So all the ads in newspapers and on television and in sports venues and public spaces and...don't work? Or did you just mean ads are less cost effective without tracking-based targeting?
sell the ads in newspapers? is this the 1950s? j/k
Seriously though, what newspaper(s) would you honestly be willing to spend ad dollars with (and for what products) thinking that this would be a good investment? Geritol? Now, if your suggestion is buying newspaper ads would then get ads in their digital versions as well, then maybe. However, seems to me that most viewers of news sites are from link aggregators more than just readers of a website. Not sure how that would affect ad placement.
Fair enough. But you do notice that newspapers are still the most popular way for CPG goods like P&G to advertise where they don’t have to target or track.
Eventually, that demographic will age out so to speak, and then what. What are the numbers of new younger subscribers? This is why newspapers are folding/selling.
TV and podcasts are moving towards surveillance based advertising too. Look at the rise of smart TV's, cable, and streaming services that require identification and location as well as the various ad supported podcast players.
Your are correct if you are using over the air TV or Kodi and if you use FOSS podcast players such as Antennapod or Podverse.
>TV and podcasts are moving towards surveillance based advertising too.
Everything is moving this way. It's only a natural desire for those spending money on advertsing to want to know if the money is being spent effectively, or if they'd be just as well off lighting cigars with $100 bills.
The lure of targeting, tracking (ad effectiveness, not people per se), etc is just too inticing for those non-techies that haven't pulled back the curtain to see that the all powerful wizard isn't wearing any clothes (to mix metaphors). Those of a certain age that depended on Nielsen ratings and what not buying TV/Radio ad time were always very interested in knowing how effective the ad buy really was. Then, the digital ads folks come along telling them they can hit exactly the demo they want to target and then show click through rates, etc. It's like a dream come true with a cherry on top under a rainbow with the leprechaun delivering a pot of gold riding on the unicorn's back. They all bit hard hook,line,and sinker.
“Privacy” has never been about the service you are using collecting data for recommendations and even advertising while you are using the service. People aren’t complaining that when you tell FB that you are a married man interested in women that they target advertising for your demographic. It’s about collecting data when you are not on the platform.
But Apple doesn’t make money by advertising based on the podcast you listen to. I doubt they make any real money on their new podcast subscription service. Apple doesn’t even hosts podcasts. They just index RSS feeds. The podcast directory API has been freely available for over a decade and is used by third party podcast players.
Unlike Spotify, you can subscribe to a podcast feed that isn’t in the directory.
Ads are much more valuable and higher click through vs impression if they’re personalized.
Small businesses are willing to give more money per ad campaign if they know they’ll get clickthru on a specific target market. These same small businesses don’t have the money to run long ad campaigns which would result in less clicks.
I have always been a bit skeptical of off-site data producing serious lift in VCG auction clearing prices for in-feed units, but I’m also pretty out of date.
Some people claim, without much proof, that ads without tracking are less effective. We don't care and would prefer to see their business model fail than to maintain the status quo. That is the point here.
Weren't there even studies showing, that context based advertising is on par with personalized (based on tracking your every move) advertising?
I strongly suspect that might be the case. I also believe that social networks could - in theory - create effective advertising possibilities without the need to target user properties.
Take my experience with Instagram. When I am looking at mostly typography related posts, it tends to work well if they show me paid ads for interesting fonts. But when they show these to me, when I am looking at gardening content, I tend to be irritated and ignore them.
I know - I am talking anecdata here - but maybe there could be a way to not target users, but target topics and hit the users that move through these topics (so to speak).
One problem, though, I see with this approach is when you want to create a longing in somebody who never before had the idea that he/she would like to have a cool new font (to stay with my example). Or the next "hot" stuff from some global brand (or what they believe that i should want to feel cool).
But as said - I can't find the studies I seem to remember right now on the effectiveness of context based advertising compared to personalized advertising. So I am not sure if this was just my imagination.
The vast majority of people love ad supported services. They prefer free/low cost to expensive and express this preference regularly. They don't think advertising is evil, and in fact many people voluntarily wear adverts on their own clothes.
Online advertising pays for a massive amount of stuff. If it dies, then the outcome is not "everything stays the same but somehow better". The outcome is that a lot of services we take for granted go away and either don't come back at all, or come back far worse because their market is now much smaller and only rich people pay for it.
To put this in perspective, when I worked at Google they had a prototype internal service that let you "buy" your way out of seeing ads by bidding against yourself in the auction. The idea was to allow people to pay for an ad-free internet, but without making users freeloaders on the services they used (that's ad blocking and exists already). I thought, what a great idea. I'll sign up. Result: to get rid of a just a fraction of all the ads I was seeing online (my guess, ~20% of ads I saw were served by Google) would have costed $200-$300 per month.
After seeing the scale at which advertisers were subsidizing my online experience, I lost interest, as did everyone else. Paying 4x as much as my entire normal internet bill just to see fewer ads, not even get ridding of all of them, just wasn't worth it.
The reality is that the public aren't demanding restrictions on online advertising. They don't care. They like free stuff and they've got nothing against advertisers. This is a war being waged for political and commercial reasons, dressed up as consumer protection, and if/when it actually starts to bite in visible ways, a whole lot of people are going to be mighty shocked at how upset the public will get.
The public would certainly got upset with the idea above. Fortunately that idea has nothing to do with reality - we don’t need to bid ransom to Google to make it stop tracking, same way we don’t have to bid against car thieves to get our cars back.
The most efficient way to solve climate change is to provide every user in the planet the exact amount of goods/services that solves a user's need at the exact time.
This eliminates all the redundant transportation, housing, waste (food, cloths, electronics, equipment)
And the only way to provide is that through tracking (both history and intent).
No, the most efficient way to solve climate change is for people to consume less crap; this reduces far more wasted resources. There is no need to give up your privacy and no need for corrupt middlemen to track you.
The last thing I want to do is to start a flame war, but I know a lot about this field and it’s been my observation that it’s both important and kind of opaque.
I would be happy to answer questions (within some fairly broad guidelines of proprietary information) in as much detail as anyone would like.
Everything from the technology to the organizational imperatives to the competitive landscape is actually quite complex and nuanced.
I have no ambition of informing folks’ moral judgements (I have my own), but on average it’s probably better if moral judgements are informed by detailed understanding.
Neither Facebook nor Google “sells user data”. Why would they? There is value in having sole access to the data. They sell access to you based on the data they collect.
In this case, I would say FB is more in the side of the angels than Google. People knowingly give FB information about them
Apple might actually be helping Facebook. It the industry doesn't regulate itself then the governments will at some point and that's going to be much worse.
The GDPR is governments (the EU) regulating an industry that has failed to regulate itself the last 20 years and most would argue that the GDPR is much stricter than it needs to be.
Nobody wants to build for iPhone or pay 30% to Apple. We build for it because that's where Americans choose to be, and if you want your software business to reach audiences, that's where you have to follow. It frankly sucks.
I don't like the fact that my code is up for review. I don't have the nanny state overseeing my web deploys.
I don't like the fact that the feedback is uneven and arbitrary.
I don't like being forced to give up my own choices for login and contact, essentially ceding my customers to Apple.
I don't like paying thirty percent for being forced to build for a platform I don't even want to be on but have to.
There should have been an open standard for native apps distributed over web. It should have been cross platform, like HTML, so we don't have to build twice or use stupid hacks to share code.
Apple builds hardware people like, but they're monsters.
Guess what? I as a consumer don’t want to enter my credit card all over the place or have to jump through hoops when I want to cancel a subscription. I want to be able to use “Hide My Email” so when you have a data breach or sell my email I can cancel it. I don’t want to use your lowest common denominator crappy web app. I want to just use an app I pay for and I don’t need to have a “relationship “ with you.
The whole “if you don’t like it don’t buy it” argument is pretty weak on a lot of the tech giants. Thank whoever failed to secure third-party cookies, it’s not great.
But Apple seems to be pretty squarely in the: “don’t buy it if you don’t like it” vertex.
I use Apple stuff because the cost/benefit is something I can live with.
But most of my friends and colleagues never touch the stuff: it’s desktop Linux connecting to server Linux. Usually Android phones but some people get Pine or old Nokias or whatever.
Is Apple running some Internet-wide cookie scam that I’m unaware of?
I am not clear which switch Apple can flip to put Facebook out of business. I assume Apple can delete Facebook from the App Store, but that would be just as consequential to Apple as to Facebook.
Also, it would seem self evident that Apple’s ability to influence Facebook comes from having a novel product, that people like to use compared to the alternatives.
> Also, it would seem self evident that Apple’s ability to influence Facebook comes from having a novel product, that people like to use compared to the alternatives.
Apple controls 50+% of American computing. At this point it isn't just a "novel product". They own the American internet interface and it takes a nation state level of effort to compete. Facebook can't even keep up.
Android is a fragmented 40% and relies on advertising. Google locks it down so hard with their Play Store Services stranglehold (no YouTube/Maps/Gmail if you disobey), that there's no room for real competition to emerge and make any money doing something unique.
None of this is healthy for the world. Both companies need a hard slap from the DOJ.
So, by a metric you yourself admit is flawed (and I assume it is flawed, I couldn't find any methodology from statcounter), the initial claims were off by 15%, which is a huge mistake and significantly weakens any 'monopoly' argument.
> OS market share is higher than that as some Mac users will use Chrome or Firefox, but no users of other platforms use Safari.
OS marketshare is actually lower than browser marketshare. Mac users using Chrome or Firefox have nothing to do with it, since the heuristic statcounter relies on, the User Agent, contains clear information about which OS is being used.
Wait, what? If you want to say that Apple controls 50% of mobile compute, then I might be willing to go along with that. But the blanket computing alone is laughable.
You've suddenly just ignored all of the data centers in the US that have very little Apple products seeing as Apple doesn't make a server product. Sure some niche data centers have popped up with racks full of Minis, but those are primarily for people making apps for those mobile devices mentioned earlier.
What the wha? Just because consumers are using Apple devices does not equate to being more compute devices than the devices creating the data to be consumed.
>look at the interface where communication and commerce are happening. Apple owns most of it. Google the rest.
These are not even close to being the same, and you moving the conversation. Or, you're using words in a manner that the rest of us are not following.
Again, maybe saying something like 50% of American consumer computing or something, but the blanket statement as written and unqualified is just wrong.
Apple and Google together can tank just about any mobile platform they wish though, see Parler. If you're off both app stores, you'll have a stupidly hard time growing even if the demand's there in principle.
Fully agree. If anything the choice that Apple is offering its users should be made law so it’s not just an “Apple thing”. If you want to track users you should have to ask them first, and if they say no that’s the end of it.
Why this isn’t about Apple, if they literally use their market power to destroy competition? They could have done tons of features to benefit users, but they implement those which damage competitors.
Which is false as Apple tracks you across apps without showing you this new prompt.
> That isn’t about Apple destroying anyone.
Could you elaborate on what are you implying here?
Are you saying Apple doesn’t damage anyone with this policy? It is obviously false.
Are you saying damaging competitors and building its own ads ecosystem is not Apple’s primary motivation here? It also seems false, as they build their own ad system, which tracks users.
> They could have done tons of features to benefit users, but they implement those which damage competitors.
Why does Facebook rely on unethical and shady business practices that harm users? Facebook is harming itself. And how is Facebook, in any meaningful way, a competitor to Apple? Apple's ad's business is PEANUTS.
> I'm no fan of Facebook, but Apple is literally showing the world that their platform can sink trillion dollar businesses with simple policy changes.
Sink? I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. Furthermore, if Facebook's business model is predicated on actively harming Apple's customers (and Facebook is harming them in a multitude of ways, including this tracking), this isn't Apple's fault at all, it's Facebooks.
> When you're "America's Computer" with a 51+% entrenchment, you shouldn't be able to govern commerce. You're a common carrier at that point.
Yah, no. Apple's marketshare, even in the US, as of January is estimated to be ~33% (iOS and macOS) combined.
"regulate" doesn't sound like the correct word in this instance. It's making the process more transparent - all Apple did was ensure users could choose what Facebook does with their data.
Apple's ad system is subject to the same rules. The link you are posting is outdated - since last year's iOS 14.5 the SKAdNetwork has been extended to provide the full API.
