manage calls" access to stop playing music when you get a call, etc. is just stupid.
I don't think they're great, it seems like a way of obfuscating what the app really does. Your approach might work for savvy or paranoid users, but not everyone notices much beyond "contains ads" or such.
Apple needs to force them to be up front from the very beginning that their stupid game or screensaver or else is also a tracking app. And boot any app that uses your phone to do anything beyond what they told you they would do in the app store description.
I guess timing and education matters. People would just click through all those Windows alerts. So they were useless. And maybe people weren't so savvy about privacy and security.
Nowadays, people are more aware about such things, so maybe you can start to assume the users are more comfortable about computing and the internet. So they should change their direction.
I'd agree with the sentiment if it was like Samsung making fun of removing a headphone jack, only to do the same thing less than a year later.
IDK MacOS blocks saving exports from Sequel Ace every single time I try. Have to do a file dialog dance each time or it silently fails. Guess devs just have to stay on top of the changing API requirements.
But i want to be able to use an app to act as a VNC server (screen capture, inputs,...), or an app (eg. tasker automation) to start a vpn connection and an ssh server when i send a SMS to the device. I just don't want a screensaver app to be able to do that.
Basically, i'd be happy if those "risky" permissions would be hidden in app management in settings, disabled by default, and enabled only by power users.
The problem now is, that due to fscked up permissions schemes, some apps are unable to work at all, even the stuff they work now, some due to play store issues (eg. termux because they want to run downloaded code), and some due to missing apis (eg vnc servers).
I can think of a few. An app might need to know if Twitter is installed so it can show a button to open a link in twitter or a web browser (This was before App Deeplinking was a thing). Maybe if an app company had multiple apps that it wanted to cross sell and see if they have both apps installed to enable certain functionality.
Not only do they develop these technologies (wifi location db, ibeacon, deep linking, findmy, etc)
They don't give you the ability to block them.
and of course, you can't find out what is going in and out of your phone over the network, and you definitely can't firewall it. ("content blockers" are nerfed)
You can disable almost all of those things in one way or another.
The problem is all of these things you mention are also useful for things users want. Often they are useful for things users want inside their applications. Nobody wants a neutered OS.
To disable ibeacon you turn off bluetooth and/or location services. I don't know about find my - it may locate other people's stuff no matter what you do. You can't really disable deep linking. If you get a text message with an amazon link, the amazon app will see it.
It is not apple's way to advertise this capability is available, and give you granular control.
Why does an app need to know which other apps you have installed? Because it might want to interface with those apps obviously. Apple has actually ratcheted down permissions on that API because it was abused.
People want apps to be able to do things and those things can often allow tracking in addition to being useful to the user. There is pretty much one API Apple devised specifically for tracking users and this very issue is Apple attempting to shut down.
Clarification: Just to be clear, Apple isn’t shutting down the API entirely, they are changing it from opt-out to opt-in.
I completely agree that it is a healthy attitude to have, and all of Apple's claims should be independently investigated. But I also agree that you should check facts or provide citations before spreading FUD:
- There was never any API for a third party app on iOS to get the time spent in another app. The only workaround I saw to this was an app that asked you to screenshot your app usage screen, and it was able to process those screenshots in an automated way (can't find the link).
- There is an API to open URLs between apps, so that one app can link to another app. When developers realized that they could check whether or not a given URL was openable to check if an app is installed, they started abusing this API to check every app on the system. Apple cracked down on the API in iOS 9 and made it so that all apps declare which other apps they can check, and App Review decides if they have a legitimate use: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
Good summary. And it’s common for apps that might not otherwise have a URL handler to have one for things like authentication callbacks from login with Facebook, emails from the app, etc.
> For example, why does any app need to know which other apps I have installed, and how long I use them? This permission should very sparingly pass the review process, and only for apps in specific categories.
Since I can't edit my original comment, I chose to reply to it instead of replying to everyone who corrected me. Yes, there's no API to directly query installed apps and usage on iOS. I think I got the wrong impression from years ago, when the function canOpenURL() could be abused to detect which apps were installed[0]. Thank you all for the corrections.
There is just absolutely no good-faith way anyone can disagree with requiring user consent to be tracked. It is as close to “pure evil” as you can get for Facebook to campaign against it.
I don't like the wording at all. "Ask app not to track" means an app can ignore a user's request, just like with "Do not track" on the web. The button should read "Deny", and the denial should be strictly enforced.
You're jumping to conclusions about the technical implementation based on the button text? It is enforced. If the users chooses the 'don't track' option in the dialogue the app does not get access to the IDFA.
There is no way for apple to prevent apps from tracking, since many apps require persistent storage. At best Apple can throw apps out of the appstore after they become aware of an infraction.
I believe this dialog does control access to apple's advertiser-id (IDFA), so apple did implement some technical measures. Unfortunately that's not the only way for an app to track a user, so giving the impression that Apple enforces this denial would be misleading. People already blame Apple for apps lying on their privacy labels.
It is a combination of both. Clicking this will deny the app access to the very useful IDFA identifier, so this part is strictly enforced.
However, when phrased like this, it does not JUST represent the access to the IDFA, it is a direct request from the user to not track you in any OTHER way either. And yes, the app can ignore that, but then Apple is free to deny it access to the App Store.
exactly this. Facebook can still tie your actions in the app to your Facebook account, nothing's changing there and Apple couldn't possibly control that. They won't, however, get that IDFA, which _is_ something Apple can control.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 480 ms ] threadA doctor giving someone a new lease on life with an arm transplant isn't a hero unless they're threatening _their own_ arm by volunteering it.
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In what world do things work like that?
Please don't misread me though--I'm glad Apple is doing this, I just don't think they're heroes for it.
In the real world there are few "heroic" deeds that don't benefit the entity doing them.
The doctor doing the transplant gets professional acclaim that is not worthless, would you say the doctor did it to market themselves?
Turns out doing good things can be profitable, it's not an either or.
This tired cynicism any time a company does something good and people admire them for it (ie consider the action heroic) is not novel or useful. Companies at the size of Apple and co are never going to be pure forces of good with no bad deeds, but they are still capable of being heroes in a specific context. Right now Apple is being a hero of their customer's right to privacy
After all, to me Chuck Yeager is less of a hero than someone who helps out at a soup kitchen every weekend. One was doing their job (and a questionable person honestly) and the other is taking their own time to help others.
Apple could have also built a business around tracking their users and selling targeted ads etc.
They have forgone all the revenues associated with such practices because in the long term, they think society won’t accept them.
Ads don’t automatically imply data collection without consent.
They didn’t have data for targeting, which is possibly why they didn’t pursue it.
The argument still stands - just replace TS with mom jeans. My point wasn't actually about Taylor Swift marketing - it was that demographic targeting is a reasonable way to identify an audience. Those mom jeans are not going to sell very well in a younger, urban demographic compared to Iowa.
More information here. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
Nearly every company in the world does not fit that description, and I would bet that the vast majority of them would benefit from targeted advertising. One example being local stores targeted only to local people.
