The fact that Facebook appears to consider user consent an existential threat to their business model tells me everything I need to know about them right now.
Normally, I'd ignore any marketing touting new privacy features in iOS, but Facebook's response has convinced me this isn't just an empty gesture from Apple.
I wholly internalized that there was a real problem when I started taking my phone to other parts of the house, placing it in a drawer before returning and shutting the door to have an in person conversation with someone.
Apps cannot use the microphone on iOS 14 without your awareness. There is a little dot that will show up at the top of the screen if an app has recently used microphone or camera. Hopefully this can assuage your paranoia.
The dot is just for the foreground app. If a background app uses the mic, your clock turns red (for recording) or green (for a phone call) in an even more obvious way, and tapping it takes you to the app that is doing so.
I've started using the mobile sites for companies like Facebook that I kind of need to use occasionally but really don't want their horrifying app on my phone.
It's kind of fascinating how hard they (not just Facebook) push you to use their "so much better" app even when their HTML version seems just as good if not better. It's just so much better for them. If you try the app and it's not better then you know what it's really about.
My daughter uses Messenger Kids to interact with her friends, now that COVID means she can’t see any of them in real life. (It wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it’s what all the other kids are on, so we have no real choice.)
If she adds a friend, it’ll send me a messenger message telling me I have to approve it, with a link. If I try to follow that link, it will tell me that my desktop browser can’t be used to manage Messenger Kids and that I have to install the app on my phone. Although it seems like in most cases you can open up Messenger Kids in the panel on the left, and then there will be an approve/deny button, so it’s mostly lies that you can’t do this on desktop.
I'm not sure why this is getting down-voted, but I think the point here is the _fact_ that you have been put in a situation where, as an individual, you are concerned enough to do this is telling, crazy or not
I didn't downvote, but "It doesn't matter if it's true, It's bad that I'm concerned" is used to justify all sorts of alarmist policies. Right now that's what's being used to restrict voting rights across the US and has been used for a long time to justify NIMBY and tough on crime policies regardless of evidence.
There are differences between these scenarios. In one case we have an individual who made a personal decision that does not affect anyone else. The contrary examples are of people imposing their will upon others to restrict the rights of others. There is very little one should do about the beliefs of others, regardless of what the evidence supports, unless it affects the rights of others.
I do have precedence in logic, right? Alexa/Siri/etc must listen for their voice cue prompts to activate, and discarding all other discussion. So I must trust that corporation would discard if not applicable. Without a hardware cutoff switch for a mic - it is blind trust, isn't it?
This is really, really bad reasoning. Basically you're saying that there's no point in countering wildly untrue conspiracies with facts or evidence, the mere fact that people believe the conspiracies means they might as well be true?
(I'm not making a claim either way on whether or not in this case it's true that devices are spying on us, just that this line or thinking is absurd that it doesn't really matter if a given thing is true)
I remember back in 2002 when I took a college course on Computer Security and the prof told story after harrowing story of the lengths to which spy agencies went to get the information they were after. I remember thinking, "Well if the NSA really wanted to track everyone and record everything that was ever transmitted over the internet, I suppose they could. But nah, that's crazy."
Fast forward to 2013 and Snowden.
Our defaults for "they wouldn't do that" when it comes to your privacy are all wrong.
If that's a "conspiracy theory" that you need to dismiss so that you can go about your life, fine. But the truth is, these people are constantly up to no good and you can't trust closed software nor hardware. The technical capability for draconian mass surveillance exists.
The poster you're replying to did not say that AMZN/GOOG/AAPL wouldn't spy on you, they simply stated that evidence should be considered to justify claims, especially if you're trying to spread those claims to other people. Your argument "we should sound alarms without evidence because tomorrow we'll have evidence" is classic conspiracy theory reasoning, which is why people will classify you as one. In essence, we shouldn't throw people in jail for crimes they haven't committed yet.
I believe the post in question believes they have enough evidence to justify the actions and is speaking from a position of surprise/resignation at the state of things.
Kind if like, 'I cant believe it's come to this, but given all the evidence, it's justified."
That's a pretty big leap. The OP was talking about putting their phone in a drawer, not throwing people in jail without a trial. I, for one, don't blame them one bit.
The issue is: We can't prove it either way. We can make law which increases the risk if they are uncovered and hope they abide to it (see GDPR and California Law for attempts in that direction) but a prove is hard.
At the same time we see the incentives, and the incentives are to collect and analyze things.
Is it absurd? My leap seems smaller and more logical than the alternative. The technical fact is that each of these features exist, and are used daily.
A device which does not have a hardware cutoff switch, which you've allowed to listen for it's own prompts ("Hey Siri, etc") can listen to you. So far we're all speaking "current knowns". Nothing about that is conspiracy.
The trust part is "storage of data received" and "use of that data". Sure it probably does not today - but will the terms of service change tomorrow?
An example parallel are Alexa devices listening, and accidentally storing whole convos.
You are right on - the fact that I even needed to think about whether I should have to be concerned with it is where I was headed.