Money quote (which to be fair, was not too an FT journalist):
“Apple was unable to validate for us that Apple’s solutions are compliant with Apple’s policy,” he said. “Despite multiple requests and trying to get them to confirm that their products are compliant with their own solutions, we were unable to get there.”
Oh, you just wait! I am sure that Apple will eventually build its own ad empire. It is too sweet peece of pie to be left on the table. Also, Apple badly needs to justify it's market cap with some revenue.
To be fair Big Tobacco has had a lot more time to adjust to the health problems. They too spent a lot of time hiding their own reports of the dangers of smoking.
Also, the louder they whine the better off they are. A company that's really in trouble wouldn't whine so loudly for fear of losing trust of shareholders and customers.
There are plenty of legitimate concerns about the effect of social media on individuals and societies, but as both a smoker and a former FB employee equating them is a stretch.
And IMHO the group most vulnerable to any negative effects of social media are mostly on TikTok these days. Why is no one ever like “ByteDance is a drug cartel”?
I haven't used TikTok, but I wonder if it is flooded with filter-bubble fueled politics? That my primary concern with Facebook, Twitter and Youtube (and others), and I honestly think the world would be a better place if that could be turned off.
So during my time at FB I spent most of it on ML infra for ads and IG.
But I did spend 2016 in a content moderation group. And 2016 was both the inflection point of everyday people saying “FB is fucking with elections” and believe me or not, a totally clean election at least as concerns the outcome (I voted for Clinton FWIW).
Most people’s objections to the effect of social media on politics, and I used to do this for a living, seem to boil down to: “It’s the platform’s responsibility to put downward pressure on stuff I disagree with”.
I don’t mean to be flip, but one person’s “misinformation” is another person’s “free speech”.
That's fascinating. Matt Taibbi recently did an article - a takeaway from which was that Facebook is currently doing exactly that - burying content that is true but lends credence to crazy.
TikTok turns it up to 11 in my experience. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube all started off with a mechanism where you choose whose content to view through following/subscribing/friending. Over time, this was de-emphasized in favor of algorithmic recommendations, but it's still a strong signal. On the other hand, following on TikTok feels like an afterthought - it really aggressively recommends content based on the slightest interest. TikTok's algorithm is strikingly good at identifying what you like and keeping you there. YouTube also tries this, but it seems to be less effective at it and just degrade to showing you videos for the extremes of your political leaning rather than say, how effectively TikTok figured out what I find physically attractive.
TikTok highly optimizes to the individual, but from what I can tell there's little toxic political material, partially due to the threat of censorship or reduced reach. Filter bubbles are a thing, but nothing like the rabbit hole of YouTube, and are more benign imho. It's mostly short form content up to 3 minutes long.
It took a lot of effort get my Facebook/Instgram feed to be a mostly positive experience, but TikTok's algorithm did it immediately.
For me it brings back the fun of the early internet.
TikTok is pretty well targeted. You just choose what to engage with. I skip funny, animals, and politics. I watch woodworking, cooking, and self-reliance clips. My daughter watches world class medical experts as they explain cool things.
The "crack" element of it is you can feel productive consuming it, after all, you are kinda learning. My hack is I want to start taking notes during some TikToks and then not return until I perform the recipe, craft, life hack, etc.
> There are plenty of legitimate concerns about the effect of social media on individuals and societies, but as both a smoker and a former FB employee equating them is a stretch.
True. Tobacco breaks encourage us to connect with our fellow human beings, social media mostly makes us hate each other more ;P
I personally think that Ma Bell-era regulatory infrastructure isn’t equipped to deal with modern tech giants, but I don’t think that hyperbole is assertions shorn of an argument for a better idea add much to the discussion.
I'm not convinced. In fact I believe young people today are much more skeptical and competent about media use than the older generations. My anecdotal data points are mainly the fact that almost all conspiracy believers I know are >40 years.
Facebook through influence on audience has power to wreck political and humanitarian situation in any country in the world right now. TikTok potentially has that power 5-10 years from now. Whatever solution you find to Facebook will also mostly apply to TikTok.
>Why is no one ever like “ByteDance is a drug cartel”?
Because defending Facebook ( whether part of it or as a whole ), will be an extremely unpopular opinion on HN.
1. No one knows ByteDance, only TikTok.
2. No one on HN uses TikTok much. The demographics / target audience are child and young adult. Like SnapChat. So it is not on their Radar.
3. HN for the past 10+ years have been hating Facebook, it is borderline a cult. Trump era has turned this up to eleven.
4. They all think Facebook is the root cause of misinformation and spread. It is why the community or country is divided. It needs to be destroyed. Which is a strange take because I think twitter is far worse.
5. So Anything but Facebook, if TikTok will destroy Facebook, they will gladly side with TikTok, even though ByteDance the company is Chinese.
I agree with some of your points but the misinformation one is tricky. Absent Menlo Park getting hit by a meteor, trying to increase FB’s obligation around controlling misinformation is a net increase in like Zuck’s personal editorial power right?
Oh I edited the post to clarify the misinformation one wasn't my take. But the current mainstream / majority view on HN. Which has only seen some pushback in very recent months.
Having lived through an era in Hong Kong where only one voice and one view is allowed. I tend to have a contrarian take than most on HN.
> There are plenty of legitimate concerns about the effect of social media on individuals and societies, but as both a smoker and a former FB employee equating them is a stretch.
Your statement seems to imply that cigarettes are known to cause physical bodily harm and that Facebook does not.
This also sounds eerily like the statement Andrew Bosworth (FB exec) made:
"While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation."
But Facebook does not just impact the user, unlike sugar. Your actions can directly impact me. So it is more like cigarettes in that regard.
The privacy implications aside, all social media is going to have negative mental health outcomes in the long run as all platform's best case scenario is for users to view more and they do that by ignoring what may be good for it's users mental health.
If Mark Zuckerberg saw what Facebook is today and what fuels it back in the early days I'd suspect he'd be disgusted by it and the direction it's trying to drag people into (Metaverse). It's worse than big tobacco because people don't need to go out and buy or pay for social media in the traditional sense. They just need to pick up something they likely already own and pay with time. They don't know the motive is ad revenue, not their own well being. Social media are marketing sales companies. But they claim falsehoods such as entertainment or community. They don't highlight how those things get them paid on earnings calls. They talk about their ad revenue.
Social media should require a label every time a user opens the app. A warning, no different than cigarettes. Showcasing the negative mental state its users can have, showcasing the negative an echo chamber can create and showcasing how people can become so sick they make life altering choices due to consuming social media.
You make some good points but I’ll offer a little food for thought and a little first-hand anecdote.
I tend to agree that there’s research supporting the thesis that people’s inclination to post only the highlights of their lives on social media creates an unrealistic and frankly depressing comparison for the median viewer of it. Most of us didn’t just graduate from a prestigious university or get married or welcome a child into the world and it’s easy to be like: “well my life sucks”.
But the nicotine/sugar debate is kinda missing that we sell alcohol at 7/11 which is devastating in excess to my health, my loved one’s sanity, and fatal to the guy I run over driving. We tried prohibiting that and it ended very badly. Is too much Internet better or worse than too much whiskey? Debatable I guess, but, free country?
I’ve known Andrew Bozworth for years and we have disagreed plenty of times. But he’s in the top like 5% of people I know on integrity in all the ways we can sort of measure that as individuals: tells people the truth, keeps promises, admits mistakes, treats his wife and kid well, all that. And whether you agree with his life’s work or not: he’s not in it for the money, I don’t know his finances but he joined early, I’m pretty sure he could buy like a pro sports team if he wanted. He works hard because he wants to achieve his goal. I’m not sure I agree with his goal, but he isn’t faking it.
I’m pretty sure that all my SV bridges were burned a long time ago. Antonio was very kind to me in the book but “god of the drunken brogrammers” doesn’t have the same ring to it that it did when Chaos Monkeys got all those awards.
The only character reference I can hope for, or frankly would want, is that I’m pretty good at my job in spite of my personal issues.
I wasn’t trying to spin up a big contentious thread, I was trying to inject some first hand knowledge of how this stuff works so that people can make informed judgements about it.
If having worked at FB half a decade ago and thinking Boz is a pretty stand up guy in person makes me a pariah?
Then I guess it’s a beautiful day for an auto de fay.
> But the nicotine/sugar debate is kinda missing that we sell alcohol at 7/11 which is devastating in excess to my health, my loved one’s sanity, and fatal to the guy I run over driving.
In many respects I agree here. But, like sugar and nicotine: alcohol is an active choice that one must pay for in a much different way - the barrier to entry is not the same. We can also draw parallels that advertising by the liquor company is targeting me to buy it. But liquor companies aren't marketing companies playing a slight of hand game. They sell a product, not the ad. Is alcohol detrimental to society in certain respects? Yes. The argument here, however, seems to be: that it's OK to add another unhealthy aspect to our lives. But it's much harder for a 12 year old to buy alcohol. It's not hard for that same 12 year old to misunderstand the motives of Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. Alcoholism and Social Media share health negativities. But they are not the same in ease with which to consume.
Andrew Bosworth (not Bozworth) knows very well the negative implications of the product he works on, yet continues to stand behind it even if "...he could buy like a pro sports team...". Just because he's rich doesn't mean his intentions serve anyone other than himself. He penned "The Ugly" at Facebook and knows the platform can have dire implications. I didn't claim he was faking it, I was stating that your response seemed to take a cue from his analogy. Irrespective of that I also don't think the analogy is a good representation of the state of social media.
I think my original post started out by saying there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about social media.
I mean, I quit with a lot of unvested stock because it wasn’t obvious to me that I was making people net happier by my work, which is a way that I want to feel about my work.
But I think that the number of people on this site who organize their careers around pure altruism is small enough that I’ll probably live through those people throwing rocks because I’m arguing that this subject is nuanced and complicated.
I think I said that Boz and I have disagreed plenty over the years. But if he’s going to get burned at the stake in a public forum because he’s had to make very, very difficult decisions and didn’t always make the right ones, we’ll tie me to the same post because I’ve badly fucked up on much simpler decisions.
> If Mark Zuckerberg saw what Facebook is today and what fuels it back in the early days I'd suspect he'd be disgusted by it and the direction it's trying to drag people into (Metaverse).
I suspect Zuckerberg's morals didn't change much. What makes you think they did?
> Why is no one ever like “ByteDance is a drug cartel”?
For the same reason that anti-tobacco advocates focus on Phillip Morris and not pipe smokers- its the more well known incarnation of the product. And, frankly, I don't think a lot of people realize that TikTok is a social network. I think a lot of people see a few videos out of context and think it's like YouTube (or at least the older, less big production of Youtube from back in the day)
> Why is no one ever like “ByteDance is a drug cartel”?
"As a genxer with an addictive streak, TikTok is undoubtedly as addictive as crack."[1] "Tiktok is also addictive in a way that no competing app has managed to capture."[2] "Tiktok is absolutely more addictive than Facebook."[3] "I like to think of TikTok as the crack cocaine of addictive social media."[4]
The article wasn't about ByteDance's revenue. And ByteDance didn't try to organize public opinion against informed consent to my knowledge. Facebook campaigned for attention and got it.
They said something about Facebook in response to an article about Facebook. You replied with whataboutism. I showed people criticize ByteDance when relevant. Even call them crack sellers.
So if Facebook disappeared tomorrow do you think the same people would say, “oh well, I might as well get my medical information from the New England Journal of Medicine”?
When I’m referring ti “conservatives” only reading right wing media that agrees with the craziness, I’m not referring to “Romney/Bush conservatives”, I’m almost one myself. I am referring to populist/religious right conservatives.
Before someone posts a “whataboutism”, I don’t know what happens on the extreme nonsensical left. I mostly read tech news, WSJ and “The Hill”.
This isn’t meant to beat up on conservatives. But let’s see what’s happen in 2020.
Fox News was the go to place for conservatives. Then they fairly called election results and their news articles called the accusations of the election being stolen “unfounded” and then people started leaving Fox News for News Max.
RedState purged all of their never Trump journalists who clearly had their conservative bona fides because they were losing readers. Anytime that RedState does still occasionally admit the election wasn’t stolen, people threaten to cancel their subscriptions.