>TADELIS: Yes. So, for non-branded search, we actually had no idea what the results are going to be. Because here, if I am searching for, example, a studio microphone I’m sure that on eBay I might find a variety of used ones. But if I’m not thinking about eBay, and I just search for “studio microphone,” if eBay doesn’t pay an ad, they might not even show up on the first page. And by the way, the automated machines at eBay that were doing the online bidding, they had a basic library of close to 100 million different combinations of keywords, because eBay has practically everything you could imagine for sale on the site. So, we really had no idea what the returns for the non-branded searches would be.
>TADELIS: And we took a third of these D.M.A.’s, and we turned off all paid-search advertising. This was an extremely blunt experiment where we’re saying, “What would happen if we didn’t advertise at all?” And to our surprise the impact on average was pretty much zero.
The interesting question is much tracking adds on top of simpler targeting based on location and context.
Or make it optional and just show that ad to users that have set their location field.
Facebook and others have convinced people that they can do better than simple location based advertising.
People would call the last one personalized and not "location targeted", but it's pretty hard to see where that flips.
Mass advertising needs to die off already. Just hold better search and filtering tools and empower people to discover what they want instead of telling them what they should want.
There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that happily pay for ads on Facebook over other platforms and see improved results after tweaking the targeting.
The issue is the privacy loss we get, not the efficacy of targeting.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
No... ~targeted~ advertising only enriches ad platforms not the buyers of the ads.
> In our previous episode, we learned that TV advertising is much less effective than the industry says.
Sounds like almost all advertising is just a zero-sum game.
All that said, I am not an authority on if any evidence exists, I have never looked into the literature my self, so perhaps this evidence already exists and I just don’t know about it.
--- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
Regardless of its efficacy, the legality should be out of the question.
Targeted ads work really well for many scenarios, b2b software.
I’m also not sure if it matters whether they are actually effective. At least for the short term. If people believe they are effective, is there any difference in the dynamic?
One can directly measure ROI and prove the value of this advertising. Especially FB provides for my business (political marketing) at least 10X better direct response value and that is mostly using 1:1 targeting and lookalike modeling.
What I like about the HN discourse is that if someone slings out a statement which is demonstrably false, someone that knows better might respond with a correction. That is why I left this comment, as I all my knowledge with the targeted ad business was anecdotal, and I desperately needed a correction.
there are a lot of ways to measure outside of FBs analytics tools.
including the very simple simply using a refcode or even a specific product/url. How many purchases did you get / how much did you spend?
this is what i'm referencing. like that's so incredibly basic and it bugs me HN just either doesn't understand or lets their opinion on it go first
In my experience FBs inaccurate reporting is just a tiny amount of impressions delivered and they refund the $1 or whatever it is a couple times a year. Have they ever had a reporting anomaly on their analytics tools for tracking off FB conversions? they very well could have but I haven't heard of one.
There is no way to validate their impression/click data that all the downstream metrics are reliant on. If you have a way, I'd love to know about it. The claim isn't that they make up conversions, the claim is that they overstate the ROI and cv% based on the denominator.
There is also an academic researcher who regularly publishes as well.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...
and of course there's Tim Hwang.
https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis
Internet ads do not work past simple location based targeting.
I have routinely gotten over 100% immediate last-click roi from fb ads, for many clients.
I know for a fact many others have too. There are a ton of direct to consumer online-only products that easily measure this. Just make a page or item which you only use to advertise on FB. sales/spend. Game developers track this closely too.
No, probably more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWRlxSGf_ns
I mean, it goes against the business model they operate under, but they could, right?
They're clearly at least trying to move in the opposite direction and have been making those moves for some time now.
Maybe they won't always go that way. Maybe they will.
No one is saying they're our savior, though. No one is begging Apple to please save us.
Why would I need to be saved? I'll just buy a device from a different manufacturer. If there are literally no privacy-respecting options, and a majority of people think there should be one, either a company will form on its own, or constituents will make enough noise that the government will step in.
If not in the US, the EU still seems to have some basic respect for the rights of their citizens.
... which is really no mystery, because Apple users are customers, and Facebook users are product.
Apple makes money by selling more products which means they innovate by making Watches, Earpods, M1, etc. Facebook makes money by selling your attention and data, which meants they innovate by extracting data from every experience they can (Oculus, Whatsapp, ...), using more complex technologies (Facebook AI), and encouraging whatever behaviors create more ad spend (hint: outrage).
Add in the fact that Apple has made privacy a core part of their brand promise and it means that Apple has strong incentives to protect their customers in a way that most companies, especially Facebook, do not.
But regardless it’s not Facebook’s value prop to business that people have an issue with but ya know, how they actually deliver it.
On the other hand, it's argued that Apple doesn't care about their developers because they enforce draconian regulations on what iOS developers are allowed and not allowed to do, and don't hesitate even to shut down billion dollar apps (i.e., Fortnite).
I have mixed feelings about Apple's walled garden, both as a developer and a user, but when it comes to user privacy, I'm firmly in Apple's camp. I can't think of a single other large tech company that has a strong stand in favor of user privacy and acted on that. Basically, if Privacy is a killer feature for a consumer, then Apple is literally the only game in town.
Every other company would have been falling over themselves to unlock a terrorists iPhone.
Apple said no, hired Ted Olsen, and litigated (along with lots of other less well known cases).
This may have even hurt them in some consumers eyes (hard to understand them protecting someone who killed a bunch of people). So the PR risk was very significant.
So they do seem to have a pretty committed consumer focus (and now make money because of that).
It is virtually inevitable though that someone will go after them (anti-trust etc) because this is a game of billions and folks who for example do in-game loot boxes (fortnite) and marketing (facebook) etc are going to be in regulators ears and in ny times ads and op-eds calling for this horrible situation to be broken up.
It's fairly obvious that, given Epic was saying "you can pay $2 less to get the same amount of vbucks" that Apple was going to lose a huge portion of revenue from the App if they didn't pull it, and if they actually left it up, they'd have to allow every other app to institute third-party payment processors as well to not appear like they're playing favorites and the PR nightmare that would come from that.
It doesn’t mean anything at all.
https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/the-fortnite-m...
Anyone who wanted to flout any rule could claim Apple was playing favorites with Epic.
It has nothing to do with being screwed out of $2 per purchase of in-game currency.
Saying that developers are "buying" users makes no sense. Devs are not a customer of apple. If anything, devs are a supplier to apple. Since the net money flow is from Apple to Dev.
As always, just follow the money.
Now, the legal view of Apple's ecosystem is being litigated right now. What I posted above might be how the court sees it, or what you posted might be how the court sees it. We won't get a definitive answer until either Epic or Apple go home with the key to processing payments on iOS and all of the other systems that are effectively an iPhone with a different form factor (eg PS5, xbox series).
(I’m not entirely opposed to this arrangement; I’m typing this on my iPhone. But I bought it knowing and accepting that I’m partly the product)
It’s not what people mean when they say ‘you are the product’.
What they mean is that if you aren’t paying, then the company is only interested in retaining you as a user so that they can satisfy their actual customers.
When you are paying, you are the customer
It’s also true that iOS developers are customers of Apple’s distribution service.
Buy Apple’s users are not a product in the sense that anyone uses this phrase.
First the money flows from from end user to Apple, and then from Apple to developer.
The simplest way to model it is as a supply from dev to apple, plus a value-adding supply from apple to end user.