Devices do listen to all sounds to listen for their "prompt" - how do I know what is actually discarded? And with precedence, I don't think it is 'crazy'.
Anybody that doesn’t know the code their device is running is a fool to trust it by default. Even knowing the code well, devices are compromised all the time. Yours seems like the lone sane opinion here.
We don't know the code of HN but we trust it because we can see the inputs, outputs, and trust the admins running it. A lot of people trust Google/Apple for the same reason to keep their devices secure but are aware that they might need to stay up-to-date and give up freedom [to install unverified apps] to achieve that security.
HN also does not have a microphone sitting here for me constantly listening for me to say "OK HN, post response". It is running as a pull HTTP connection in a sandboxed browser. I do not need to imply any trust in them provided they don't have some zero day exploit running to escape my browser and hijack my system.
Just as if my location/microphone were able to be physically turned off on my phone I would not have to trust that someone isn't always listening in on me. If I can't do that it is not unreasonable not to trust it. There have been plenty of instances of these things being abused.
This logic could be used to say there is a problem that some people believe they need to wear tinfoil hats to stop mind-reading. No, we should help them seek medical help. It's easily verifiable to check if your phone is sending data, so if they're concerned, they can check that like many people do and find out what data is being sent. But stopping a conversation midway through to hide your phone to continue to talk while not being a major underworld criminal is a worrying level of paranoia. If you are an underworld criminal, what are you doing with a phone? Didn't you see what happened to encrochat?
Ha - nothing subversive or illegitimate! I'm an engineer ha. The effort cost is minimal (walking to another room) - the downside cost if I was wrong (data mining by a social app for ads) was worth it.
Insurance companies analyze purchase records for modeling lifestyle risk.... if I were discussing a family member who had a health scare how do I know that info isn't 'surfaced' to insurers, etc?
I don't think the "threat" is the obvious one... Nobody trusts Facebook -- many, if not most, people honestly believe they listen to their conversations already. The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight.
A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers, and some label won't stop Facebook users or meaningfully impact Facebook. Hell, when Microsoft faced anti-trust breakup, the company didn't sit and whine. They fought the threat and sold billions of dollars of software and solutions to their antagonist.
I'm not sure "Cigarettes will kill you" was ever meant to stop smokers from smoking. It was part of a generations long campaign to change the entire perception and culture behind smoking. And it seems to be working very well.
I think there are parallels here. I see a focus on getting _current_ users to stop tolerating naked privacy. I think that ship has sailed. But in time the entire culture can shift where future generations do not accept naked privacy.
I think people forget how ubiquitous smoking was. I remember back in the 80s, you basically couldn't go anywhere without ending up stinking like an ashtray. And it was even worse decades earlier before I was born. Everyone bellyached as anti-smoking laws kicked in, but slowly, attitudes changed, and now, it's not such a big deal. I bet if you got rid of anti-smoking laws, you wouldn't even see a huge uptake in public smoking or smoking in workplaces these days, because people's minds have been changed and there are a lot fewer smokers.
It's probably hard to fathom now but while working at Chevron in 1990 / 1991 the two smokers in my group got their own office so no one else had to share with them while they smoked at their respective desks. Thankfully they kept the door closed, but any time you had to go in there everything - the walls, the ceiling, their keyboards and monitors, their books - everything had an odiferous brown patina. It was like walking into a bar. The fact that last comparison no longer really works tells me how much the world has changed for the better.
I had to do some work at a customer datacenter, which was a converted print/mainframe room in a 70s high-rise with lots of windows.
The customer had built a wall blocking all of the windows in the late 80s (this was circa 2000), we had to go in the the area inbetween.... 10-15 years of no interior cleaning and high temps resulted in these weird formations of tar drips. It almost looked like a cave formation. Absolutely vile.
The story from the site staff was that the print and mainframe operators back in the day would essentially sit and continuously smoke, all day, all night. IIRC, we found a half dozen defunct cigarette machines.
Hahahhaah. That's cool and disgusting at the same time. A former coworker shared with me he was tasked to investigate why the mainframe was throwing errors only at night. He discovered a couple of operators were rolling a couple and then disconnecting the air ducting to the mainframe to use as a covert way to vent their own exhaust.
Totally, but look at how smart (and evil) the tobacco companies were. They pivoted between strategies in smart ways.
Once reality started setting in and denial didn't cut it, they acted to protect the shareholders. Phillip Morris bought things like Kraft that they could spin-out later. They settled claims and paid states billions of dollars for healthcare costs a few years before healthcare started going up 30% a year... which capped their liability AND made it politically impossible to put them out of business.
Google seems to at least attempt to do something similar by entering and investing billions into businesses like Cloud, cars, etc. I don't see that with Facebook... Facebook digs in and spouts some nonsense about connecting people, like the capitalist version of Soviet PR people.
Well, I'm by no means defending Facebook's business, but they did open-source a couple little projects called React, GraphQL, and PyTorch (and a bunch of other lesser-known stuff), so technically it's not _all_ bad. :P
The point isn't doing good, the point is having multiple viable lines of business. No one does that better than Microsoft - they have, what, a dozen billion dollar products now? Google is trying but has this far been less successful, and Facebook isn't even really trying at all. The closest they have is Oculus, but hardware isn't going to cut it.