Trump of course is the poster boy for the extremists. But when he started touting the benefits of the Covid vaccine and boosters, he is boo’d and cancelled by the extreme right and they say he is kissing up to the establishment.
The Wall Street Journal has always been center right. But because it didn’t tote the “populist agenda” or the “election was stolen”, the conservatives are abandoning it too.
I wasn't approaching this from a political side at all. Frankly I don't have the domain knowledge to understand what you're trying to say.
The issue I'm referring to is that any advertising-supported platform has an incentive to generate "engagement" and divisive, outrageous content will generate a lot more of it, regardless of whether it's misleading or even completely false.
Politics-wise, the landscape would be much better if all constituents were given a fair, unbiased view of the media "market" not tailored to each individual to generate the maximum level of outrage just to further enrich some assholes. People can still decide which sources to read & trust but at least it's a conscious choice and they are free to look elsewhere, even if only to see what "the other side" reads.
It's not like Apple gets the cash instead, think this is good whichever you dislike more.
And I don't think they report revenue broken down like that, just usage, but you could check: https://investor.fb.com (I glanced at it, seems to be just as far as 'family of apps' and 'reality labs', which I assume is whatever 'metaverse' nonsense R&D).
If there's any merit to these figures, this is pretty crazy. I'm tempted to side with apple b/c I generally think they're at least less bad than FB and I value any platform taking steps to further privacy.
But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary, even if I think it's for the better in this instance.
This is the crucial point I think. Apple claims its on the side of privacy when it suits them. When it doesn't they don't care. In fact as the only big tech company allowed in China, you could argue they have a much worse effect on privacy overall for humanity than any other tech company.
It's all bullshit, and marketing. Apple is doing this to grow apple ads. That's it.
China has very strong privacy laws, though. In fact, Grindr recently stopped operating there because their business model was made very difficult by the new PIPL law.
One could be reductive and say that the Chinese Government has given themselves a monopoly on privacy invasion. Is that strictly worse than privacy invasion as a capitalist business model? I think the answer to that is highly subjective and highly culturally dependent.
> In fact as the only big tech company allowed in China, you could argue they have a much worse effect on privacy overall for humanity than any other tech company.
I would argue that it would be far worse for humanity if they decided that they did not have to follow local laws. Regardless of what you might think of our laws here, I do not want a foreign company feeling entitled to ignore them and impose their American views. They do it far too often as it is already.
If you want Apple to provide better privacy, change your laws and make sure they are followed.
In the meantime, until Apple is found to have violated local data protection laws, the whole “but China” argument is a red herring.
All companies are sociopaths that are only after the dollar. If Apple does something "good", it is basically benefitting them in some way, if it stops doing so they will change. Name me one company which sacrificed profitability for ethics.
Which part of that require tracking? You search for Facebook, they show you a TikTok ad as the first result (granted, quite annoying more often than not). Same business model as DuckDuckGo.
Their $5 billion / year ad business in the App Store, News and Stocks. The one where they track you by default in many Apple apps, build a cross-app ad profile based on your behavior, demographic information you are forced to enter to even reate an account, geographic location, and so on. And then they allow ads to be targeted against you using fairly high granularity user segments (minimum 5k users).
Want to opt out of this? It's a OS-level setting in an obscure place, rather than what Apple requires from 3p apps.
Now, Apple isn't uniquely bad in the level of tracking they do. They're just the same as all of these companies are. The place where they are unique is the incredibly brazen self-dealing, using their control of iOS to boost their own tracking ad business over the competitors.
Citation? I'm not saying your wrong, but I haven't heard anyone make this claim before.
> rather than what Apple requires from 3p apps
For the sake of argument, even if we assume your prior claim is correct, this is still incorrect. Apple does not require third party apps to notify users or provide an opt-out mechanism from tracking user activity across the apps of a singular developer.
I already linked to Apple's own privacy policy on ads where they describe exactly this. If that's not a sufficient source, there's nothing better I could do. To quote:
> We create segments, which are groups of people who share similar characteristics, and use these groups for delivering targeted ads.
> We may use information such as the following to assign you to segments:
> ... The music, movies, books, TV shows, and apps you download ...
> ... The topics and categories of the stories you read and the publications you follow, subscribe to, or enable notifications from ...
> ... Your name, address, age, gender, ...
> ... your App Store searches and browsing activity ...
> ... information stored on your device, such as the apps you frequently open ...
There is absolutely no suggestion there that these segments would be per-app. In fact, they cannot be per-app given some of the data they say they're using is only collected from places with no ads. That is not an exhaustive list by the way, but just representative examples provided by Apple. The only data they explicitly promise not to use for ads targeting is:
> No Apple Pay transactions or Health app data is accessible to Apple’s advertising platform
There's a separate setting for its own advertising network that asks the user if they want their activity in apps to be used to target ads they see. Just like for the case of 3rd party apps like FB, it can be turned off.
What rules of the game? Apple has no obligation to make Facebook a profitable company. If anything, the lesson here is to not tightly couple core parts of your business model to a third party.
> the fact that a company can do this to another company
I don't necessarily believe Apple are being deliberately adversarial here. Perhaps I'm being overly naive, but to me Facebook's woes are a side-effect, not the primary aim. Apple's change is to improve privacy for their paying customers, and if Facebook (or anyone else) relies on invading that privacy to make money ... tough. The window has closed. Time to figure out an alternative.
> But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary, even if I think it's for the better in this instance.
As a general principle I agree, but this is more a reason to encourage many small businesses over a small number of trillion dollar businesses (other reasons exist for the exact opposite).
But in this specific case, not only do I agree with you that it’s for the better, but I also can’t see how Apple is even going further than just requiring apps on its platform to adhere to GDPR.
> a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch
I briefly started a service. It was an automated tool to track how your tweets affected followers and traffic to one or more sites. It was neat.
Then Twitter changed the auth API. A month later, the throttles changed. Then something else changed in the JSON objects the API returned.
We decided to give up when Twitter announced their own analytics tool, after about two months or part-time work.
So yes, companies can and do that routinely. Sometimes, as it seems to be the case here, they are just acting in their (and their customers) best interest and completely ignoring the effects on other companies.
Apple is asking users if they want any specific app to be able to track them. Users can still say it’s ok to track me, Apple just gives me the option instead of being on by default. Apparently a lot of people are saying don’t track me? And that’s important, I should be given the choice in regards to privacy.
Not saying Apple is a saint, however it’s not that Apple changed the rules they provide options that weren’t available before (and imho should have been available already for years).
And the fact that this makes their own (mostly losing) app store search ads product lots of money is just a total coincidence.
Like, I could accept these changes if they applied to Apple too, but they don't, so the privacy stuff is a smokescreen for moves designed to keep their services revenue growing, and their stock price heading up and to the right.
I don't think it is scary. I think it is evidence that Facebook's revenue is built on ground they don't control. Google at least took step to have some control by creating Android. Given Facebook's bottom line, they could have done something similar.
As could Microsoft. None of the other players wanted to risk as much as Apple by investing in hardware and in person services. Really investing in it, for 10+ years. They certainly had/have the cash.
I suspect one motivation for this “Metaverse” thing is to create a platform that they control. Where they can track people as much as they want and show as many ads as they want.
> But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch
In this instance, the flick of the switch added a prompt asking users whether they want to opt in/consent to Facebook tracking their activities on other apps.
If Facebook is truly taking that much of a hit from that, it tells you how many users opted out. If their advertising model only succeeds by tracking users without their explicit consent, then their model is a failure.
> But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary, even if I think it's for the better in this instance.
They did not flick the switch, the users did. They merely pointed out the existence of the switch.
> But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary
You should read about what Ford Motor Company did to the horse and buggy industry. Or what email (arguably Hotmail) did to the postal and phone companies. Or what Boeing did to the transoceanic shipping companies.
> But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary, even if I think it's for the better in this instance.
You've got it back to front. If one company is $10b dependent upon another company not having the option to disable privacy invasion, then that company has chosen to build their castle in a swamp. It deserves to sink by $10b.
It tells quite a lot about Facebook's business model when you realize it's threatened this much by user consent. Apple has simply stated asking for consent for something that didn't require it before. It's merely people's choice to not be tracked.
Facebook built their empire on browsers being super super permissive about tracking. Critically, this tracking was (a) something most users weren't aware was happening and (b) something that was very very possible to curtail, because it wasn't something Facebook controlled.
People started noticing, and they didn't like it. Browser makers and platform makers moved to make these unhappy people happier. Facebook got caught out, because their whole business is built on this invasive tracking.
I am 100% untroubled by the way this is playing out. It's not a general case problem. It's very specific to Facebook's dependence on an accidental aspect of the web that, when explained, most people are horrified by -- and that was fairly easy to rework.
Can someone explain why the ad business isn't happy with SKAdNetwork, an anonymized replacement for IDFA tracking?
I'm just trying to understand, when marketing people come to me (as a mobile dev) and say "we need to enable ATT popup, we need the IDFA badly" what to tell them in response. The ATT popup is spooky to many users, I just can't quite understand whether e.g. my app really needs it or is it the advertisers trying to trick publishers to enable IDFA even though the latter don't benefit from it?
So my hypothesis that my app doesn't need the IDFA is correct, and when e.g. Facebook SDK docs push hard for enabling the IDFA, I should just ignore it? Or would it backfire on me somehow?
Who would want to buy a Facebook phone and with what operating system? I think “Social OS” could have been a good idea, but the actual Facebook App sucks.
Allowing banking on a rooted phone is an impossible operation as far as the bank is concerned.
How can they be sure the user with the rooted phone is Very Good At Security and rooted their phone on purpose instead of someone who got their phone hacked and has spyware listening to their banking logins?
The safe bet for banks is to deny all banking on rooted phones, that way they don't need to argue about lost money, they can just go "phone rooted, not our problem, we did our best to prevent it".
How can banks be sure that computer, the browser, the os people use is very good at security?
It should scream the people that phone is rooted. But, denying services is inimical.
Its not just banking app I have started to see a lot of app behaving differently when phone is rooted. Rooting generally means people can mitm app, which app developer obviously doesn't like. Its more about control than security in my opinion.
You might be surprised people are so naive. If you just do following thing I would say it would be so easy for facebook to capture market.
Release a phone with:
- 0 Bloatware,
- High Ram/ CPU/ functions
- 100% privacy and no ads (initial days to allure consumers)
- Cheap price
People will purchase them and after 3-4 year add tracking slowly in name of feedback etc. There will be some loss but for long term I think facebook should do it, or it will be wiped off from market.
Make it so that it would always have the latest Facebook features and sell it at/below cost. Market it heavily and you would see a lot of people buy it because it is the cheapest available phone.
I'd love to now see Google follow suit for Android. They have air-cover now that Apple has done it.
And, if they don't, I hope Apple beats them up on how this is a unique feature of iPhone re: protecting your privacy - the value of which was just quantifiably proven by how much it impacted Facebook to block it.
Except Google isn't like Apple, their business model depends on harvesting Android users, see yesterday's thread about force activation of movement tracking.
We shouldn't be proud of that. The fact that the market is a duopoly, with the 50+% option being an expensive, locked down, "luxury brand" that gets taxed and controlled like a dictatorship is not good. Spying or straight jacket protection racket. Gross.
The market should have way more devices, OSes, and shouldn't rely on advertising.
The DOJ needs to break up both Apple and Google so we have fairer competition and better options for consumers and small businesses.
I really hope Framework, Pinephone, Fairphone, DuckDuckGo, Mozilla, et al. can find cracks in the giants and grow. But it's really hard when they have so much unassailable power.
> I'd love to now see Google follow suit for Android
You hope that google, an advertising company, will follow apple, a hardware/service company, to block trackers and diminishes the effectiveness of ads?
Even if, by any chance, google made a move against tracking, I only believe in google reducing the effectiveness of their adversaries (like removing third party cookies) not themselves.
The thing is - Google DOESN'T track you on Android unless you opt-in already. They're pretty sneaky about getting people to opt-in. But they could do this, and it wouldn't even hurt them.
But maybe it would bring regulation? Maybe it's coming? One can hope...
You cannot disable the advertising ID. You can _reset_ it, and what that reset does is start collecting personal tracking information under another id. Now unless you remember to reset this id every day, you are being tracked.