People here are arguing it is a supply from end user to dev, plus a supply from Apple to dev. That's obtuse way to model it IMO. Then again those are the kind of people who probably devising tax avoidance schemes and making big bucks so what to I know.
Not in China:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...
I doubt you would be arguing that, if Apple bricked basically every iPhone in China, it would be evidence that their "incentives are aligned with their customers".
Being a separate device, as you said, means the phones would still work independent of Apple.
The Chinese government would block updates and sales, hencecustomers would blame them, not Apple, because Apple was incentivized with customers instead of the government moving forward.
It is not "bricking phones" as you said. As much as you don't like this fact, Apple had a choice and decided to put the Chinese government before it's users.
An iPhone that cannot connect to Apple’s servers is essentially bricked. Not only do a significant number of critical features on the phone require reaching out to Apple to function, but IIRC, after a certain period of time without being able to contact Apple, the phone will require you to log in with your Apple ID. I believe this is to prevent activation lock bypasses by blocking network resources.
I remember reading about an issue a while back, where a person got locked out of their phone at sea, because they didn’t have network access for an extended period of time.
You're splitting hairs here about Apple choosing to share their user data with the Chinese government over their user's privacy.
Will they put the consent pop up on App Store and News?
You can think of it as a common. Blocking tracking essentially is a destruction of a bit of commons; the app developer will get less revenue. By systematically encouraging this block, Apple is making it comparatively less worthwhile to have an ad-supported app instead of a paid app, thus moving revenue to the app store (where Apple can tax it) instead of the advertising side (where it is monetarily free for the user.)
If we really wanted to find out what is right for the user[1], the correct thing is to see if users want to buy their way out of tracking. Offer the apps with advertising with tracking, with advertising without tracking, and without advertising - at different prices, representing the value of the advertising and tracking. My bet is that a majority of users would not want to pay the cost of non-tracked advertising - either they'll want to buy away advertising (and that will only be a small fraction) or they'll want the free variant. Basically, all data I've seen indicate that most people don't want to buy their way out of advertising - it's too expensive. I expect the same applies to tracking.
[1] Under the assumption that we've got an efficient market and will see an equilibrium of development that correspond to value created.
Everything in it is structured around forcing you to pay Apple for access to things you want. Microtransactions, apps etc. All of it must go through Apple and they must have a cut of everything.
You can say they're more honest because they're taking your money up front as opposed to facebook selling you to advertisers, but I don't think it's in Apple's customers' best interests to be milked like cows
It's in Apple's short-term best interest to win over public opinion. It not only cools down anti-competitive rhetoric, but it also helps sell phones.
But everyone seems to conveniently forget about the absolute moral nightmare that is Apple’s supply chain.
Remember when they had to put up nets to stop people from killing themselves? [1]
What about when they were accused of using literal slave labour? [2]
Or the time they actively lobbied Congress when a vote came up to restrict American companies using slave labour [3]
I don’t say this as a shit post, I mean it, it’s really not at all clear to me that Apple are somehow morally less reprehensible.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-human-cost-of-an-...
[2] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale
[3] https://www.axios.com/apple-lobbied-congress-uyghur-slave-la...
For the record... this posted from an iPhone. I got rid of the MacBook already but it’s a process.
Presumably if you were going to criticise companies using Chinese suppliers, a company like that wouldn’t be top of your list. Or is there something else going on here?
I'm making a point that the largest company in the world not only does so but actively took steps to ensure they wouldn't be legally prevented from doing so in the future.
I am pointing out that there is more than one dimension (privacy) on which we should think about these companies and the moment you do it's interesting to note how only one of them has a bad public image and the other is a hero.
No, everyone hasn't. Apple has its problems, too, and nobody denies that. But arguments like yours amount to no more than "Hey, look over there! Don't look at Facebook, look at this other thing!"
Deflection. Whataboutism. Call it what you will.
I am responding to someone calling Apple a hero. I did nothing other than to point out the fact that like many things in life, it's not that simple.
There is no attempt to help Facebook or whatever you had in mind, that was your own projection. We can talk about 2 issues at the same time.
In fact they were offered billions of dollars in revenue by Google for customer location data in Google Maps. Apple turned it down and instead spent billions of dollars and several years building Apple Maps instead.
If they were intent on monetising users data, you’d expect them to make a deal with Google to allow tracking in Safari in exchange for a higher fee for default search.
In other words they don’t seem to be doing any of the things We would expect to see if this theory was correct.
Devices do listen to all sounds to listen for their "prompt" - how do I know what is actually discarded? And with precedence, I don't think it is 'crazy'.
Example: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/25/614470096...
Just as if my location/microphone were able to be physically turned off on my phone I would not have to trust that someone isn't always listening in on me. If I can't do that it is not unreasonable not to trust it. There have been plenty of instances of these things being abused.
(I'm not making a claim either way on whether or not in this case it's true that devices are spying on us, just that this line or thinking is absurd that it doesn't really matter if a given thing is true)
Fast forward to 2013 and Snowden.
Our defaults for "they wouldn't do that" when it comes to your privacy are all wrong.
If that's a "conspiracy theory" that you need to dismiss so that you can go about your life, fine. But the truth is, these people are constantly up to no good and you can't trust closed software nor hardware. The technical capability for draconian mass surveillance exists.
Kind if like, 'I cant believe it's come to this, but given all the evidence, it's justified."
At the same time we see the incentives, and the incentives are to collect and analyze things.
A device which does not have a hardware cutoff switch, which you've allowed to listen for it's own prompts ("Hey Siri, etc") can listen to you. So far we're all speaking "current knowns". Nothing about that is conspiracy.
The trust part is "storage of data received" and "use of that data". Sure it probably does not today - but will the terms of service change tomorrow?
An example parallel are Alexa devices listening, and accidentally storing whole convos.
Insurance companies analyze purchase records for modeling lifestyle risk.... if I were discussing a family member who had a health scare how do I know that info isn't 'surfaced' to insurers, etc?
https://i.judge.sh/frank/Derpy/chrome_0aklMR0vP4.png
https://i.judge.sh/careless/Flutter/chrome_Vm3HAfRnaQ.png
It's kind of fascinating how hard they (not just Facebook) push you to use their "so much better" app even when their HTML version seems just as good if not better. It's just so much better for them. If you try the app and it's not better then you know what it's really about.
If she adds a friend, it’ll send me a messenger message telling me I have to approve it, with a link. If I try to follow that link, it will tell me that my desktop browser can’t be used to manage Messenger Kids and that I have to install the app on my phone. Although it seems like in most cases you can open up Messenger Kids in the panel on the left, and then there will be an approve/deny button, so it’s mostly lies that you can’t do this on desktop.
I don't think the "threat" is the obvious one... Nobody trusts Facebook -- many, if not most, people honestly believe they listen to their conversations already. The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight.
A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers, and some label won't stop Facebook users or meaningfully impact Facebook. Hell, when Microsoft faced anti-trust breakup, the company didn't sit and whine. They fought the threat and sold billions of dollars of software and solutions to their antagonist.
I think there are parallels here. I see a focus on getting _current_ users to stop tolerating naked privacy. I think that ship has sailed. But in time the entire culture can shift where future generations do not accept naked privacy.