It won’t cause Facebook to go bankrupt (less well-targeted ads can still be sold but aren’t worth as much), but it will meaningfully impact them. Most high level Facebook employees have significant amounts of Facebook stock. Even the implication that Facebook’s ad revenue will decrease is going to lower their stock price. So of course they are going to try to prevent this change- if it becomes permanent they are taking a hit to their retirement savings.
If Android follows suit (not guaranteed but iOS and Android often converge on features within a few versions of each other), then they are going to take another hit. Executives want to prevent this change in the interest of their personal wealth.
While I welcome the change as an iOS user (for privacy with my other apps, I don’t even have a Facebook account) I can understand why Facebook is coming out hard against the change.
>If Android follows suit (not guaranteed but iOS and Android often converge on features within a few versions of each other), then they are going to take another hit. Executives want to prevent this change in the interest of their personal wealth.
Google might be incentivized to do it, as doing so would harm the effectiveness of other ad networks without affecting their own (as long as the user has a Google account)
Facebook’s attempts to legally challenge Apples UX changes seem fruitless, but they would definitely have a case against Google if they tried to pull this to benefit their ad network and data collection efforts over Facebook’s.
>if it becomes permanent they are taking a hit to their retirement savings.
This would be amazing. Imagine all the talent that would be freed into real problems.
BTW: I remember while working in the financial sector, in the financial bubble, how terrified they were if markets were to be corrected, like they did.
The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight
It's very telling that personal privacy has Facebook's leadership fudging its collective Huggies, while every other company — even Google — is going along with it.
One unexplored possibility is that they actually needed to do quite a bit of analysis to determine all the uses the data is put to within their organization and doing a legal review so that they didn’t end up making a false statement.
> A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers
That's the opposite of true. It didn't stop _every_ smoker, but research has established that anti-smoking marketing and labeling has a massive impact on how many people smoke overall.
> The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight.
I don't agree with this. It seems less of an emotional response than a business one: the changes from iOS will have a large, material impact on Facebook's business, and it will get even worse if other gatekeepers follow suit (not likely, as Google's model is pretty close to Facebook's).
I think the real takeaway is how much money is riding on surveillance capitalism, and how these business models take a real hit when you just explain clearly to the user what's going on and give them a choice.
Calling it now: for all the hate Zuckerberg gets now, he's going to be Bill Gates in 25 years, and they only people who won't trust him are the vaccine mind control nuts.
MS "just" used it's behavior to ensure it was the dominate OS, and made some hardware products to boot. They had some questionable telemetry stuff going on, and with the latest OS joined the slimey ad stuff after everyone else had already paved that particular road to hell for them.
FB is much much creepier in all of the information they gather about people without them being aware of it. Not just what/who they follow, but they have insights into their user's financial/spending info, health/medical, and plenty of other stuff that is just too damn much. And they way the implemented it so that they follow you around to gather that info without you even coming close to using their site.
In my opinion, it's just not even the same sport let alone ballpark.
>A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers
Nicotine is as hard to quit as heroin. The fact that we still punished smokers through public shaming, exclusion and excessive fines just shows how unsympathetic our culture is to perceived "moral failings."
Yes, it is odd that many who deem shaming an effective strategy where smoking is concerned deem it ineffective and counter-productive for obesity, narcotic addition, and other undesirable behaviors.
Well I've kicked heroin but not nicotine. Not because the nicotine is more addictive, but because its harms are orders of magnitude less. I've tried both and I would rather go cold-turkey off nicotine than a strong opiate.
I agree 100% with the "perceived moral failings" part. Shaming people does not help. I couldn't kick the H until I stopped shaming myself. The guilt made my usage worse. It was caused by complex mental health issues, dealing with those got me healthy.
The whole ordeal has made me a much more understanding, compassionate person. I'm extremely grateful to be one of the few that made it out.
Perhaps we should advocate consistency. Either shaming and punishment works to discourage unwanted behaviour or it doesn't. If it does, then perhaps we should start shaming obese people and crack addicts.
P.S. Before the downvotes come, I'm rather fat and a mostly ex-smoker, so I'm not attacking obese people, just wondering at the inconsistency.
I think the two are not quite equivalent. Smoking is the action, while obesity is the condition. The equivalent would be shaming smokers for getting cancer or shaming obese people for overeating (to nitpickers: yes, this is a simplification).
The main difference seems to be that smoking in public inflicts secondhand smoke on others, while obesity inflicts... taking up more room on public transit? IF shaming is effective at curbing public smoking, and there is no shaming for smoking in private, then I think you could have a logically consistent position.
I don't know if the first of those is true, and the second definitely isn't (although maybe a different level of intensity), so I'm not saying there is consistency, just that it's possible.
We can all agree that "shaming" is not good; but at the same time we should not promote/encourage behaviors that leads to negative outcomes.