LMGTFY: As part of Google Play services update in late 2021, the advertising ID will be removed when a user opts out of personalization using advertising ID in Android Settings. Any attempts to access the identifier will receive a string of zeros instead of the identifier.
I've commented on this earlier as well (and so have a lot of HN users) . The problem isn't ads (at least for me). It's the pervasive surveillance and tracking that FB et al use. Good riddance if another player changes the rules.
Ads are a problem as well, just not quite as bad as tracking. They are still useable as an attack vector, an incentive for websites to get less and less accessible, and just a general nuisance. When most news websites are more ads than content, there is a systemic problem.
Disagree, they've never said it's gone for good, just postponed, if you have a link which contradicts this I'd be pleased to read it.
> Apple said its decision to delay was "based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others... we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features."
Google Estimated To Be Paying $15 Billion To Remain Default Search Engine On Safari
The 10B estimate from the article is lower than a quick estimate from just looking at the quarterly and the drop in revenue growth. Just looking at that the cost is closer to 20B.
If such simple changes have that big of an effect on you, you're in the wrong. I'd like Meta to spin off WhatsApp and Instagram, then shut down for good.
Ignoring the ethics of the adverting for now and looking at the advertisers using Facebook, particularly the many small business that use the platform. This $10B hit in revenue is directly down to a reduction in ad spend, which directly hits revenues.
Assuming an estimated ROAS of about 6-10x then this equates to advertisers seeing a $60B to $100B reduction in sales via Facebook. Many of these advertises will not be moving this budget elsewhere, they will just be seeing reduced sales.
So, I'm all for criticism of online advertising ethics, particularly targeted at Facebook. But please remember they are an important part of the larger online economy which supports business that employ people. Please remember the people at the bottom of the chain here who have (and will continue to) seen a material impact on their business, income or employment due to these (and the inevitable further) changes.
Regardless of whether it puts people or jobs at risk, I don't believe society should be paying this advertising tax (in the form of time wasted being interrupted by ads, consuming garbage misleading content that's only there to generate an ad impression such as chumboxes/Taboola/Outbrain, the privacy violations, etc) just so that a relative minority can have a job.
Otherwise, you could also argue that illegal things such as violence or theft also enable people to have "jobs" in countries where law enforcement doesn't or can't crack down on it.
People are so quick to dismiss advertisements as "always bad", but they are part of a legitimate ecosystem that IS BENEFICIAL TO YOU.
Sales people, recruiters, advertisements, marketing departments - they all help me understand what is being sold so I can buy things that I GENUINELY want or need
It is true that there are garbage advertisements out there, and they should be pruned. But if YOU write really awesome code at work and you want people to use it, ask yourself, how do other people know they should use it?
You tell them. You talk, you email, you set up Confluence pages with documentation. All of this is a part of the advertising ecosystem - and it helps the creator AND the consumer
This statement is just a perfect illustration of how manipulation has been normalized in our everyday lives. Your attention constantly being undermined for the benefit of perpetual awareness of consumer goods is just how things should be apparently. I guess if you're in the business of writing "really awesome code" to force people's attention into spending money you have to believe in advertising as a civil right or something but society as a whole doesn't have to agree with you.
I personally believe the vast majority of advertisements are nothing more than mental pollution. While there is a place and time for promotion, I feel like there should be spaces specifically designed for advertisements. I have no problem whatsoever with businesses trying to get my attention when I specifically look for some relevant service. I’m not talking about peppering my search results with interstitial content, but rather, going to a website designed to find and purchase products or to find services/contractors for hire.
No, lots of people absolutely go to Google to get ads. How many people do you think are looking for Wikipedia when they search for something like "flowers" and it's February 14th?
This idea people seem to have here that nobody likes or ever needs/uses ads is just plain wrong. These businesses aren't the size they are because ads are useless noise.
Yes! Getting rid of the need to learn special syntaxes and awkward commands is a big part of why people use search so much. Again, I really cannot stress this enough. Nobody outside of the HN bubble thinks the way this works is a problem.
Lots of ads are for things that aren't appropriate for Shopping, e.g. most service businesses. So that wouldn't work. Universal search is a ship that sailed long ago my friend. People find it useful and Google has tons of metrics to back it up. It's not going away. Mixed mode search is just so much easier to use.
Society as a whole is employed by either the government, or companies that use advertising to generate cash and pay salaries; not sure which other system you are advocating.
Before advertising was as widespread and exploited as it is today, people build businesses around service, quality, worth of mouth and recommendations. That resulted in some truly great things, and it seems that with advertising we've lost a lot of that. Ultimately it's probably to do with people being cheap and advertisements just exploit that.
At least for me personally, it has come to the point where I don't believe advertisements anymore.
The reason we've lost that, fundamentally, seems to be the outsourcing and centralization of manufacturing.
A brand used to mean something.
Now, it's a sticker covering the "Made in X" label, to arbitrage the difference between customer goodwill and actual manufacturing costs.
It's pervasive throughout the grocery store and department stores, but to me McDonald's is the poster child. Ostensibly you're getting a "McDonald's meal", but what that fundamentally means is you're getting minimal-cost food, manufactured as centrally as possible, with a bare minimum of prep done in the store.
Drop shipping and popup social media brands are the ultimate realization of this. If a brand means nothing, why shouldn't I just fabricate one, leverage the same supply chain, and compete on advertising alone?
Quite the opposite for me. As a child I grew up in a "small" town of 30-40.000 I think, I would go to the store to see what was new including computers, I would swing by the local cinema to see what was coming. I don't recall advertising was in paid newspapers either. I would know about books from the library. It was far less advertisement driven and all about reputation and recommendations from experts, professionals and store owners.
In the 80s when I grew up. The library had two books on AppleSoft Basic. I learned the intricacies of the //e from InCider and buying books and software based on sending in a card in the back of the magazine where you could circle the products you were interested in.
The store owners were far from “experts”. They were either minimum wage workers at Sears who were in school or sales people selling to businesses.
Seeing an ad for a product or service makes me less likely to buy/use it. Luckily for advertisers I block as much advertising as I can so I may still accidentally become their customer.
I don't think any of those roles you mention help me understand what is being sold. It's true they're bringing it to my attention but they'll also be lying about it to the maximum extent permitted by local laws.
Lots of software I use on a daily basis has no marketing team and became dominant on its merits alone. I would rather all software competed on its merits.
As for you main point about advertising helping me find products I genuinely want/need, this couldn't be further from the truth in my experience. Recently I wanted a new laptop, and one of my criteria was that said laptop should not have pre-installed nonsense like mcafee/Norton(I mean I would be wiping the drive and installing Linux anyway but this is on principle). Anyway it turns out that all large laptop companies install some kind bloatware and also advertise aggressively, so it's quite difficult to search for a laptop without bloatware, since all the ads/seo are for laptops by companies with large advertising budgets and therefore have bloatware. More generally if I'm looking for a product I want there are generally multiple competing providers/manufacturers of said product, and I therefore must figure out which is better, and often there is a clear winner. However the other sides advertising team are incentivized to muddy the waters in this situation making it less obvious which products are best.
Also can you please not yell random words it's actually kind of jarring to read.
"has no marketing team" is different than "has no marketing".
the stars on github are part of marketing.
good docs are part of marketing.
that tweet from a 3rd party is marketing.
if a project isn't exposed anywhere and has no website (i.e. is completely private), then yes, it has no marketing. everything else has degrees of marketing baked in.
Of course pretty much all communication is advertising in some way, but the topic here is the corporate kind with teams of people trying to optimize click through rates and the like. I don't think they are really comparable and I don't think its particularly difficult to tell the difference in most cases.
Do they? SEO spam sites, review spam on Amazon and the like, review kickback schemes, buying off of "influencers" on Youtube/Instagram/etc: these all add noise when I'm trying to understand what is being sold. In fact, many companies benefit (or think they benefit) from keeping me in the dark about what is being sold and many marketing departments make a living helping them keep me in the dark.
While not all advertising is bad, most of it is. Like the ratio is more 95% bad - 5% good, not 50-50.
I might be on board if this infrastructure was mostly used by local businesses. However that has not been my experience. Most advertisers are National brands and politicians. So we have this tool which could maybe used by local businesses but more often is used by National brands to push consumerism.
I would also like to flip the perspective a bit. It’s more important to allow people to have a private and consensual relationship with the internet than it is for small businesses to advertise their services.
If useful ads designed to genuinely inform consumers were the norm it'd be one thing, but I don't think that's the case. The norm is deception and manipulation.
The majority of advertising boils down to this fundamental assertion: your life isn't as good as it could be and the solution is to buy <product>. It's plainly manipulative, and the effect this mindset has on society is hard to understate. It fosters feelings of inadequacy and stokes the fire of consumerism that's destroying the environment.
In practice there is a direct correlation between adspend and sucky products and I don't use ads to find interesting things. I use tech tubers and reviewers for that.
> they all help me understand what is being sold so I can buy things that I GENUINELY want or need
Advertising literally undermines the understanding of what’s on offer, by trying to manipulate people into buying whatever was paid to be advertised, regardless of needs and wants.
This isn't something Apple "did" to Facebook. Apple let people opt out of tracking. People chose privacy. Facebook's business model is not compatible with privacy.
> Assuming an estimated ROAS of about 6-10x then this equates to advertisers seeing a $60B to $100B reduction in sales via Facebook.
That's a pretty big assumption. Do we have any data that backs that up?
It's just as easy to assume that there will be very little impact, because most people ignore Facebook ads, and that this is actually saving small businesses money.
> They must be making a return on their investment, otherwise why would they do it?
Because of Facebook's advertising that says they should.
Or independent contractors who will helpfully create an ad campaign that will "earn 6x their investment".
There's plenty of stories out there of folks who actually put in the effort to measure the income generated by FB and Google ads, and they aren't flattering.
Because everyone else is doing it and they feel like they need to do it. Also, statistics manipulation by said ad agencies. They do anything for conversion "attribution" metrics. Saw an ad 6 months ago and now you buy the product? That's tracked as a conversion by the ad company, telling the business how great their ads are doing. I'm convinced that a vast amount of sales attributed to online ads are sales that would have been made anyway.
A ROAS of 6-10 is apparently the average from what I have read, although I don't quite believe this.
Even if its actually closer to a ROAS of 2-3 (which is not unreasonable, 30-50% of sale price paying for advertising), that would still be $20B-$30B in reduced sales.
Ad spending just shifts to other channels or other forms of marketing / sales. It doesn't necessarily mean that the sales are going down. eCommerce is on a tear of growth worldwide.
Revenue for businesses comes from people. $100B in sales is not necessarily a good thing. I think there is a somewhat reasonable argument for a huge amount of advertising being harmful to consumers given the vast power imbalances and deep psychological weaknesses inherent to the human mind. How much stuff is purchased not because of a real need but because of a need that has been implanted via advertising?
It is not only better for people but also for the environment.
In my past life, I bought a lot of gizmos thanks to random ads. Most of those gadgets end being used once or twice, and then go in donation pile or trash.
People can invest extra cash, retire early, donate. And I think those jobs that are lost due to less consumption will pave a way towards more meaningful work eventually.
On the other hand, consumers haven’t stopped spending. So that 60-100B that consumers might have spent on Facebook advertised businesses will probably end up elsewhere, like their local economy (or Amazon…probably Amazon)
So I would argue it’s just a shift. Similar to what has happened with the pandemic and restaurants. Consumer restaurant spend didn’t disappear, it got reallocated to electronics, vehicles, etc.
Please remember that any resistance to the loss of your privacy might lose people money. Let's not also forget to use basic manipulation and reference poor little small businesses in our example to make people sympathetic.
I guess if unethical behavior is used persistently enough, it'll be normalized and we can start talking about how important it is to keep doing it (and oh yeah the little guy, think about the little guy--especially over any general societal goals)
> Let's not also forget to use basic manipulation and reference poor little small businesses in our example to make people sympathetic.
While I appreciate that these tactics are used by large business (including Facebook) to manipulate people. As the author of the comment you are replying to I'm speaking from experience as a small business owner. We have seen this impact directly and I can attest to it being true. So, yes it does impact small businesses and yes I am asking for people to sympathetic to them and their employees.