Once reality started setting in and denial didn't cut it, they acted to protect the shareholders. Phillip Morris bought things like Kraft that they could spin-out later. They settled claims and paid states billions of dollars for healthcare costs a few years before healthcare started going up 30% a year... which capped their liability AND made it politically impossible to put them out of business.
Google seems to at least attempt to do something similar by entering and investing billions into businesses like Cloud, cars, etc. I don't see that with Facebook... Facebook digs in and spouts some nonsense about connecting people, like the capitalist version of Soviet PR people.
Can confirm. I visited many a windowless office in Manhattan where everyone smoked, and air circulation was nil.
Fixing electronics in those days always started with swabbing a thick layer of tar off the circuit boards.
The customer had built a wall blocking all of the windows in the late 80s (this was circa 2000), we had to go in the the area inbetween.... 10-15 years of no interior cleaning and high temps resulted in these weird formations of tar drips. It almost looked like a cave formation. Absolutely vile.
The story from the site staff was that the print and mainframe operators back in the day would essentially sit and continuously smoke, all day, all night. IIRC, we found a half dozen defunct cigarette machines.
Nicotine is as hard to quit as heroin. The fact that we still punished smokers through public shaming, exclusion and excessive fines just shows how unsympathetic our culture is to perceived "moral failings."
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2018/10/17/why-its-so-hard-to-...
So, what do you advocate? Reward smokers? Encourage smoking?
P.S. Before the downvotes come, I'm rather fat and a mostly ex-smoker, so I'm not attacking obese people, just wondering at the inconsistency.
The main difference seems to be that smoking in public inflicts secondhand smoke on others, while obesity inflicts... taking up more room on public transit? IF shaming is effective at curbing public smoking, and there is no shaming for smoking in private, then I think you could have a logically consistent position.
I don't know if the first of those is true, and the second definitely isn't (although maybe a different level of intensity), so I'm not saying there is consistency, just that it's possible.
Where do you live where obese people and crack addicts are not shamed?
So, generic "smoke is bad for you", "overeating is bad for you", "junk food is bad for you"; and positive reinforcements like "say no to smoke", "say no to junk food" would be a good start.
And if some groups comes out and state that those messages are "shaming" well, those people are idiots.
P.S.: ex-smoker and ex-fat person here
I mean why do people feel it's their duty to get into someone else's life? How about assume fat people and people who smoke know it's bad for them and just leave them alone. I think people in society would be much better off of they worried themselves with their own lives. I guess that's a lot harder than pointing out other people's problems though.
I agree 100% with the "perceived moral failings" part. Shaming people does not help. I couldn't kick the H until I stopped shaming myself. The guilt made my usage worse. It was caused by complex mental health issues, dealing with those got me healthy.
The whole ordeal has made me a much more understanding, compassionate person. I'm extremely grateful to be one of the few that made it out.
If Android follows suit (not guaranteed but iOS and Android often converge on features within a few versions of each other), then they are going to take another hit. Executives want to prevent this change in the interest of their personal wealth.
While I welcome the change as an iOS user (for privacy with my other apps, I don’t even have a Facebook account) I can understand why Facebook is coming out hard against the change.
Google might be incentivized to do it, as doing so would harm the effectiveness of other ad networks without affecting their own (as long as the user has a Google account)
poor little snow flakes. i have zero sympathy
This would be amazing. Imagine all the talent that would be freed into real problems.
BTW: I remember while working in the financial sector, in the financial bubble, how terrified they were if markets were to be corrected, like they did.
Edit: Ok. Maybe https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-reportedly-escape-hat...
MS "just" used it's behavior to ensure it was the dominate OS, and made some hardware products to boot. They had some questionable telemetry stuff going on, and with the latest OS joined the slimey ad stuff after everyone else had already paved that particular road to hell for them.
FB is much much creepier in all of the information they gather about people without them being aware of it. Not just what/who they follow, but they have insights into their user's financial/spending info, health/medical, and plenty of other stuff that is just too damn much. And they way the implemented it so that they follow you around to gather that info without you even coming close to using their site.
In my opinion, it's just not even the same sport let alone ballpark.
and more.
I don't agree with this. It seems less of an emotional response than a business one: the changes from iOS will have a large, material impact on Facebook's business, and it will get even worse if other gatekeepers follow suit (not likely, as Google's model is pretty close to Facebook's).
I think the real takeaway is how much money is riding on surveillance capitalism, and how these business models take a real hit when you just explain clearly to the user what's going on and give them a choice.
It's very telling that personal privacy has Facebook's leadership fudging its collective Huggies, while every other company — even Google — is going along with it.
One unexplored possibility is that they actually needed to do quite a bit of analysis to determine all the uses the data is put to within their organization and doing a legal review so that they didn’t end up making a false statement.
That's the opposite of true. It didn't stop _every_ smoker, but research has established that anti-smoking marketing and labeling has a massive impact on how many people smoke overall.
> Power cycle device.
'Apple Verification. Enter the password for "<email>" in Settings.'
> Tap 'Not Now'
'Apple Verification. Enter the password for "<email>" in Settings.'
> Tap 'Not Now'
'Apple Verification. Enter the password for "<email>" in Settings.'
> Tap 'Not Now'
'Apple Verification. Enter the password for "<email>" in Settings.'
> Tap 'Not Now'
Probably they are competing for engineers, Messenger / WhatsApp vs iMessage, time spent on Facebook content vs on Apple content and other things I'm missing.
On the other side they benefitted from the popularity of Facebook (and many other internet properties companies) because they gave an extra reason to people to buy smartphones and using them a lot.
They're both huge companies whose largest risk of disruption comes not from the marketplace (they can monitor, acquire and influence challengers), but from regulators. The appearance of competition helps both companies to reduce that risk.
(It's debatable whether or not Google is any better. At least they're a lot less overt about their contempt for user privacy and data sovereignty.)
The way to reduce potential damage is to evolve, adapt, pivot, and diversify. Not to kick and scream.
Facebook has enough money and enough smart people to do and be anything it wants. It chooses to be the neighborhood creep in the bushes watching your daughter through your windows.
It is enough to highlight the policies and products of Facebook that you disapprove of.
Nothing existential about it at all. It's an actual threat to Facebook's business model. And I'm OK with that.
"Existential threat" means a threat to the very existence of a thing, so a thing that is an "existential threat" is a very big actual threat. I think maybe you're confusing "Existential" with "Hypothetical"?
Politicians started using that phrase en masse about a year ago, and the internet has latched onto it and now misuses it all the time.
"Existential threat" means something so devastating it threatens the subjects very existence.
It's meant that for as long as the phrase has been in use.
> an existential threat is a threat to the existence of something.
I can't decide if this comment is very clever ironic satire or... not ;-)
> Politicians started using that phrase en masse about a year ago
"Existential threat" has been in wide-spread use for a really long time. The first time I heard the phrase used was probably some time in the late 90s. And that's more a function of my age than of how long the term has been used. The cliche is at least half a century old and has been used by politicians for at least decades.
For example, the phrase was commonly used in anti-proliferation and denuclearization advocacy during the last quarter of the 20th century, when nuclear weapons were characterized as an "existential threat" to humanity. This use persists today; see, for example, https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/nuclear-weapons-and-ex...