So, generic "smoke is bad for you", "overeating is bad for you", "junk food is bad for you"; and positive reinforcements like "say no to smoke", "say no to junk food" would be a good start.
And if some groups comes out and state that those messages are "shaming" well, those people are idiots.
>and positive reinforcements like "say no to smoke", "say no to junk food" would be a good start.
I mean why do people feel it's their duty to get into someone else's life? How about assume fat people and people who smoke know it's bad for them and just leave them alone. I think people in society would be much better off of they worried themselves with their own lives. I guess that's a lot harder than pointing out other people's problems though.
"You're Apple's customer and Facebook's product" is often repeated but completely true in this case. It's all about incentives.
Apple makes money by selling more products which means they innovate by making Watches, Earpods, M1, etc. Facebook makes money by selling your attention and data, which meants they innovate by extracting data from every experience they can (Oculus, Whatsapp, ...), using more complex technologies (Facebook AI), and encouraging whatever behaviors create more ad spend (hint: outrage).
Add in the fact that Apple has made privacy a core part of their brand promise and it means that Apple has strong incentives to protect their customers in a way that most companies, especially Facebook, do not.
Also, you literally are Apple’s product to their iOS developer ecosystem, in the sense that developers fork over 30% of their revenue to Apple for access to you.
On one hand, it's argued that Apple has an incentive to act against their customers because they want to sell apps on the app store.
On the other hand, it's argued that Apple doesn't care about their developers because they enforce draconian regulations on what iOS developers are allowed and not allowed to do, and don't hesitate even to shut down billion dollar apps (i.e., Fortnite).
I have mixed feelings about Apple's walled garden, both as a developer and a user, but when it comes to user privacy, I'm firmly in Apple's camp. I can't think of a single other large tech company that has a strong stand in favor of user privacy and acted on that. Basically, if Privacy is a killer feature for a consumer, then Apple is literally the only game in town.
We just need to look at how they handled the San Bernadino shooting and requests for a phone unlock to find a supposed "lying dormant cyber pathogen".
Every other company would have been falling over themselves to unlock a terrorists iPhone.
Apple said no, hired Ted Olsen, and litigated (along with lots of other less well known cases).
This may have even hurt them in some consumers eyes (hard to understand them protecting someone who killed a bunch of people). So the PR risk was very significant.
So they do seem to have a pretty committed consumer focus (and now make money because of that).
It is virtually inevitable though that someone will go after them (anti-trust etc) because this is a game of billions and folks who for example do in-game loot boxes (fortnite) and marketing (facebook) etc are going to be in regulators ears and in ny times ads and op-eds calling for this horrible situation to be broken up.
> and don't hesitate even to shut down billion dollar apps (i.e., Fortnite).
It's fairly obvious that, given Epic was saying "you can pay $2 less to get the same amount of vbucks" that Apple was going to lose a huge portion of revenue from the App if they didn't pull it, and if they actually left it up, they'd have to allow every other app to institute third-party payment processors as well to not appear like they're playing favorites and the PR nightmare that would come from that.
I'm saying that Apple was going to get shafted on payments and making money from Epic anyways if they left it up because Epic was charging $2 less when paying directly via a card and bypassing in-app purchases.
No, that's not right. The app is the product, the customer is the buyer of the app, and the split of revenue is 70/30 (or 85/15 for small devs).
Saying that developers are "buying" users makes no sense. Devs are not a customer of apple. If anything, devs are a supplier to apple. Since the net money flow is from Apple to Dev.
On the other hand, devs wouldn't be able to sell to iPhone users if there was no iPhone, or no App Store, or the appleid.apple.com identity verification system, or iOS 14, or anything else that is paramount to devs even having those users as customers in the first place. In this scenario, the iPhone is the product and the App Store is a feature of the iPhone, and the fact that it moves money around (or doesn't, most of the time) is irrelevant.
Now, the legal view of Apple's ecosystem is being litigated right now. What I posted above might be how the court sees it, or what you posted might be how the court sees it. We won't get a definitive answer until either Epic or Apple go home with the key to processing payments on iOS and all of the other systems that are effectively an iPhone with a different form factor (eg PS5, xbox series).
Whether you consider the developers a customer of Apple paying for distribution, or a supplier to Apple who takes a cut, is ultimately a semantic distinction. But the conflict of interest it creates — that Apple retains a monopoly on how software is distributed to a device that you ostensibly “own” and sets rates to optimize for their own gain - is the case regardless of the semantics we use.
(I’m not entirely opposed to this arrangement; I’m typing this on my iPhone. But I bought it knowing and accepting that I’m partly the product)
If this is true about Apple, it is true in any retail situation.
It’s not what people mean when they say ‘you are the product’.
What they mean is that if you aren’t paying, then the company is only interested in retaining you as a user so that they can satisfy their actual customers.
When you are paying, you are the customer
It’s also true that iOS developers are customers of Apple’s distribution service.
Buy Apple’s users are not a product in the sense that anyone uses this phrase.
This is absolutely true. Both companies play the game of selling customer acquisition. But we seem to be generally more okay with middlemen squeezing a two sided market. Sometimes. If it’s DoorDash or Amazon then public opinion seems to go the other way.