I think you're under-appreciating how unsympathetic and narcissistic this argument is. If you're suggesting that the original response didn't take into account that it would literally be you who would be losing money, please rest assured everyone made that assumption.
Being the smaller agent of a parasitical industry doesn't make you or your bid to continue the status quo sympathetic.
I'm not asking for the status quo to continue and didn't intend my comment to imply that. I purposely started my original comment suggesting I was ignoring the ethics in order to concentrating on the wider economic impact of changes such as that implemented by Apple. The other comment threads on this post are doing a good job of debating the ethics, I'm just trying to ensure people have in mind the wider impact when they debate these changes.
Personally I think the privacy invasive advertising is long overdue heavy regulation and I look forward to it both as a person and particularly as a parent. I fully support Apples change and hope the rest of the industry follow.
We have always tried to minimise our usage of privacy invasive advertising (we actually barely use Facebook narrow targeting tools and have avoided targeted remarking as I personally hate being chased around the internet by ads for something I have looked at), and will continue to do so.
Do you know what happens when small businesses go out of business? Large too-big-to-fail conglomerates step in with their cookie-cutter milquetoast experiences, paying workers minimum wage and centralizing wealth away from the communities in which they operate. And they most certainly deploy surveillance technologies to better herd their customer base.
Believe it or not, you can simultaneously care about commercial surveillance ("advertising") and the plight of small businesses despite those small businesses patronizing the surveillance economy. If you still can't bring yourself to care about two conflicting things, then ignore the last paragraph in OP's original comment and read the first two as a narrative indicating a temporary economic trend for Faceboot, rather than prematurely celebrating the surveillance industry's demise.
> you can simultaneously care about commercial surveillance ("advertising") and the plight of small businesses despite those small businesses also patronizing the surveillance economy
If you define caring as expressing passive concern in comment boards, I guess you can. If a small business depends on a surveillance infrastructure and removing the infrastructure negatively impacts the business, then you can't equally "care" about both at the same time--a choice must be made. Whether it's destroying energy jobs to lower carbon emissions or lowering the sales of an independent seller to diminish advertising reach, a choice must be made.
Society pays a greater price diminishing its civil liberties than compromising the sale of consumer goods.
> If you define caring as expressing passive concern in comment boards
No, caring describes one's personal thought process, which may then be reflected on comment boards and elsewhere. I can believe that oil extraction needs to be reduced to mitigate climate change, and even more fundamentally that the amount of work in general should decrease so the productivity gains of technology accrue to wider society, while still lamenting specific losses of jobs creating individual suffering as workers lose their existing purpose and become less able to support themselves. In fact I'd say the tendency to turn off such empathy in favor of simplistic one-sided narratives is the root of our political polarization.
> If a small business depends on a surveillance infrastructure and removing the infrastructure negatively impacts the business
The more plausible explanation is that small business revenue has gone down due to the pandemic (as widely covered), which has caused them to spend less on advertising (a straightforward way of budgeting is as a fixed percentage of profit/revenue), which has cut Faceboot's revenue. Faceboot is then blaming this downturn on increased privacy, hoping to garner some sympathy while distracting from a fundamental downturn in their market.
As I said, you're prematurely celebrating the surveillance industry's demise by buying into its own narrative. The advertising industry has a history of painting anything that might reduce their invasiveness as an existential threat, and yet the leeches are still here and drinking as much blood as ever.
He might be a restaurant owner who is trying to get the word out locally. He is not an agent of a parasitical industry. Folks in this forum have worked for banks, oil companies, tech suppliers to militaries and what not.
Trying to act morally superior to a small business owner trying to stay in the black because you dislike Facebook is absolutely ridiculous. If you dislike Facebook, just log out and delete your account.
You may be small, but you’re hoping to ride the coattails of giants by exploiting the same toxic systems they do. A symbiote who survives on a predator by eating its filth.
And what would your small little business be doing if FB didn't exist? If you can't exist without FB, then maybe, just maybe, your business plan is very flawed/short sited. Depending on someone else to exist for you to exist shouldn't be a valid business model. Having a business that is enhanced by a 3rd party is totally different. If that 3rd party suddenly isn't available, it's time to roll up those shirt sleeves and put on the big boy/girl pants to find a new something to replace.
Which ad spend is being cut, though? Is it little shops like you describe or huge link farms with barely any return on ad spend? Or both? I’m not sure. Are you?
How do you know though. Maybe business are simply investing less money into Facebook because the ROAS isn’t 6-10x times anymore.
Maybe 100% or this is on Apple, but maybe it’s also because nobody under the age of 20 uses Meta platforms. I can only speak for my country of course, but if your target isn’t in the 40+ category then Facebook or Instagram advertisements rarely pay off in any sort of data we collect on it. In my line of work Facebook works, but it doesn’t work better than targeting banner adds on financial websites or financial news papers, and you still only start the onboarding journey with that, the real sale state waaaay later. 5 years ago the sale journey started on Facebook, and now it just doesn’t.
I bet average ROAS is much closer to 1. So many companies have upside down unit economics and the ads never pay off. Even if you have good economics you would not want to see 10x ROAS as it means you’d be massively underspending in a profitable channel.
So I’m sure the shift is real, but probably lower than your estimate. I also assume Facebook will quickly figure a workaround through alternate IDs or fingerprinting in other ways.
> Please remember the people at the bottom of the chain here who have (and will continue to) seen a material impact on their business, income or employment due to these (and the inevitable further) changes.
We see this dynamic in so many industries and it's holding us back as a society. <Thing> is a net negative to society, but regulating/reducing/banning <thing> causes suffering for workers. If we want to advance as a society we'll need to be willing to support the people affected by changes like this.
And to rub more salt into the wound I'd bet almost every single Facebook employee is all-in on Apple hardware. So they are literally empowering the very company responsible for tanking their stock
The end of the article mentions but doesn't elaborate on how the beneficiaries are Google and Apple's surveillance advertising business which are booming.
Some commenters are speaking about a false dichotomy of Apple verses Google. Android open source platform does not contain Google. I don't use Google or Apple and do not recall seeing an overt advertisement in years.
Facebook makes no mention of the impact of deGoogled Android phones(GrapheneOS, LineageOS, CalyxOS,..) Linux, Ublock Origin, pfBlockerNG, Pi-hole, Adguard, or the other tools that block surveillance advertising probably because even mentioning them will create awareness that people can opt out of almost all surveillance advertising, including from Apple and Google.
1. You clearly have no evidence that Apple is doing any surveillance advertising, otherwise you’d present it. Claiming they do is therefore a lie.
2. Just because Google pays someone money doesn’t mean they have a surveillance advertising business. Google buys chairs, computers, food etc. That doesn’t mean these suppliers have surveillance advertising businesses.
Google's main business is surveillance advertising, and they pay Apple for the privilege of surveilling their users and returning them advertising. I am sorry but I do not know what else to call it other than surveillance advertising.
Apple has a $5B advertising business of their own. I would be naive to think they do not use any of the data they collect about individuals for their advertising. Their closed source platform and business practices does not enable us to verify what they claim. I have plenty of other resources of information about this, but it is pointless to share if someone does not really want to see it.
> Google's main business is surveillance advertising, and they pay Apple for the privilege of surveilling their users and returning them advertising.
Not true. Google is accessed via a web browser or via their own app. Google doesn’t have to pay to access Apple’s users. They pay for Apple to make them the default search engine in Safari. In this way, Google is paying apple to advertise their service, but Apple isn’t doing any surveillance.
> I am sorry but I do not know what else to call it other than surveillance advertising.
Yes, Google’s business is surveillance advertising. To claim that Apple has a surveillance advertising business because they receive payments from Google, is no different from claiming that the company that supplies toilet paper to the Googleplex ‘has a surveillance advertising business.’
> I have plenty of other resources of information about this
If you had a resource that shows that Apple was doing surveillance advertising, you would have presented it by now. You obviously don’t.
The analogy that someone who supplies toilet paper is guilty for what their customer does is not fitting here. Let's say I am paid and entrusted to watch and protect a herd of sheep. A guy pays me $150 each time to come over and have some pleasure with those sheep many many times. I did not do the thing myself, but I certainly know what is going on and profit from it. I am not a good person, and you should not entrust me with your sheep.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] thread[0]https://mobiledevmemo.com/apple-privileges-its-own-ad-networ...
Seriously though, what newspaper(s) would you honestly be willing to spend ad dollars with (and for what products) thinking that this would be a good investment? Geritol? Now, if your suggestion is buying newspaper ads would then get ads in their digital versions as well, then maybe. However, seems to me that most viewers of news sites are from link aggregators more than just readers of a website. Not sure how that would affect ad placement.
Your are correct if you are using over the air TV or Kodi and if you use FOSS podcast players such as Antennapod or Podverse.
Everything is moving this way. It's only a natural desire for those spending money on advertsing to want to know if the money is being spent effectively, or if they'd be just as well off lighting cigars with $100 bills.
The lure of targeting, tracking (ad effectiveness, not people per se), etc is just too inticing for those non-techies that haven't pulled back the curtain to see that the all powerful wizard isn't wearing any clothes (to mix metaphors). Those of a certain age that depended on Nielsen ratings and what not buying TV/Radio ad time were always very interested in knowing how effective the ad buy really was. Then, the digital ads folks come along telling them they can hit exactly the demo they want to target and then show click through rates, etc. It's like a dream come true with a cherry on top under a rainbow with the leprechaun delivering a pot of gold riding on the unicorn's back. They all bit hard hook,line,and sinker.
Spotify exclusives are non pre podcasts than pages that were hosted on AOL.
My smart tv isn’t connected to the internet after registering it. I have an AppleTV connected.
I think podcast has outgrown that definition some time ago.
But Apple doesn’t make money by advertising based on the podcast you listen to. I doubt they make any real money on their new podcast subscription service. Apple doesn’t even hosts podcasts. They just index RSS feeds. The podcast directory API has been freely available for over a decade and is used by third party podcast players.
Unlike Spotify, you can subscribe to a podcast feed that isn’t in the directory.
Small businesses are willing to give more money per ad campaign if they know they’ll get clickthru on a specific target market. These same small businesses don’t have the money to run long ad campaigns which would result in less clicks.
On the other hand, misinformation and propaganda also work without tracking, just less efficiently.
Wi'll have to strike a balance somewhere.
I strongly suspect that might be the case. I also believe that social networks could - in theory - create effective advertising possibilities without the need to target user properties.
Take my experience with Instagram. When I am looking at mostly typography related posts, it tends to work well if they show me paid ads for interesting fonts. But when they show these to me, when I am looking at gardening content, I tend to be irritated and ignore them.
I know - I am talking anecdata here - but maybe there could be a way to not target users, but target topics and hit the users that move through these topics (so to speak).
One problem, though, I see with this approach is when you want to create a longing in somebody who never before had the idea that he/she would like to have a cool new font (to stay with my example). Or the next "hot" stuff from some global brand (or what they believe that i should want to feel cool).
But as said - I can't find the studies I seem to remember right now on the effectiveness of context based advertising compared to personalized advertising. So I am not sure if this was just my imagination.
The vast majority of people love ad supported services. They prefer free/low cost to expensive and express this preference regularly. They don't think advertising is evil, and in fact many people voluntarily wear adverts on their own clothes.
Online advertising pays for a massive amount of stuff. If it dies, then the outcome is not "everything stays the same but somehow better". The outcome is that a lot of services we take for granted go away and either don't come back at all, or come back far worse because their market is now much smaller and only rich people pay for it.
To put this in perspective, when I worked at Google they had a prototype internal service that let you "buy" your way out of seeing ads by bidding against yourself in the auction. The idea was to allow people to pay for an ad-free internet, but without making users freeloaders on the services they used (that's ad blocking and exists already). I thought, what a great idea. I'll sign up. Result: to get rid of a just a fraction of all the ads I was seeing online (my guess, ~20% of ads I saw were served by Google) would have costed $200-$300 per month.
After seeing the scale at which advertisers were subsidizing my online experience, I lost interest, as did everyone else. Paying 4x as much as my entire normal internet bill just to see fewer ads, not even get ridding of all of them, just wasn't worth it.
The reality is that the public aren't demanding restrictions on online advertising. They don't care. They like free stuff and they've got nothing against advertisers. This is a war being waged for political and commercial reasons, dressed up as consumer protection, and if/when it actually starts to bite in visible ways, a whole lot of people are going to be mighty shocked at how upset the public will get.