But the term isn't particularly partisan or limited to extinction-level threats. it's also been used throughout modern history by right-wing populists to refer to one group or another being an "existential threat to our way of life". See for example https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44498438
The point is, the phrase has been used for a long time, always with the same meaning, and its use hasn't been particularly partisan as far as I can ever remember. Both sides use the phrase for various things. But they all definitely mean the same thing -- a threat to the existence of something (humanity, dominant cultural norms, the country, etc.). Not a "perceived" threat.
I'm genuinely and sincerely curious where you got the idea that "Existential threat means an implied, or perceived threat" rather than "a threat to the existence of a thing". The former has never been anywhere close to the dominant accepted meaning. Possibly you heard a politician or pundit use the term in a sarcastic way and misunderstood their sarcasm as literal? Or you heard someone use the phrase in a hyperbolic way?
Can you share one or more sources where people are using the phrase in the way you describe?
They see it as the beginning of a slippery slope. And I hope they're right!
The concept of social media and living our lives on the internet is new, in the scale of things. The last ~10 years have been like the period of time where the sun goes in but the thermostat hasn't noticed yet. Now people have decided they don't like being cold (having their data harvested) and are pushing back.
Do I qualify as too much alarmist when I'm horrified from seeing doctors and lawyers happily exchanging photos of clients sensitive documents using Whatsapp? (read: forgetting them in their phone gallery, ready to be exfiltrated by any malicious software or repair technician). The sad part is that people is slowly adapting to not give a damn about their and others privacy because today's electronic gadgets and services are designed in a way so they're almost unusable by privacy conscious users.
My understanding is that Facebook does not sell this data, but rather lets advertisers create hyper-targeted ads, which are only possible because of this data.
Edit: Certainly not trying to defend Facebook here (in the slightest). Just trying to correct an inaccuracy in the article.
I'd phrase it more along the lines of Facebook indirectly selling the data as hypertargeted ads, while keeping control of the data themselves.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_events/122...
Facebook collect data to sell targetted adspace, they do not sell data. This is a plain fact.
"In total, it said the social network had special arrangements with more than 150 companies to share its members' personal data. Most of these, it said, were other tech firms, but the list also included online retailers, car-makers and media organisations, including the NYT itself, among others."
source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46618582
A plain fact that requires looking realistically at how colloquialisms are used combined with a little bit of technical know how. How many businesses do you know actually "sell data"? The only market I can think of are companies like Zoominfo. Outside of that there really aren't that many companies that "sell your data". However, you'll see a ton of social justice campaigns against "stop companies selling your data". They aren't going after Zoominfo, they're going after Facebook.
Does facebook capture data? Yes.
Do they literally take that data and sell it byte for byte to other people? No.
Is that data absolutely necessary to sell their products or services? Yes.
So, in effect, its easier to say to the common person "they're selling your data" than "they're harvesting their data so they can sell products and services". Facebook is trying to defend itself in the public eye by responding to this slogan - not by the real factor that matters.
There are conferences. Much of the data can be obtained as Salesforce "apps" - connect your CRM to our massive data portal and we'll fill in information that you don't have. The biggest of these is owned by SF and called Data.com.
Not to hand waive away anyone's pre-baked hatred of Google/FB/etc., but there is an actual data industry that does buy and sell your data, with no controls over it and what it can be used for. By comparison, FB and Google are much better stewards.
From a user privacy perspective, I’m skeeved out that Facebook sells access to data rather than giving out copies. The only difference is that Facebook makes more money.
It’s like those asshole companies that say they don’t sell data, but only rent it. That’s not the point that I care about.
The more info they have, the more accurate they can be about renting out the right ones.
Until/unless personal data becomes a liability for corporations they will continue to mine it and let us mortals deal with the fallout.
You certainly say they exploit it on behalf of their customers, but we need to maintain the distinction between this, and the companies that actually do sell the data they collect, because once sold, you can never trace who is using the data, whereas with Facebook and Google’s model, you can.
It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not in Facebook’s interest to sell the data. If they did, they would lose their advantage quite quickly.
Facebook has definitely undermined trust on what data it shares.
However that is not it’s normal model.
For example Telegram has a very specific approach to security based on "you can trust us", by default chats are not end-to-end encrypted, they use non-standard encryption and the app is free, but they are upfront on why such tradeoffs are made and their point of view in making them.
Facebook could have a position of "personalized advertising is the future" and allow ipertargeted marketing by means of gathering every scrap of data they could find. But they could draw the line to keeping it within their own databases and never distributing any of it. Apparently their main line of bussiness is exactly like that, but they do not do only that, they also partake in sharing that data.
Facebook, if you know any small business that have a specific region of operation (e.g. one city) derive significant benefit and growth from Facebook's targeted advertising that they just were not seeing before.
Of course, if anyone logs in and fetches their data from facebook as a download and go through it, it is really rather unbelievable how much data there is beyond geographical data. Some of it pretty scary.
What intrigues me further, after i tried to do the same with google, i don't believe google are nearly as open to how much data they hold on a person. There doesn't seem to be any takeaway service that indicates the same depth of information. But of course we know for a fact they do hold some of it.
Anyway, the long and short of it is advertising is all we have to support enormous social networks and I feel some level of personalised data provides mutual benefit. It should of course all be opt in with no exceptions.
I'm actually conceptualising a service/product around this concept right now.
In fact, if they "sell" their user data, anti-trust regulators will be very happy; they want big techs to share user data to its competitors but the big techs are using user privacy and security as their excuses to rule out new competitions in the industry. Apple took the lead and other big techs are now following.
Even if they don't, Facebook is not the only app in the world. Tracking being disabled by default is a good thing, no matter what Facebook does with it.
But when you parse out what it means you are left with something more accurately stated as: "<Company> will not sell its proprietary assets."
It sort of like the operator of a hotel saying "I don't sell rooms".
We only sell the finest artisanal sausages rendered from gently-euthanised young canines.
Selling the actual data and selling access to use the data is a meaningless distinction.
Money changes hands. The data is used.
Perhaps we should say "renting" the data. Just the way a hotel rents you a room, but you use it on the hotel's premises.
What's even more interesting is that I don't think many considered those as threats 10 years ago.
I know apple probably has deals with malicious governments regarding data access, but at least they are standing up to FB and exposing their vulnerable points where it hurts badly, Zuckerberg has no clothes.
https://grapheneos.org/faq
Even my SSO works well enough. Some notifications rely on Google Play Services though, but I find I don't really miss those apps anyway.
The advanced knowledge i'm referring to is to first know that GrapheneOS exists, know how to enable OEM unlocking, know how to select the correct factory image and so on.
People don't care and cannot be expected to care. Apple, as much as i dislike several of their practices, provide a phone that works when you need it to. AFAIK, the iphone's primary purpose as a phone - has never had an incident where a software bug prevented someone from placing a call.
It's a reason I keep thinking about replacing my current phone with a used iPhone X, though the 12 mini would be nicer for the screen size.
What do you mean by this, exactly? Not being funny, just don't understand this as a con.
What would you like to customise, and why? How is being unable to do so harmful to users?
Genuine questions, because I can't think of much I'd like to customise. Personally, I like not having options because it keeps things simple.
People with apple products tend to keep better care of the products than the latter too.