But regardless it’s not Facebook’s value prop to business that people have an issue with but ya know, how they actually deliver it.
No, devs don't buy customers from apple. Customers buy apps, and Apple takes a commission. No money flows from Developer to Apple (apart from to 100$ annual fee if you want to be anal about it).
No they buy access to customers. You can't sell to Apple's customer base unless you give them 30% of gross. The world where Apple charges that 30% commission to the devs after the sale or collects it from the customer during the sale is irrelevant. We fork over a lot of money to Apple for the privilege of selling to their customers.
Well, you can't sell peaches to Walmart customers without Walmart taking a cut either. But we don't say the peach growers are buying customers from Walmart, do we?
I think that nowadays most profitable software is cross-platform and is also available on other platforms, thus their developers see access to the iOS market as added value rather than their primary customer acquisition channel.
I disagree. Apple's incentives is to make everybody that has an iPhone pay for apps instead of using advertising supported apps, essentially making things more expensive for the customers.
You can think of it as a common. Blocking tracking essentially is a destruction of a bit of commons; the app developer will get less revenue. By systematically encouraging this block, Apple is making it comparatively less worthwhile to have an ad-supported app instead of a paid app, thus moving revenue to the app store (where Apple can tax it) instead of the advertising side (where it is monetarily free for the user.)
If we really wanted to find out what is right for the user[1], the correct thing is to see if users want to buy their way out of tracking. Offer the apps with advertising with tracking, with advertising without tracking, and without advertising - at different prices, representing the value of the advertising and tracking. My bet is that a majority of users would not want to pay the cost of non-tracked advertising - either they'll want to buy away advertising (and that will only be a small fraction) or they'll want the free variant. Basically, all data I've seen indicate that most people don't want to buy their way out of advertising - it's too expensive. I expect the same applies to tracking.
[1] Under the assumption that we've got an efficient market and will see an equilibrium of development that correspond to value created.
It seems people can do just that now on the new iOS. The app is free to switch off / charge for features if the user is not allowing tracking. Don't know how this works together with GDPR though.
Google had the advantage that their service was separable from the physical devices using it.
I doubt you would be arguing that, if Apple bricked basically every iPhone in China, it would be evidence that their "incentives are aligned with their customers".
Being a separate device, as you said, means the phones would still work independent of Apple.
The Chinese government would block updates and sales, hencecustomers would blame them, not Apple, because Apple was incentivized with customers instead of the government moving forward.
Basically everyone with an iPhone uses an Apple ID. It is certainly not hyperbole that the devices usability would be very severely impacted without access to Apple's servers.
They would lose iCloud access. That's what the Chinese Government threatened them with.
It is not "bricking phones" as you said. As much as you don't like this fact, Apple had a choice and decided to put the Chinese government before it's users.
An iPhone that cannot connect to Apple’s servers is essentially bricked. Not only do a significant number of critical features on the phone require reaching out to Apple to function, but IIRC, after a certain period of time without being able to contact Apple, the phone will require you to log in with your Apple ID. I believe this is to prevent activation lock bypasses by blocking network resources.
I remember reading about an issue a while back, where a person got locked out of their phone at sea, because they didn’t have network access for an extended period of time.
Facebook users (at least a portion) seem to be incentivized by having a large, free social network. It is the advertisements which make it free to consumers. Facebook's monetization strategy may not align with your tastes, but most people have not problem using free services with ads. That said their customers over time are going to want to preserve more of their privacy and advertisers are going to expect the same effectiveness, Facebook is going to have to figure out how to please all parties.
Apple makes money by you being trapped in the Apple ecosystem.
Everything in it is structured around forcing you to pay Apple for access to things you want. Microtransactions, apps etc. All of it must go through Apple and they must have a cut of everything.
You can say they're more honest because they're taking your money up front as opposed to facebook selling you to advertisers, but I don't think it's in Apple's customers' best interests to be milked like cows
That's true for the time being, but considering Apple has a stranglehold on the app store and are therefore facing anti-competitive questions, they are maneuvering from an entirely different anchor point.
It's in Apple's short-term best interest to win over public opinion. It not only cools down anti-competitive rhetoric, but it also helps sell phones.
That's a wrong view. Customer in app market is the buyer of the app. Both Apple and devs are suppliers who each take a split. (Devs supply app itself, Apple supplies infrastructure and supporting services.)
Tell me more. So what would the nomenclature for the actual revenue generating side. I guess more generally, in a two sided marketplace is there specific verbiage for each “customer”?
I don't know, I'm just using common sense really. Look where money flows.
First the money flows from from end user to Apple, and then from Apple to developer.
The simplest way to model it is as a supply from dev to apple, plus a value-adding supply from apple to end user.
People here are arguing it is a supply from end user to dev, plus a supply from Apple to dev. That's obtuse way to model it IMO. Then again those are the kind of people who probably devising tax avoidance schemes and making big bucks so what to I know.