This eliminates all the redundant transportation, housing, waste (food, cloths, electronics, equipment)
And the only way to provide is that through tracking (both history and intent).
Selling user data (for ads) IS the problem.
No one would collect and store massive amounts of data if not to make a profit selling it.
They would only collect things that are useful in improving the product.
That kind of tracking IS valuable.
I would be happy to answer questions (within some fairly broad guidelines of proprietary information) in as much detail as anyone would like.
Everything from the technology to the organizational imperatives to the competitive landscape is actually quite complex and nuanced.
I have no ambition of informing folks’ moral judgements (I have my own), but on average it’s probably better if moral judgements are informed by detailed understanding.
But if your product is serving ads then collecting data for ads is improving your product
In this case, I would say FB is more in the side of the angels than Google. People knowingly give FB information about them
The GDPR is governments (the EU) regulating an industry that has failed to regulate itself the last 20 years and most would argue that the GDPR is much stricter than it needs to be.
For the ‘industry’, that is.
When you're "America's Computer" with a 51+% entrenchment, you shouldn't be able to govern commerce. You're a common carrier at that point.
The DOJ better be watching. This behavior makes 90's Microsoft look absolutely tame by comparison. Apple is the new Standard Oil.
I would say FAANG got popular and powerful because regulating them is direct conflict of interest for many politicians.
I don't like the fact that my code is up for review. I don't have the nanny state overseeing my web deploys.
I don't like the fact that the feedback is uneven and arbitrary.
I don't like being forced to give up my own choices for login and contact, essentially ceding my customers to Apple.
I don't like paying thirty percent for being forced to build for a platform I don't even want to be on but have to.
There should have been an open standard for native apps distributed over web. It should have been cross platform, like HTML, so we don't have to build twice or use stupid hacks to share code.
Apple builds hardware people like, but they're monsters.
But Apple seems to be pretty squarely in the: “don’t buy it if you don’t like it” vertex.
I use Apple stuff because the cost/benefit is something I can live with.
But most of my friends and colleagues never touch the stuff: it’s desktop Linux connecting to server Linux. Usually Android phones but some people get Pine or old Nokias or whatever.
Is Apple running some Internet-wide cookie scam that I’m unaware of?
Even more so if they do it with the flip of a switch instead of new and novel products.
Also, it would seem self evident that Apple’s ability to influence Facebook comes from having a novel product, that people like to use compared to the alternatives.
Apple controls 50+% of American computing. At this point it isn't just a "novel product". They own the American internet interface and it takes a nation state level of effort to compete. Facebook can't even keep up.
Android is a fragmented 40% and relies on advertising. Google locks it down so hard with their Play Store Services stranglehold (no YouTube/Maps/Gmail if you disobey), that there's no room for real competition to emerge and make any money doing something unique.
None of this is healthy for the world. Both companies need a hard slap from the DOJ.
Do you have a source for this assertion?
That Apple controls more than 50% of American computing seems, well, a bit on the high side.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/united-s...
OS market share is higher than that as some Mac users will use Chrome or Firefox, but no users of other platforms use Safari.
50% still seems a bit excessive, but no question that Apple is very widely used.
> OS market share is higher than that as some Mac users will use Chrome or Firefox, but no users of other platforms use Safari.
No, and the source you initially provide show this not to be the case: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-states...
OS marketshare is actually lower than browser marketshare. Mac users using Chrome or Firefox have nothing to do with it, since the heuristic statcounter relies on, the User Agent, contains clear information about which OS is being used.
Wait, what? If you want to say that Apple controls 50% of mobile compute, then I might be willing to go along with that. But the blanket computing alone is laughable.
You've suddenly just ignored all of the data centers in the US that have very little Apple products seeing as Apple doesn't make a server product. Sure some niche data centers have popped up with racks full of Minis, but those are primarily for people making apps for those mobile devices mentioned earlier.
What a strange strange twist of logic.
then
>look at the interface where communication and commerce are happening. Apple owns most of it. Google the rest.
These are not even close to being the same, and you moving the conversation. Or, you're using words in a manner that the rest of us are not following.
Again, maybe saying something like 50% of American consumer computing or something, but the blanket statement as written and unqualified is just wrong.
Additionally you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who will say opt in tracking is a bad idea.
The larger argument is that the vast majority of high value companies probably should not exist today.
Google and Apple if they worked together to manipulate the market, that’s grounds for fines etc.
Kicking apps off their app stores would not qualify and should not qualify.
Facebook is free to pull its app from the App Store if they don't like Apple's policies.
It’s hard to take arguments against Apple on this issue seriously.
All we are talking about is giving the users an option to disable tracking.
The fact they have lost money over this, simply proves that Facebook is a business that can’t survive without deceiving its users.
This isn’t about Apple at all.
It only harms Facebook because their business only works if users are deceived into being tracked when they don’t want to be.
If users wanted to be tracked, they would opt-in.
That isn’t about Apple destroying anyone. It’s about Facebook building a business on a deceptive practice.
Which is false as Apple tracks you across apps without showing you this new prompt.
> That isn’t about Apple destroying anyone.
Could you elaborate on what are you implying here?
Are you saying Apple doesn’t damage anyone with this policy? It is obviously false.
Are you saying damaging competitors and building its own ads ecosystem is not Apple’s primary motivation here? It also seems false, as they build their own ad system, which tracks users.
> They could have done tons of features to benefit users, but they implement those which damage competitors.
Why does Facebook rely on unethical and shady business practices that harm users? Facebook is harming itself. And how is Facebook, in any meaningful way, a competitor to Apple? Apple's ad's business is PEANUTS.
Sink? I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. Furthermore, if Facebook's business model is predicated on actively harming Apple's customers (and Facebook is harming them in a multitude of ways, including this tracking), this isn't Apple's fault at all, it's Facebooks.
> When you're "America's Computer" with a 51+% entrenchment, you shouldn't be able to govern commerce. You're a common carrier at that point.
Yah, no. Apple's marketshare, even in the US, as of January is estimated to be ~33% (iOS and macOS) combined.
Apple's ad system is subject to the same rules. The link you are posting is outdated - since last year's iOS 14.5 the SKAdNetwork has been extended to provide the full API.
This does not appear to be true, given that they were asked this question by the FT and refused to answer.
See: https://www.ft.com/content/074b881f-a931-4986-888e-2ac53e286...
Money quote (which to be fair, was not too an FT journalist):
“Apple was unable to validate for us that Apple’s solutions are compliant with Apple’s policy,” he said. “Despite multiple requests and trying to get them to confirm that their products are compliant with their own solutions, we were unable to get there.”
They had this mobile advertising platform then closed it, or reduced it to the ads GP mentioned.
And IMHO the group most vulnerable to any negative effects of social media are mostly on TikTok these days. Why is no one ever like “ByteDance is a drug cartel”?
But I did spend 2016 in a content moderation group. And 2016 was both the inflection point of everyday people saying “FB is fucking with elections” and believe me or not, a totally clean election at least as concerns the outcome (I voted for Clinton FWIW).
Most people’s objections to the effect of social media on politics, and I used to do this for a living, seem to boil down to: “It’s the platform’s responsibility to put downward pressure on stuff I disagree with”.
I don’t mean to be flip, but one person’s “misinformation” is another person’s “free speech”.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-british-medical-journal-st...
It took a lot of effort get my Facebook/Instgram feed to be a mostly positive experience, but TikTok's algorithm did it immediately.
For me it brings back the fun of the early internet.
The "crack" element of it is you can feel productive consuming it, after all, you are kinda learning. My hack is I want to start taking notes during some TikToks and then not return until I perform the recipe, craft, life hack, etc.
True. Tobacco breaks encourage us to connect with our fellow human beings, social media mostly makes us hate each other more ;P
We shouldn't equate them. Facebook can scale out its ability to do harm in ways that Big Tobacco couldn't even dream of.
Why are you so sure about that? Both are harmful, Facebook is bigger.
Because defending Facebook ( whether part of it or as a whole ), will be an extremely unpopular opinion on HN.
1. No one knows ByteDance, only TikTok.
2. No one on HN uses TikTok much. The demographics / target audience are child and young adult. Like SnapChat. So it is not on their Radar.
3. HN for the past 10+ years have been hating Facebook, it is borderline a cult. Trump era has turned this up to eleven.
4. They all think Facebook is the root cause of misinformation and spread. It is why the community or country is divided. It needs to be destroyed. Which is a strange take because I think twitter is far worse.
5. So Anything but Facebook, if TikTok will destroy Facebook, they will gladly side with TikTok, even though ByteDance the company is Chinese.
Having lived through an era in Hong Kong where only one voice and one view is allowed. I tend to have a contrarian take than most on HN.
Once the censorship cat is out of the bag IMHO there a lot more ways for that to go wrong than to go well.
Your statement seems to imply that cigarettes are known to cause physical bodily harm and that Facebook does not.
This also sounds eerily like the statement Andrew Bosworth (FB exec) made:
"While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation."
But Facebook does not just impact the user, unlike sugar. Your actions can directly impact me. So it is more like cigarettes in that regard.
The privacy implications aside, all social media is going to have negative mental health outcomes in the long run as all platform's best case scenario is for users to view more and they do that by ignoring what may be good for it's users mental health.
If Mark Zuckerberg saw what Facebook is today and what fuels it back in the early days I'd suspect he'd be disgusted by it and the direction it's trying to drag people into (Metaverse). It's worse than big tobacco because people don't need to go out and buy or pay for social media in the traditional sense. They just need to pick up something they likely already own and pay with time. They don't know the motive is ad revenue, not their own well being. Social media are marketing sales companies. But they claim falsehoods such as entertainment or community. They don't highlight how those things get them paid on earnings calls. They talk about their ad revenue.
Social media should require a label every time a user opens the app. A warning, no different than cigarettes. Showcasing the negative mental state its users can have, showcasing the negative an echo chamber can create and showcasing how people can become so sick they make life altering choices due to consuming social media.
I tend to agree that there’s research supporting the thesis that people’s inclination to post only the highlights of their lives on social media creates an unrealistic and frankly depressing comparison for the median viewer of it. Most of us didn’t just graduate from a prestigious university or get married or welcome a child into the world and it’s easy to be like: “well my life sucks”.
But the nicotine/sugar debate is kinda missing that we sell alcohol at 7/11 which is devastating in excess to my health, my loved one’s sanity, and fatal to the guy I run over driving. We tried prohibiting that and it ended very badly. Is too much Internet better or worse than too much whiskey? Debatable I guess, but, free country?
I’ve known Andrew Bozworth for years and we have disagreed plenty of times. But he’s in the top like 5% of people I know on integrity in all the ways we can sort of measure that as individuals: tells people the truth, keeps promises, admits mistakes, treats his wife and kid well, all that. And whether you agree with his life’s work or not: he’s not in it for the money, I don’t know his finances but he joined early, I’m pretty sure he could buy like a pro sports team if he wanted. He works hard because he wants to achieve his goal. I’m not sure I agree with his goal, but he isn’t faking it.
The only character reference I can hope for, or frankly would want, is that I’m pretty good at my job in spite of my personal issues.
I wasn’t trying to spin up a big contentious thread, I was trying to inject some first hand knowledge of how this stuff works so that people can make informed judgements about it.
If having worked at FB half a decade ago and thinking Boz is a pretty stand up guy in person makes me a pariah?
Then I guess it’s a beautiful day for an auto de fay.
In many respects I agree here. But, like sugar and nicotine: alcohol is an active choice that one must pay for in a much different way - the barrier to entry is not the same. We can also draw parallels that advertising by the liquor company is targeting me to buy it. But liquor companies aren't marketing companies playing a slight of hand game. They sell a product, not the ad. Is alcohol detrimental to society in certain respects? Yes. The argument here, however, seems to be: that it's OK to add another unhealthy aspect to our lives. But it's much harder for a 12 year old to buy alcohol. It's not hard for that same 12 year old to misunderstand the motives of Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. Alcoholism and Social Media share health negativities. But they are not the same in ease with which to consume.