Why is this important. Are you saying that PC users are stupider than Mac users or something? The end result is that PC users go through more hardware than Macs. I consider myself pretty decent with computers and use both. My five year old MacBook Air runs fine, I’ve gone through two PC laptops (that were always bigger) and they don’t tend to survive windows updates. I’ve even churned through yearly chrome books that seem to be made out of paper mache or something.
Perhaps people are trainable to do the right thing. But it’s been decades, maybe we think about why this training fails on aggregate.
In the meantime, my personal experience of cost/year being cheaper with Mac vs PC stands for me.
My personal experience is my all my laptops last. People have problems with macs. People have problems with PCs. Doesn’t mean any are better than the other. But people with pc laptops will more often update their laptop for next to no gain over what they already had.
And the 'mini' is still huge.
I waited a long time for a new small iPhone and eventually got to the point where I had to buy a new phone, because my SE lasted about 15 minutes & I needed to carry around battery packs just to use it.
Apple Pay in particular is better with thumb reader instead of the tap, look at, tap again buggy process.
I could really get behind having both (esp if I could combined).
Similar to how they let the Mac line languish for a while because it wasn't their top seller without realizing if they sleep on that segment it will hurt the iPhone in the long run.
I can't find the equivalent on iOS. All my searches lead to ad blockers using Safari's content blocking, but the VPN-style ad blockers appear to violate Apple's terms, and so aren't in the app store. I've also seen recommendations to use Pi hole on my network, which is fine until I leave the house.
If anyone has recommendations for system-wide VPN/DNS-based blockers for iOS, please share. That's the last real thing keeping me on Android.
https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html
DNScloak and an ad blocking hosts file, such as the one here: https://github.com/BlackJack8/iOSAdblockList would be another option.
[1]: https://nextdns.io/
https://www.timetoplayfair.com/timeline/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robpegoraro/2020/10/15/apple-to...
And so many others. Apple phone users weren't allowed by Apple to have Spotify as their default music program until recently.
How do I feel now? I absolutely love this ecosystem. I don't fear OS updates like I used to with Android. I don't fear my device will be stranded without updates. The UI is clean. The 11 is as fast today as when I got it. It seamlessly works the watch and my Bose headphones. BT was always finicky with the Android phones I had.
And there's the privacy angle.
Having to jailbreak to side-load apps that aren't on an approved storefront is not acceptable.
https://m.imgur.com/yT14ZVS
Being born a male a few decades ago
I suspect it’s as stupid as ranking all members based on some dumb algorithm like “25 year olds like females, this is a female” and just shoveling garbage.
Years ago Facebook just kept recommending people I hated over and over. I wish they would have a mode of “you’re good, we can’t think of anyone else you like.”
It’s like going into a store and the salesperson says “this is perfect for you” and they are just showing you every item in their store.
Would love to see some evidence of that. That's quite an accusation and it should be taken seriously.
Isn't it opt-in by using their platform? Or is your argument that targeted ads are not common knowledge to Facebook users? I likely wouldn't use Facebook or Google etc. if I had to pay cash; fine with paying with personal data; but for people who aren't fine with that, they shouldn't use it.
I realize that any attempt to discuss this is inviting downvotes, but I just ask for a quick comment if you do choose to downvote. I try to be very open minded.
Separately, opt in implies informed consent. Most users have no clue what data Facebook is capturing. It's not informed.
The iPhone update doesn't even immediately forbid tracking, it just requests apps to ask for permission. That simple change pushed Facebook to buy newspaper, radio and TV ads to try to get people to reject the update. Think about it: they feel threatened by user awareness.
The dialog pops up and you give your consent for the FB app to track whatever it wants, because you're fine with that.
Other users similarly are allowed to make their own choice as to whether they accept that trade off.
I don't think this is an entirely fair argument unless it is exceedingly clear what you are opting in to. The fact that FB (and others) are so resistant to being more transparent about this is in itself informative.
Sadly there is some truth to that. In a better world it would be regarded as the absolute, bare minimum.
I applaud the fight in that it hopefully makes Facebook weaker but I'm not cheering for Apple having this power either. I'd rather wish for their greed to cause these two to destroy each other.
I still haven't heard anything about a privacy consent screen regarding the default Google search box.
Can't fix the whole world all at once, but Apple is not uncompromising in their privacy stance by any means.
Now if Apple exempted Google from Adblock and cross site cookies that would be a different story.
A Google search on an iPhone and a Google search on an android produces very different data gathered by Google.
Apple is positioning itself as The Privacy Company today, but they've benefited immensely from the attention economy over the last 15 years.
They would not have sold as many millions of iPhones, iPods (heck, even Macbooks) in the last decade, if Instagram & Facebook weren't there to suck people in to their platform (clearly, the same is true for Android). Now that the iDevices are a self-sustaining status symbol with mass adoption and institutionally-ingrained utility outside of social media, Apple no longer needs to trade user privacy to build their moat, and they can pretend that they've been on the user's side all along.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's motions here are very good. But the entire mobile computing industry was bootstrapped with addiction. Facebook and its ilk might have been the perpetrators, but they were not the only beneficiaries.
Google can’t provide privacy that users want as it would bankrupt them. Apple can. Other than that, they can both do the same hardware, software, apps, etc.
I’m surprised it took them this long to really start driving it home. I think they were either trying to figure out if monetarily they wanted to start selling data. Or the buying public finally started caring.
The truth is that all the huge advertising revenue is just a plus for the investors, the apps would have been created anyways, and then network effects take care of the content.
I really don’t see the logic in this.
It’s pretty obvious these devices were useful for many things - messaging and the web would have been enough to guarantee growth.
I think you have the causality the wrong way round.
People only use Facebook so much because the iPhone put it in their pocket rather than on their desk.
The burger restaurant clip in the audio...couldn’t they still target users just based on interests? And not actually linking those interests to a specific person?
And on the other hand, I don’t hear much from Google.
I can't get that article to load, so I'm hoping they address how she knows that 90% of her business comes from facebook, and how hyper targeted ads are more effective than just geo-located tags.
It seems like ads for her business would be good for users within 'x' number of miles/blocks/whatever of her business, and not necessarily based on their interests, correct?
I think they got it coming.
This is definitely a true statement. The vast majority of small businesses who advertise on FB will be hurt by this change. The best estimate to date is a 20-30% drop in marketing efficiency due to worse targeting capabilities. Some of these small businesses will inevitably go out of business due to this change (for better or worse).
I worked at a small hardware store as a kid and we got all our business from word of mouth. IDK what the best argument here is, so I suppose I'm just admitting my feelings with this comment.
I think the honest answer is, yes if facebook protects their profit margins then it will impact small business as they pay more to get the same results. OR Facebook could reduce their margins since Apple's change will reduce their product effectiveness.
Once we frame it that way it is clear what the battle is about. Facebook is fighting apple to protect their own profitability and is using a sympathetic actor (small business) as a shield.
I don't think I've ever seen a source for this. Could you post one, ideally one which is not subject to conflicts of interest (e.g. funded by the advertising industry)?
That is, Facebook is a behemoth in advertising because of its capabilities to predict which users will convert from an ad unit. By predicting conversion rate accurately, FB empower small businesses to get more conversions out of fewer ad impressions and spend.