Why would I need to be saved? I'll just buy a device from a different manufacturer. If there are literally no privacy-respecting options, and a majority of people think there should be one, either a company will form on its own, or constituents will make enough noise that the government will step in.
If not in the US, the EU still seems to have some basic respect for the rights of their citizens.
If Apple genuinely though that, you’d expect them to be selling access to their customer data to the highest bidder, but they aren’t.
In fact they were offered billions of dollars in revenue by Google for customer location data in Google Maps. Apple turned it down and instead spent billions of dollars and several years building Apple Maps instead.
Well, they still need a search provider, a lot of people would change it to Google anyway. Arguably locking down the browser to limit tracking as much as possible is reasonable even though it potentially makes that Google deal less lucrative.
If they were intent on monetising users data, you’d expect them to make a deal with Google to allow tracking in Safari in exchange for a higher fee for default search.
In other words they don’t seem to be doing any of the things We would expect to see if this theory was correct.
But apple (and Android) allowing search providers to bid/buy that default spot is a barrier to entry for new search providers and only makes the dominant search provider stronger. How could a new Google emerge today when people lazily accept the default? When Google started there was not built in browser default - users had to manually type in altavista.com or google.com.
A big company like Coca Cola being able to buy huge advertising campaigns is a barrier to entry for new Cola makers. I suppose there are cases where buying or selling placement might be unethical, but I don't see it here. For example for a long time Google funded Firefox by buying a place as the search default. Was that unethical by Mozilla?
In this case the incentives led to an action with a positive impact for the user, so we should keep up those incentives regardless of which corporation ends up capitalizing on them.
If you cared about ethical treatment of labour in China, presumably you’d prefer to buy products from a company that rigorously audited its supply chain, excluded suppliers they caught violating it, ensured workers were paid above average industry wages and had below average suicide rates in their suppliers, right?
Presumably if you were going to criticise companies using Chinese suppliers, a company like that wouldn’t be top of your list. Or is there something else going on here?
I don't know why people are like this. You can be pro human rights and also not dedicate your entire life to supply chain audits.
I'm making a point that the largest company in the world not only does so but actively took steps to ensure they wouldn't be legally prevented from doing so in the future.
This is not correct, I've seen it said here several times so I looked into it. Apple lobbied for some amendments to the act on the grounds of practicality but did not oppose it and said they thought it should become law.
everyone seems to conveniently forget about the absolute moral nightmare that is Apple’s supply chain
No, everyone hasn't. Apple has its problems, too, and nobody denies that. But arguments like yours amount to no more than "Hey, look over there! Don't look at Facebook, look at this other thing!"
> The fact that Facebook appears to consider user consent an existential threat to their business model tells me everything I need to know about them right now.
They see it as the beginning of a slippery slope. And I hope they're right!
The concept of social media and living our lives on the internet is new, in the scale of things. The last ~10 years have been like the period of time where the sun goes in but the thermostat hasn't noticed yet. Now people have decided they don't like being cold (having their data harvested) and are pushing back.
Facebook is one of the worst, but to be fair, lots of software companies seem to have difficulty grasping the concept of consent. How many times have you been asked to install or turn on something you didn’t want, where the options are “Yes” and “Ask me later”? What happened to “No”? Why can’t software companies accept a no from the user and treat it respectfully? No means no, right?
Devil advocating attempt: they obviously did a measure how much of their userbase will allow the app to serve personalized ads and how it will impact their revenue. Even if it is in a ballpark of 10%, it is still a ton of money and, as a commercial enterprise acting in the interests of its shareholders, FB should do it's best to avoid or reduce potential damage.
should do it's best to avoid or reduce potential damage.
The way to reduce potential damage is to evolve, adapt, pivot, and diversify. Not to kick and scream.
Facebook has enough money and enough smart people to do and be anything it wants. It chooses to be the neighborhood creep in the bushes watching your daughter through your windows.
Facebook is sufficiently loathed on HN that I would caution against using absurd emotion inducing analogies like “watching your daughter through your windows”. Not only is this needlessly gendered (would I not be upset by someone watching my son?), but it’s also a call to rally base and pure emotion. It almost feels as if you want to whip up a mob of digital citizens.
It is enough to highlight the policies and products of Facebook that you disapprove of.
Still devil advocating. Imagine you have a well developed silver mine, which produces a metric ton of silver every week. And you have an idea that there can be a gold vein somewhere on your land plot. But to find and develop it you should spend a lot of resources, including your well trained miner workforce. Rational decision would be to maybe do some research on a "last served" basis and continue to expand your silver mine, which is your primary source of income, until it depleted (if it will deplete at all, you don't know it for sure).
This, and the fact that (EFF and a few others aside) they're fought against only by an entity whose core business has nothing to do with mining users personal data, speaks loudly about pretty much every other corporation out there.
Do I qualify as too much alarmist when I'm horrified from seeing doctors and lawyers happily exchanging photos of clients sensitive documents using Whatsapp? (read: forgetting them in their phone gallery, ready to be exfiltrated by any malicious software or repair technician).