Andrew Bosworth (not Bozworth) knows very well the negative implications of the product he works on, yet continues to stand behind it even if "...he could buy like a pro sports team...". Just because he's rich doesn't mean his intentions serve anyone other than himself. He penned "The Ugly" at Facebook and knows the platform can have dire implications. I didn't claim he was faking it, I was stating that your response seemed to take a cue from his analogy. Irrespective of that I also don't think the analogy is a good representation of the state of social media.
I mean, I quit with a lot of unvested stock because it wasn’t obvious to me that I was making people net happier by my work, which is a way that I want to feel about my work.
But I think that the number of people on this site who organize their careers around pure altruism is small enough that I’ll probably live through those people throwing rocks because I’m arguing that this subject is nuanced and complicated.
I think I said that Boz and I have disagreed plenty over the years. But if he’s going to get burned at the stake in a public forum because he’s had to make very, very difficult decisions and didn’t always make the right ones, we’ll tie me to the same post because I’ve badly fucked up on much simpler decisions.
I suspect Zuckerberg's morals didn't change much. What makes you think they did?
For the same reason that anti-tobacco advocates focus on Phillip Morris and not pipe smokers- its the more well known incarnation of the product. And, frankly, I don't think a lot of people realize that TikTok is a social network. I think a lot of people see a few videos out of context and think it's like YouTube (or at least the older, less big production of Youtube from back in the day)
Facebook is cancer on society and zuck and sheryl sandberg are the pathogenic leeches
"As a genxer with an addictive streak, TikTok is undoubtedly as addictive as crack."[1] "Tiktok is also addictive in a way that no competing app has managed to capture."[2] "Tiktok is absolutely more addictive than Facebook."[3] "I like to think of TikTok as the crack cocaine of addictive social media."[4]
The article wasn't about ByteDance's revenue. And ByteDance didn't try to organize public opinion against informed consent to my knowledge. Facebook campaigned for attention and got it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28137353
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28134963
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30188320
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28133824
And maybe they’re right: so I’ll keep an open mind if someone posts some figures.
I’ve submitted some anecdotes to the thread but I think I clearly labeled them as such.
They said something about Facebook in response to an article about Facebook. You replied with whataboutism. I showed people criticize ByteDance when relevant. Even call them crack sellers.
Before someone posts a “whataboutism”, I don’t know what happens on the extreme nonsensical left. I mostly read tech news, WSJ and “The Hill”.
This isn’t meant to beat up on conservatives. But let’s see what’s happen in 2020.
Fox News was the go to place for conservatives. Then they fairly called election results and their news articles called the accusations of the election being stolen “unfounded” and then people started leaving Fox News for News Max.
RedState purged all of their never Trump journalists who clearly had their conservative bona fides because they were losing readers. Anytime that RedState does still occasionally admit the election wasn’t stolen, people threaten to cancel their subscriptions.
Trump of course is the poster boy for the extremists. But when he started touting the benefits of the Covid vaccine and boosters, he is boo’d and cancelled by the extreme right and they say he is kissing up to the establishment.
The Wall Street Journal has always been center right. But because it didn’t tote the “populist agenda” or the “election was stolen”, the conservatives are abandoning it too.
The issue I'm referring to is that any advertising-supported platform has an incentive to generate "engagement" and divisive, outrageous content will generate a lot more of it, regardless of whether it's misleading or even completely false.
Politics-wise, the landscape would be much better if all constituents were given a fair, unbiased view of the media "market" not tailored to each individual to generate the maximum level of outrage just to further enrich some assholes. People can still decide which sources to read & trust but at least it's a conscious choice and they are free to look elsewhere, even if only to see what "the other side" reads.
Agreed, far less people have committed suicide or foment genocide from smoking.
That sounds counter-intuitive but if I’m eyeballing that wrong I’d be in your debt if you’d point me at some figures.
No sarcasm, I legitimately want to know.
what's the harmful practice here?
Are you not aware of facebook's (meta's) tracking/privacy invasion?
Does anyone know if FB provides a revenue and profit breakdown on a per app basis?
Like how much does IG, WhatsApp, FB, Messenger etc individually make?
And I don't think they report revenue broken down like that, just usage, but you could check: https://investor.fb.com (I glanced at it, seems to be just as far as 'family of apps' and 'reality labs', which I assume is whatever 'metaverse' nonsense R&D).
But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary, even if I think it's for the better in this instance.
It's all bullshit, and marketing. Apple is doing this to grow apple ads. That's it.
it would be fair to say that Chinese are monitored, yes. not that they have zero privacy. what a ridiculous, unsubstantiated claim.
Look at what happened to one of their athletes after she complained about being a assaulted at the last Olympics.
US is probably a few decades that level. Hopefully longer.
Obviously the the ideal would be to have neither.
I would argue that it would be far worse for humanity if they decided that they did not have to follow local laws. Regardless of what you might think of our laws here, I do not want a foreign company feeling entitled to ignore them and impose their American views. They do it far too often as it is already.
If you want Apple to provide better privacy, change your laws and make sure they are followed.
In the meantime, until Apple is found to have violated local data protection laws, the whole “but China” argument is a red herring.
See https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin... for the details.
Want to opt out of this? It's a OS-level setting in an obscure place, rather than what Apple requires from 3p apps.
Now, Apple isn't uniquely bad in the level of tracking they do. They're just the same as all of these companies are. The place where they are unique is the incredibly brazen self-dealing, using their control of iOS to boost their own tracking ad business over the competitors.
Citation? I'm not saying your wrong, but I haven't heard anyone make this claim before.
> rather than what Apple requires from 3p apps
For the sake of argument, even if we assume your prior claim is correct, this is still incorrect. Apple does not require third party apps to notify users or provide an opt-out mechanism from tracking user activity across the apps of a singular developer.
> We create segments, which are groups of people who share similar characteristics, and use these groups for delivering targeted ads.
> We may use information such as the following to assign you to segments:
> ... The music, movies, books, TV shows, and apps you download ...
> ... The topics and categories of the stories you read and the publications you follow, subscribe to, or enable notifications from ...
> ... Your name, address, age, gender, ...
> ... your App Store searches and browsing activity ...
> ... information stored on your device, such as the apps you frequently open ...
There is absolutely no suggestion there that these segments would be per-app. In fact, they cannot be per-app given some of the data they say they're using is only collected from places with no ads. That is not an exhaustive list by the way, but just representative examples provided by Apple. The only data they explicitly promise not to use for ads targeting is:
> No Apple Pay transactions or Health app data is accessible to Apple’s advertising platform
I don't necessarily believe Apple are being deliberately adversarial here. Perhaps I'm being overly naive, but to me Facebook's woes are a side-effect, not the primary aim. Apple's change is to improve privacy for their paying customers, and if Facebook (or anyone else) relies on invading that privacy to make money ... tough. The window has closed. Time to figure out an alternative.
Cf: all those people who depend on a google project to survive.
This is the same, but at scale.
As a general principle I agree, but this is more a reason to encourage many small businesses over a small number of trillion dollar businesses (other reasons exist for the exact opposite).
But in this specific case, not only do I agree with you that it’s for the better, but I also can’t see how Apple is even going further than just requiring apps on its platform to adhere to GDPR.
I briefly started a service. It was an automated tool to track how your tweets affected followers and traffic to one or more sites. It was neat.
Then Twitter changed the auth API. A month later, the throttles changed. Then something else changed in the JSON objects the API returned.
We decided to give up when Twitter announced their own analytics tool, after about two months or part-time work.
So yes, companies can and do that routinely. Sometimes, as it seems to be the case here, they are just acting in their (and their customers) best interest and completely ignoring the effects on other companies.
Not saying Apple is a saint, however it’s not that Apple changed the rules they provide options that weren’t available before (and imho should have been available already for years).
Like, I could accept these changes if they applied to Apple too, but they don't, so the privacy stuff is a smokescreen for moves designed to keep their services revenue growing, and their stock price heading up and to the right.
In this instance, the flick of the switch added a prompt asking users whether they want to opt in/consent to Facebook tracking their activities on other apps.
If Facebook is truly taking that much of a hit from that, it tells you how many users opted out. If their advertising model only succeeds by tracking users without their explicit consent, then their model is a failure.
They did not flick the switch, the users did. They merely pointed out the existence of the switch.
You've got it back to front. If one company is $10b dependent upon another company not having the option to disable privacy invasion, then that company has chosen to build their castle in a swamp. It deserves to sink by $10b.
Facebook built their empire on browsers being super super permissive about tracking. Critically, this tracking was (a) something most users weren't aware was happening and (b) something that was very very possible to curtail, because it wasn't something Facebook controlled.
People started noticing, and they didn't like it. Browser makers and platform makers moved to make these unhappy people happier. Facebook got caught out, because their whole business is built on this invasive tracking.
I am 100% untroubled by the way this is playing out. It's not a general case problem. It's very specific to Facebook's dependence on an accidental aspect of the web that, when explained, most people are horrified by -- and that was fairly easy to rework.
I'm just trying to understand, when marketing people come to me (as a mobile dev) and say "we need to enable ATT popup, we need the IDFA badly" what to tell them in response. The ATT popup is spooky to many users, I just can't quite understand whether e.g. my app really needs it or is it the advertisers trying to trick publishers to enable IDFA even though the latter don't benefit from it?
The whole advertising industry rely much more and make so much more money off personal data than they admit.
If you want to control eyeballs, you have to control the device.
I'd almost say any device by Facebook should be made illegal unless you notify people close to you that you're "monitoring".
Probably a lot of people if it was cheap enough and marketed right.
I completely agree with you on this, yet a lot of people are buying Oculus sets
And make it hard enough to root so that people just don't get a cheap phone and install vanilla Android on it.
How can they be sure the user with the rooted phone is Very Good At Security and rooted their phone on purpose instead of someone who got their phone hacked and has spyware listening to their banking logins?
The safe bet for banks is to deny all banking on rooted phones, that way they don't need to argue about lost money, they can just go "phone rooted, not our problem, we did our best to prevent it".
It should scream the people that phone is rooted. But, denying services is inimical.
Its not just banking app I have started to see a lot of app behaving differently when phone is rooted. Rooting generally means people can mitm app, which app developer obviously doesn't like. Its more about control than security in my opinion.
Release a phone with: - 0 Bloatware, - High Ram/ CPU/ functions - 100% privacy and no ads (initial days to allure consumers) - Cheap price
People will purchase them and after 3-4 year add tracking slowly in name of feedback etc. There will be some loss but for long term I think facebook should do it, or it will be wiped off from market.
If people buys oculus it shouldn't be that hard.
And, if they don't, I hope Apple beats them up on how this is a unique feature of iPhone re: protecting your privacy - the value of which was just quantifiably proven by how much it impacted Facebook to block it.
The market should have way more devices, OSes, and shouldn't rely on advertising.
The DOJ needs to break up both Apple and Google so we have fairer competition and better options for consumers and small businesses.
I really hope Framework, Pinephone, Fairphone, DuckDuckGo, Mozilla, et al. can find cracks in the giants and grow. But it's really hard when they have so much unassailable power.
As for GNU/Linux based phones, it is always the same OpenMoko like story, I don't have high hopes for them.
You hope that google, an advertising company, will follow apple, a hardware/service company, to block trackers and diminishes the effectiveness of ads?
Even if, by any chance, google made a move against tracking, I only believe in google reducing the effectiveness of their adversaries (like removing third party cookies) not themselves.
Google could do the same thing.
The thing is - Google DOESN'T track you on Android unless you opt-in already. They're pretty sneaky about getting people to opt-in. But they could do this, and it wouldn't even hurt them.
But maybe it would bring regulation? Maybe it's coming? One can hope...
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
> Apple said its decision to delay was "based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others... we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features."
...anyway.
Google Estimated To Be Paying $15 Billion To Remain Default Search Engine On Safari
The 10B estimate from the article is lower than a quick estimate from just looking at the quarterly and the drop in revenue growth. Just looking at that the cost is closer to 20B.
Assuming an estimated ROAS of about 6-10x then this equates to advertisers seeing a $60B to $100B reduction in sales via Facebook. Many of these advertises will not be moving this budget elsewhere, they will just be seeing reduced sales.
So, I'm all for criticism of online advertising ethics, particularly targeted at Facebook. But please remember they are an important part of the larger online economy which supports business that employ people. Please remember the people at the bottom of the chain here who have (and will continue to) seen a material impact on their business, income or employment due to these (and the inevitable further) changes.