FB's ability to predict conversion rate is driven by a ML algorithm that takes as inputs: all the user data it tracks via the Facebook Pixel, all the user data it collects through its own domains, and data sent via server API's from advertisers.
Apple's tracking change reduces the amount of available user data to its ML algo by a large percentage.
As a result, prediction power will decrease. And therefore, marketing efficiency.
The actual 20-30% estimate is just that, an estimate. But, directionally, there's no question efficiency will decrease.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26193544
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179162
In the long term, I think Facebook is the biggest loser in this scenario, not the small businesses.
And, I also agree that most businesses will be willing to pay less of a premium for FB ads after this change. But, even for the businesses that adapt their spend accordingly, their final marketing budget will be smaller, and therefore, their net income/profit from ads.
That's all they are doing. They aren't preventing companies from tracking users in this way. They are just requiring them to get permission.
Says a lot about Facebook's business model that this is a cause for "all-out war," and that they'd rather try to stop the feature than convince their users to enable it. I guess they know that at the end of they day if they can't do this behind their users' backs, they probably aren't going to be able to do it at all.
I dislike Apples closed ecosystem (anf google trying to do the same), but if it can weaken FB's grip on people, it might bring some benefit even to non apple customers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-hits-back-facebook-revo...
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/security-world/2019/01/apple-p...
I mean, it was always kinda obvious, but seeing them confirm it out right is interesting, to say the least.
E.g. if anti-vaxxers started pushing a campaign saying "doctors want to stab your arms with needles", I'd expect a similar pushback from the medical community about the perception-coloring of this phrasing (even if it's technically true). In both cases, it seems like the argument is more of "Yes people can opt in to that, but the opt-in process shouldn't bias you against opting in"
Whether that's a fair argument or not, I'll leave to society.
Is this better?
"This owners of this app are looking to gather as much information about you as possible so they can use it as leverage against you. They will sell that information to political agents who will use your demographics against you. There will be advertisers who know when you are having your period, when you are pregnant, and that you've searched for penis enhancing tools. While they probably won't share this information around, they will let advertisers buy adverts discretely targeting your race, gender, and sexual preferences."
Is that a better message?
I think Apple is being quite generous here myself. I'd have the dialog be bright red with a toxic logo on the yes button.
Good on Apple. I fear if it was any other company Facebook would be able to persuade them to change.
And I think most users will see no problem with this.
If I value the service enough, I'll pay for it. That Apple gets 30% is another discussion and as a user, not my problem.
If I don't value the service that much, I now get to be informed and can decide whether I value using it more than my privacy. Facebook's all out propaganda campaign shows which choice they think most users will make in this instance.
Now imagine they charge $1 monthly for their app subscription. Hell, even a couple of cents would be an improvement. Or even better: they charge a one-time payment to buy the app.
Now that so much news has spread about these privacy additions, Apple selling out will actively hurt this image they have spent a lot of time building. It’s going to have to be an extremely lucrative agreement between them and Facebook for it to be worth it.
> Apple’s most recent earnings report revealed that it earned $12.51B from Services in calendar Q3/fiscal Q4, though there is no breakdown on how much of this comes from ad revenue.
Notice the 'could's:
> Samik Chatterjee argued the company could leverage the millions of users who search its App Store and Safari browser daily to generate the stellar growth seen by Facebook and Google in recent years.
> he launch of Apple TV+, coupled with Apple Inc’s foray into digital services, could help the company increase its income from advertising by more than five fold to $11 billion annually
This article is literally just speculation. Actually, it's quoting someone's speculation.
> The report seems highly speculative…
And even the wildest estimates put it far short on the actual money maker, which is hardware sales. When push comes to shove, if they have to choose between ad and devices, they won’t hesitate long.
Apple also knows which App Store ads I saw given that their server sent them to me in the first place. The ads are (at least for now) limited to the App Store and don't carry over across the web or other Apple apps.
Thus I don't see the problem with Apple using the data they've already got to provide anonymized conversion metrics to app developers.
No it doesn’t.
It provides aggregate statistics on downloads, just like any analytics server.
No data on users is shared.
Ads do not always mean user tracking.
Google built a super successful ad business on search terms alone, long before they got into user tracking.
Do you have any evidence that Apple tracks users for their ad business - which only sells ads for apps when users search for them?
As requested, evidence of tracking in iPhones - https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2020/11/16/appl...
That isn’t evidence of Apple tracking anything.
IDFA is used by Facebook and ad-tech companies.
Apple are switching IDFA to be Opt-In rather than opt out.
That’s what Facebook is complaining about.
The mechanism for tracking users is already present. What more proof do you need?
Even if you manage to toggle 3rd parties out of your phone. You cannot toggle the Apple out of it.
Evidence that Apple uses it.
The mechanism relies on libraries which send user behavior from other app to Facebook. These are correlated by the ID.
The identifier is not the mechanism. The mechanism is Facebook’s library.
Apple has no such mechanism.
> You cannot toggle the Apple out of it
False.
There is a toggle for the entire feature.
Calling tracking a cardinal rule of ads is like calling HTML a cardinal rule of communication. Sure it might be ubiquitous now, but if HTML were to suddenly disappear I guarantee communication between humans won’t stop — it would adapt. Tracking isn’t a foundation, it is merely what has worked this past decade or so.
Fact of the matter is, advertising today / web marketing relies on user tracking. I'm yet to see anyone debunk this.
Let's call it what it is -- stalking.
It’s ‘disingenuous’ to claim that as some cardinal rule.
It’s not - it just happens to be the most popular business fad of the 2010s.
What works in business changes over time. That is a cardinal rule.
But in no way does it need it. We could easily go back to untargeted, reasonably effective ads that appeal to broad markets instead of extremely specific ones.
Pretty soon, this'll turn into: customer has to keep paying Apple because of vendor lock-in.
Ecosystem concerns aren’t as relevant today, since both Android and iOS have everything you’d want, but in the olden days of Blackberry, Microsoft, and many other mobile operating system vendors trying to compete, they were always seriously hampered by their lack of ecosystem.
Utterly baffled.
because it would create an obvious a compelling opportunity for someone to finally break the stranglehold of FB's monopoly.
I miss my friend and family connections, but most people in my community won't go near that ecosystem with a flaming 10' pole any longer, and many friends like me, despair that our loved ones' reaction to e.g. the Social Dilemma and ongoing revelation after revelation of sociopathic corporate amorality is "yes that is sad but I have choice" because "all my friends are only insta" or "my cottage business depends entirely on my pages" etc etc.
I cannot wait for them to go down in flames.
Bring it Apple.
Few things could flat out annihilate Facebook, but punching a large hole in their network is probably one of them.
So FB has Apple with some leverage over them saying accept this or else. FB is in a weak position because it would be hard to tell your users hey leave Apple because they won't let us take all your data without permission. I don't feel for them at all.
If there is some documentation you claim shows iAds being privileged, please post a link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd
Apple isn't a monopoly -- they're a walled garden.
I'm all for regulations that force Apple to open up their hardware so that people can install different software on it, or to disable the walled-garden mode of their software platform akin to how you can install lineageOS or freedroid on android devices but I don't think it's reasonable to mandate that Apple must allow Facebook to do something with their software simply because Apple does it with theirs.