The sad part is that people is slowly adapting to not give a damn about their and others privacy because today's electronic gadgets and services are designed in a way so they're almost unusable by privacy conscious users.
So do most news websites, anyone that sells targeted ads.
Is this really a surprise from people here that companies that sell ads earn most of it with targeted advertisements?
Apple taking on this issue is worthy of respect, but let's not pretend that Apple respects all user consent. They're constantly forcing things on their users with thinly veiled justifications like "security".
I wonder if Apple is in a sort of competition with Facebook.
Probably they are competing for engineers, Messenger / WhatsApp vs iMessage, time spent on Facebook content vs on Apple content and other things I'm missing.
On the other side they benefitted from the popularity of Facebook (and many other internet properties companies) because they gave an extra reason to people to buy smartphones and using them a lot.
Your description "a sort of competition" seems an accurate way to describe it, in my opinion.
They're both huge companies whose largest risk of disruption comes not from the marketplace (they can monitor, acquire and influence challengers), but from regulators. The appearance of competition helps both companies to reduce that risk.
> Nothing existential about it at all. It's an actual threat to Facebook's business model.
"Existential threat" means a threat to the very existence of a thing, so a thing that is an "existential threat" is a very big actual threat. I think maybe you're confusing "Existential" with "Hypothetical"?
> ...and the internet has latched onto it and now misuses it all the time.
I can't decide if this comment is very clever ironic satire or... not ;-)
> Politicians started using that phrase en masse about a year ago
"Existential threat" has been in wide-spread use for a really long time. The first time I heard the phrase used was probably some time in the late 90s. And that's more a function of my age than of how long the term has been used. The cliche is at least half a century old and has been used by politicians for at least decades.
For example, the phrase was commonly used in anti-proliferation and denuclearization advocacy during the last quarter of the 20th century, when nuclear weapons were characterized as an "existential threat" to humanity. This use persists today; see, for example, https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/nuclear-weapons-and-ex...
But the term isn't particularly partisan or limited to extinction-level threats. it's also been used throughout modern history by right-wing populists to refer to one group or another being an "existential threat to our way of life". See for example https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44498438
The point is, the phrase has been used for a long time, always with the same meaning, and its use hasn't been particularly partisan as far as I can ever remember. Both sides use the phrase for various things. But they all definitely mean the same thing -- a threat to the existence of something (humanity, dominant cultural norms, the country, etc.). Not a "perceived" threat.
I'm genuinely and sincerely curious where you got the idea that "Existential threat means an implied, or perceived threat" rather than "a threat to the existence of a thing". The former has never been anywhere close to the dominant accepted meaning. Possibly you heard a politician or pundit use the term in a sarcastic way and misunderstood their sarcasm as literal? Or you heard someone use the phrase in a hyperbolic way?
Can you share one or more sources where people are using the phrase in the way you describe?
Facebook should just make a user's location required - not the ios permission to constantly track a user all over... but just a field on a user - city/state/country.
Or make it optional and just show that ad to users that have set their location field.
I don't think that's relevant here: the new prompts aren't about collecting gps data but correlating your identity across contexts. If you manually chose a city in Facebook, I think the ad in the other random app which used fb ad network would only be able to use it if the user said "yes" to the prompt.
I think theres a spectrum of techniques and no bright line. If you are temporarily in NY but live in LA, is it location based advertising to show the user an ad targeted to LA? What if you're at a regional airport and the only flights today are to LA? What if the ad network knows you have a flight booked to LA today? What if you have a lot of friends in LA so there's a good chance you will be there soon?
People would call the last one personalized and not "location targeted", but it's pretty hard to see where that flips.
Be careful not to conflate necessary with convenient. Static ads can still be local, e.g. in the local newspaper, on the radio station, on a sign post, or websites for local businesses/communities.
Agree. The spying part is what is wrong (and should be illegal without a consent and paid compensation). Ad agencies should not be allowed to track and model my behavior, and then use these models to sell me stuff. Or if they do they should pay me for it.
There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that happily pay for ads on Facebook over other platforms and see improved results after tweaking the targeting.
The issue is the privacy loss we get, not the efficacy of targeting.
I’m also skeptical of the claim that targeted ads don’t work better then static ads. However I think the default assumption should be that they don’t until we find evidence that they do. That is the burden of proof should be on the targeted ads.
All that said, I am not an authority on if any evidence exists, I have never looked into the literature my self, so perhaps this evidence already exists and I just don’t know about it.
At scale? Margin of error at best. I will tell you what my interests are by vising web properties that cater to them in that specific time. You deciding to keep showing me ads for a Nespresso machine when I'm reading about circular saws is idiotic.
That doesn’t pass the sniff test. Would you say that in general, you wouldn’t expect a difference in results if you sold Taylor swift albums to white suburban women in Iowa, versus black urban men in Atlanta?
You know what would blow both of those out of the water? Selling it to those that have indicated that they are interested in Taylor Swift as white suburban women in Iowa do not buy Taylor Swift albums. They buy mom jeans. Instead they are getting ads for Taylor Swift.
How do you increase your market past people who have already liked Ms. Swift?