Otherwise, you could also argue that illegal things such as violence or theft also enable people to have "jobs" in countries where law enforcement doesn't or can't crack down on it.
Sales people, recruiters, advertisements, marketing departments - they all help me understand what is being sold so I can buy things that I GENUINELY want or need
It is true that there are garbage advertisements out there, and they should be pruned. But if YOU write really awesome code at work and you want people to use it, ask yourself, how do other people know they should use it?
You tell them. You talk, you email, you set up Confluence pages with documentation. All of this is a part of the advertising ecosystem - and it helps the creator AND the consumer
Are you arguing that only Google should be allowed to make money from advertising online?
One does not go to google to get ads, one goes to google to get results, which ads subtract from.
GP was likely talking about a dedicated space, say ads or offers.com.
This idea people seem to have here that nobody likes or ever needs/uses ads is just plain wrong. These businesses aren't the size they are because ads are useless noise.
Even so, a total loss of privacy isn't a given within advertising itself (it's a fairly new phenomenon).
At least for me personally, it has come to the point where I don't believe advertisements anymore.
A brand used to mean something.
Now, it's a sticker covering the "Made in X" label, to arbitrage the difference between customer goodwill and actual manufacturing costs.
It's pervasive throughout the grocery store and department stores, but to me McDonald's is the poster child. Ostensibly you're getting a "McDonald's meal", but what that fundamentally means is you're getting minimal-cost food, manufactured as centrally as possible, with a bare minimum of prep done in the store.
Drop shipping and popup social media brands are the ultimate realization of this. If a brand means nothing, why shouldn't I just fabricate one, leverage the same supply chain, and compete on advertising alone?
How would I have heard about anything computer related in the 80s in the small town south about computer products?
Even today I would have never heard about Backblaze, Linode etc if it weren’t for podcast ads.
I wouldn’t hear about local concerts, events etc either.
The store owners were far from “experts”. They were either minimum wage workers at Sears who were in school or sales people selling to businesses.
I don't think any of those roles you mention help me understand what is being sold. It's true they're bringing it to my attention but they'll also be lying about it to the maximum extent permitted by local laws.
As for you main point about advertising helping me find products I genuinely want/need, this couldn't be further from the truth in my experience. Recently I wanted a new laptop, and one of my criteria was that said laptop should not have pre-installed nonsense like mcafee/Norton(I mean I would be wiping the drive and installing Linux anyway but this is on principle). Anyway it turns out that all large laptop companies install some kind bloatware and also advertise aggressively, so it's quite difficult to search for a laptop without bloatware, since all the ads/seo are for laptops by companies with large advertising budgets and therefore have bloatware. More generally if I'm looking for a product I want there are generally multiple competing providers/manufacturers of said product, and I therefore must figure out which is better, and often there is a clear winner. However the other sides advertising team are incentivized to muddy the waters in this situation making it less obvious which products are best.
Also can you please not yell random words it's actually kind of jarring to read.
"has no marketing team" is different than "has no marketing".
the stars on github are part of marketing.
good docs are part of marketing.
that tweet from a 3rd party is marketing.
if a project isn't exposed anywhere and has no website (i.e. is completely private), then yes, it has no marketing. everything else has degrees of marketing baked in.
Of course pretty much all communication is advertising in some way, but the topic here is the corporate kind with teams of people trying to optimize click through rates and the like. I don't think they are really comparable and I don't think its particularly difficult to tell the difference in most cases.
Do they? SEO spam sites, review spam on Amazon and the like, review kickback schemes, buying off of "influencers" on Youtube/Instagram/etc: these all add noise when I'm trying to understand what is being sold. In fact, many companies benefit (or think they benefit) from keeping me in the dark about what is being sold and many marketing departments make a living helping them keep me in the dark.
I might be on board if this infrastructure was mostly used by local businesses. However that has not been my experience. Most advertisers are National brands and politicians. So we have this tool which could maybe used by local businesses but more often is used by National brands to push consumerism.
I would also like to flip the perspective a bit. It’s more important to allow people to have a private and consensual relationship with the internet than it is for small businesses to advertise their services.
The majority of advertising boils down to this fundamental assertion: your life isn't as good as it could be and the solution is to buy <product>. It's plainly manipulative, and the effect this mindset has on society is hard to understate. It fosters feelings of inadequacy and stokes the fire of consumerism that's destroying the environment.
In practice there is a direct correlation between adspend and sucky products and I don't use ads to find interesting things. I use tech tubers and reviewers for that.
Advertising literally undermines the understanding of what’s on offer, by trying to manipulate people into buying whatever was paid to be advertised, regardless of needs and wants.
That's a pretty big assumption. Do we have any data that backs that up?
It's just as easy to assume that there will be very little impact, because most people ignore Facebook ads, and that this is actually saving small businesses money.
Because of Facebook's advertising that says they should.
Or independent contractors who will helpfully create an ad campaign that will "earn 6x their investment".
There's plenty of stories out there of folks who actually put in the effort to measure the income generated by FB and Google ads, and they aren't flattering.
Even if its actually closer to a ROAS of 2-3 (which is not unreasonable, 30-50% of sale price paying for advertising), that would still be $20B-$30B in reduced sales.
ROAS of 6-10x would be unusually excellent.
Either people need the products and will carry on buying them, or they don’t, and they will spend their money on something else instead.
In my past life, I bought a lot of gizmos thanks to random ads. Most of those gadgets end being used once or twice, and then go in donation pile or trash.
People can invest extra cash, retire early, donate. And I think those jobs that are lost due to less consumption will pave a way towards more meaningful work eventually.
In a sense ads can measure a few axes of a buyer, if your critical axes correlate well with that noisy signal then it will perform well.
So I would argue it’s just a shift. Similar to what has happened with the pandemic and restaurants. Consumer restaurant spend didn’t disappear, it got reallocated to electronics, vehicles, etc.
I guess if unethical behavior is used persistently enough, it'll be normalized and we can start talking about how important it is to keep doing it (and oh yeah the little guy, think about the little guy--especially over any general societal goals)
It's the corporate version of "think of the children". Often cited by big predators (from Amazon to Walmart, Exxon to Utilities) for cover.
While I appreciate that these tactics are used by large business (including Facebook) to manipulate people. As the author of the comment you are replying to I'm speaking from experience as a small business owner. We have seen this impact directly and I can attest to it being true. So, yes it does impact small businesses and yes I am asking for people to sympathetic to them and their employees.
Being the smaller agent of a parasitical industry doesn't make you or your bid to continue the status quo sympathetic.
Personally I think the privacy invasive advertising is long overdue heavy regulation and I look forward to it both as a person and particularly as a parent. I fully support Apples change and hope the rest of the industry follow.
We have always tried to minimise our usage of privacy invasive advertising (we actually barely use Facebook narrow targeting tools and have avoided targeted remarking as I personally hate being chased around the internet by ads for something I have looked at), and will continue to do so.
Believe it or not, you can simultaneously care about commercial surveillance ("advertising") and the plight of small businesses despite those small businesses patronizing the surveillance economy. If you still can't bring yourself to care about two conflicting things, then ignore the last paragraph in OP's original comment and read the first two as a narrative indicating a temporary economic trend for Faceboot, rather than prematurely celebrating the surveillance industry's demise.
If you define caring as expressing passive concern in comment boards, I guess you can. If a small business depends on a surveillance infrastructure and removing the infrastructure negatively impacts the business, then you can't equally "care" about both at the same time--a choice must be made. Whether it's destroying energy jobs to lower carbon emissions or lowering the sales of an independent seller to diminish advertising reach, a choice must be made.
Society pays a greater price diminishing its civil liberties than compromising the sale of consumer goods.
No, caring describes one's personal thought process, which may then be reflected on comment boards and elsewhere. I can believe that oil extraction needs to be reduced to mitigate climate change, and even more fundamentally that the amount of work in general should decrease so the productivity gains of technology accrue to wider society, while still lamenting specific losses of jobs creating individual suffering as workers lose their existing purpose and become less able to support themselves. In fact I'd say the tendency to turn off such empathy in favor of simplistic one-sided narratives is the root of our political polarization.
> If a small business depends on a surveillance infrastructure and removing the infrastructure negatively impacts the business
The more plausible explanation is that small business revenue has gone down due to the pandemic (as widely covered), which has caused them to spend less on advertising (a straightforward way of budgeting is as a fixed percentage of profit/revenue), which has cut Faceboot's revenue. Faceboot is then blaming this downturn on increased privacy, hoping to garner some sympathy while distracting from a fundamental downturn in their market.
As I said, you're prematurely celebrating the surveillance industry's demise by buying into its own narrative. The advertising industry has a history of painting anything that might reduce their invasiveness as an existential threat, and yet the leeches are still here and drinking as much blood as ever.
Trying to act morally superior to a small business owner trying to stay in the black because you dislike Facebook is absolutely ridiculous. If you dislike Facebook, just log out and delete your account.
Where I live, we have the same argument when it comes to the oil and gas industry, the military industry etc. etc.
Selectively ignore the worst part so we can feel guilty about improving it? for what purpose?
Maybe 100% or this is on Apple, but maybe it’s also because nobody under the age of 20 uses Meta platforms. I can only speak for my country of course, but if your target isn’t in the 40+ category then Facebook or Instagram advertisements rarely pay off in any sort of data we collect on it. In my line of work Facebook works, but it doesn’t work better than targeting banner adds on financial websites or financial news papers, and you still only start the onboarding journey with that, the real sale state waaaay later. 5 years ago the sale journey started on Facebook, and now it just doesn’t.
So I’m sure the shift is real, but probably lower than your estimate. I also assume Facebook will quickly figure a workaround through alternate IDs or fingerprinting in other ways.
We see this dynamic in so many industries and it's holding us back as a society. <Thing> is a net negative to society, but regulating/reducing/banning <thing> causes suffering for workers. If we want to advance as a society we'll need to be willing to support the people affected by changes like this.
And to rub more salt into the wound I'd bet almost every single Facebook employee is all-in on Apple hardware. So they are literally empowering the very company responsible for tanking their stock
Some commenters are speaking about a false dichotomy of Apple verses Google. Android open source platform does not contain Google. I don't use Google or Apple and do not recall seeing an overt advertisement in years.
Facebook makes no mention of the impact of deGoogled Android phones(GrapheneOS, LineageOS, CalyxOS,..) Linux, Ublock Origin, pfBlockerNG, Pi-hole, Adguard, or the other tools that block surveillance advertising probably because even mentioning them will create awareness that people can opt out of almost all surveillance advertising, including from Apple and Google.
They're probably too insignificant to affect Facebooks bottom line.
Presumably because to claim that would be false.
Google pays Apple ~$15B a year which is surveillance advertising revenue.
2. Just because Google pays someone money doesn’t mean they have a surveillance advertising business. Google buys chairs, computers, food etc. That doesn’t mean these suppliers have surveillance advertising businesses.
Face it. It’s just a falsehood.
Google's main business is surveillance advertising, and they pay Apple for the privilege of surveilling their users and returning them advertising. I am sorry but I do not know what else to call it other than surveillance advertising.
Here is a study showing that Apple collects data from Iphone users pretty much the same as Google does from Android phones. https://irishtechnews.ie/trinity-study-privacy-concerns-abou...
Apple has a $5B advertising business of their own. I would be naive to think they do not use any of the data they collect about individuals for their advertising. Their closed source platform and business practices does not enable us to verify what they claim. I have plenty of other resources of information about this, but it is pointless to share if someone does not really want to see it.
Not true. Google is accessed via a web browser or via their own app. Google doesn’t have to pay to access Apple’s users. They pay for Apple to make them the default search engine in Safari. In this way, Google is paying apple to advertise their service, but Apple isn’t doing any surveillance.
> I am sorry but I do not know what else to call it other than surveillance advertising.
Yes, Google’s business is surveillance advertising. To claim that Apple has a surveillance advertising business because they receive payments from Google, is no different from claiming that the company that supplies toilet paper to the Googleplex ‘has a surveillance advertising business.’
> I have plenty of other resources of information about this
If you had a resource that shows that Apple was doing surveillance advertising, you would have presented it by now. You obviously don’t.