FB's noise around this feels very out of character, even for something that's devolved into a personal conflict. They may be truly scared of the update.
This is definitely good for privacy in the short term, but long term will depend on if Apple decides to monetize this data themselves.
Or they could simply update the data-sharing default to "Yes" and 75%+ would never disable it.
> The don’t collect this data. How could they monetize it?
Your answer is essentially -
“in principle they could build tracking into all their software”
You seem to be suggesting that their plan is to fein interest in privacy to undermine all the tracking companies first, and then reverse their stance and become a super-intrusive tracking company.
That seems very far fetched and weirdly conspiracy like.
Also obviously not true, given that they have been lobbying for privacy legislation.
Even if Apple’s motives are somehow nefarious, Facebook is being scummy in the first place, so it’s a fair move for Apple to take advantage of that, IMO.
You nailed it. Facebook wants to confuse and distract. There's absolutely no reason why Apple's push for user permission on tracking would cause the Facebook app to become subscription-based. WTF?
So it's hard to come to a conclusion that Apple hates ads. It's easier to say that Apple dislikes advertiser networks, since their own attempt at a generic network (iAds) failed miserably. It's not even clear to me that blocking tracking is going to kill ads as a revenue stream, all it will do is make ads more expensive because they're slightly less targeted on iOS?
Also, Apple runs their own seemingly successful ad market within the App Store app — something I'm reminded of each time I search for an app and see a competitor's app I don't want at the top of my search results, filling my screen with the new design. So it's hard to say that Apple does this for the best user experience. Showing extra popups isn't great UX. And Apple likes free apps, it makes their phone and platform more valuable, so they can charge more for the hardware knowing folks can get great apps inexpensively or free.
While I'm in favour of Apple losing its complete monopoly over App Stores and apps that compete with its own, I actually am in favour of Apple enforcing these policies on apps from its own App Store and platform. And while I would say that third-party stores could have different stances on permissions, the idea that a third-party app store could prevent a popup asking to share a phone's identifier, for example, is frankly a security bypass. The same is true if apps want to communicate with other apps without the operating system knowing.
Personally, I'd love it if Apple went a step farther and used the network layer and code signing to identify which apps actively use which trackers and tracking networks the same way they currently identify apps that use the microphone and camera. It'd be fascinating to see an operating system feature that says 50% of my network traffic in Application X was telemetry being sent to Facebook, for example.
If you had broken this paragraph out into a separate post, it might get more and highly deserved attention.
It wouldn’t become unviable for Facebook because even with a smaller number of users consenting to tracking they would still have a gigantic ad market.
That's a very healthy attitude towards Apple's claims. They developed all these APIs that allow app makers to spy on their users, and then blame the app makers for spying.
For example, why does any app need to know which other apps I have installed, and how long I use them? This permission should very sparingly pass the review process, and only for apps in specific categories.
What are you referring to? As far as I know, one app can't query the list and usage time of other installed apps on iOS. This stackoverflow question[1] seems to confirm this. But please enlighten me if I'm misunderstanding what you're referring to.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51634436/how-to-get-a-li...
This should be done the same as with location and microphone access... ie. "ask the user". "Flashlight 2000 DX app wants to access list of apps installed - allow once, allow always, deny now, deny always". Facebook wants to track 50 different things? Well.. ask the user 50 different times and try to explain why you want access to their call history and calendar data (adding calendar entries could also be a write-only option, with optional unique ids to change/remove entries).... and give your UX team a headache. Also, "deny" should be the "bolded" default. Maybe even give the user a list of unchecked permission the app wants, with explanations why it needs them, and have the user check the ones they want to give to the app (default state is unchecked (deny)).
Also granularity is key... giving location access for bluetooth connections, giving "manage calls" access to stop playing music when you get a call, etc. is just stupid.
Apple needs to force them to be up front from the very beginning that their stupid game or screensaver or else is also a tracking app. And boot any app that uses your phone to do anything beyond what they told you they would do in the app store description.
My how things have changed
Nowadays, people are more aware about such things, so maybe you can start to assume the users are more comfortable about computing and the internet. So they should change their direction.
I'd agree with the sentiment if it was like Samsung making fun of removing a headphone jack, only to do the same thing less than a year later.
Vista popped up inscrutable boxes for all kinds of actions, with no explanation.
This is a small number of permissions, each explained clearly.
If Microsoft had done it this way, nobody would have laughed.
Yes.
Basically, i'd be happy if those "risky" permissions would be hidden in app management in settings, disabled by default, and enabled only by power users.
The problem now is, that due to fscked up permissions schemes, some apps are unable to work at all, even the stuff they work now, some due to play store issues (eg. termux because they want to run downloaded code), and some due to missing apis (eg vnc servers).
That a big No. List of apps uniquely identifies the device and the user. Is this api available??
I just want the app to ask me, and me to decide if the app really needs it or not.
They don't give you the ability to block them.
and of course, you can't find out what is going in and out of your phone over the network, and you definitely can't firewall it. ("content blockers" are nerfed)
The problem is all of these things you mention are also useful for things users want. Often they are useful for things users want inside their applications. Nobody wants a neutered OS.
It is not apple's way to advertise this capability is available, and give you granular control.
IOS does not allow this.
The premise of your post is incorrect, and you should issue a correction and an apology to the HN community for posting ignorant horseshit.
People want apps to be able to do things and those things can often allow tracking in addition to being useful to the user. There is pretty much one API Apple devised specifically for tracking users and this very issue is Apple attempting to shut down.
Clarification: Just to be clear, Apple isn’t shutting down the API entirely, they are changing it from opt-out to opt-in.
It helps collect data that can be used to help detect malicious users of services.
What are you talking about?
They didn’t develop any such APIs, and have been progressively closing up anything that can be exploited that was left over from Mac OS.
Also, they aren’t blaming anyone for using anything they have built.
They are just asking users to consent to apps using it.
Why is that a problem?
- There was never any API for a third party app on iOS to get the time spent in another app. The only workaround I saw to this was an app that asked you to screenshot your app usage screen, and it was able to process those screenshots in an automated way (can't find the link).
- There is an API to open URLs between apps, so that one app can link to another app. When developers realized that they could check whether or not a given URL was openable to check if an app is installed, they started abusing this API to check every app on the system. Apple cracked down on the API in iOS 9 and made it so that all apps declare which other apps they can check, and App Review decides if they have a legitimate use: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
Since I can't edit my original comment, I chose to reply to it instead of replying to everyone who corrected me. Yes, there's no API to directly query installed apps and usage on iOS. I think I got the wrong impression from years ago, when the function canOpenURL() could be abused to detect which apps were installed[0]. Thank you all for the corrections.
0. https://useyourloaf.com/blog/querying-url-schemes-with-canop...
I believe this dialog does control access to apple's advertiser-id (IDFA), so apple did implement some technical measures. Unfortunately that's not the only way for an app to track a user, so giving the impression that Apple enforces this denial would be misleading. People already blame Apple for apps lying on their privacy labels.
However, when phrased like this, it does not JUST represent the access to the IDFA, it is a direct request from the user to not track you in any OTHER way either. And yes, the app can ignore that, but then Apple is free to deny it access to the App Store.