The argument still stands - just replace TS with mom jeans. My point wasn't actually about Taylor Swift marketing - it was that demographic targeting is a reasonable way to identify an audience. Those mom jeans are not going to sell very well in a younger, urban demographic compared to Iowa.
Ebay didn't stop buying targeted ads, afaik they stopped buying a specific type of ad in google search that had the keyword 'ebay' in it. Most companies bid up their own searches with the theory that they have to or else their competitor would, but ebay showed that people who search 'ebay magic cards' would most likely skip the search ads and go straight to ebay.
No they completely stopped buying ads. The brand keyword experiment gave them the confidence to run an experiment to completely turn everything off.
>TADELIS: Yes. So, for non-branded search, we actually had no idea what the results are going to be. Because here, if I am searching for, example, a studio microphone I’m sure that on eBay I might find a variety of used ones. But if I’m not thinking about eBay, and I just search for “studio microphone,” if eBay doesn’t pay an ad, they might not even show up on the first page. And by the way, the automated machines at eBay that were doing the online bidding, they had a basic library of close to 100 million different combinations of keywords, because eBay has practically everything you could imagine for sale on the site. So, we really had no idea what the returns for the non-branded searches would be.
>TADELIS: And we took a third of these D.M.A.’s, and we turned off all paid-search advertising. This was an extremely blunt experiment where we’re saying, “What would happen if we didn’t advertise at all?” And to our surprise the impact on average was pretty much zero.
Given that ebay is a worldwide company that is relevant to pretty much everyone on the plant, it seems like they are exactly the case for targeted ads being least useful.
Nearly every company in the world does not fit that description, and I would bet that the vast majority of them would benefit from targeted advertising. One example being local stores targeted only to local people.
Targeted ads don’t work any better then static ads. This is new for me. Actually now that I think about it, all evidence I remember at the moment is anecdotal. So perhaps you are right.
Regardless of its efficacy, the legality should be out of the question.
Yes they do. It really bugs me all these HN threads state this and rely on their own personal experience not as an ad buyer but as a consumer. It's not true.
One can directly measure ROI and prove the value of this advertising. Especially FB provides for my business (political marketing) at least 10X better direct response value and that is mostly using 1:1 targeting and lookalike modeling.
I have routinely gotten over 100% immediate last-click roi from fb ads, for many clients.
I know for a fact many others have too. There are a ton of direct to consumer online-only products that easily measure this. Just make a page or item which you only use to advertise on FB. sales/spend. Game developers track this closely too.
This is anecdotal evidence. Nobody is disputing those exists. However I think FB and Google owe their existence a little better evidence, such as A/B testing, control group studies and even experiments to actually demonstrate their effectiveness. Until we have those (and perhaps we do; I seriously know nothing of the existing literature) the anecdotal evidence we do have should be taken only as indicative of effect, not proof of effect. Anecdotal evidence come with a ton of bias.
Cool. Just as I thought. It seemed wrong that such an easily measurable thing would never have been tested and a whole industry (arguable the biggest industry in the western world at the moment) had never measured it (or they had and found no effect).
What I like about the HN discourse is that if someone slings out a statement which is demonstrably false, someone that knows better might respond with a correction. That is why I left this comment, as I all my knowledge with the targeted ad business was anecdotal, and I desperately needed a correction.
i know... and so do probably most major and direct response marketers.
there are a lot of ways to measure outside of FBs analytics tools.
including the very simple simply using a refcode or even a specific product/url. How many purchases did you get / how much did you spend?
this is what i'm referencing. like that's so incredibly basic and it bugs me HN just either doesn't understand or lets their opinion on it go first
In my experience FBs inaccurate reporting is just a tiny amount of impressions delivered and they refund the $1 or whatever it is a couple times a year. Have they ever had a reporting anomaly on their analytics tools for tracking off FB conversions? they very well could have but I haven't heard of one.
> there are a lot of ways to measure outside of FBs analytics tools.
There is no way to validate their impression/click data that all the downstream metrics are reliant on. If you have a way, I'd love to know about it. The claim isn't that they make up conversions, the claim is that they overstate the ROI and cv% based on the denominator.
I’m not sure it makes sense to speak this broadly about efficacy, since there are probably variations in returns amongst different targeting groups and value props. Execution matters.
I’m also not sure if it matters whether they are actually effective. At least for the short term. If people believe they are effective, is there any difference in the dynamic?
It is clear that an ad on a search page for a product works much better than something that is not relevant. What I’ve seen from my wife’s Facebook is that Facebook heavily promotes ads based on your search activity elsewhere. If they know that you are more likely to buy a product than a random person, it would definitely improve the ad effectiveness. In other words they’re skimming intent based on google searches.
I think it's less to do with targeting and more to do with a noxious business model. When your business model literally relies on wasting people's time and/or compromising their privacy, it shouldn't be surprising that people eventually develop workarounds (ad blocking) or provide a business incentive for a third-party company (like Apple) to implement countermeasures.
to be fair, that could in part be the Baader-Meinhoff effect [1], where you'll only remember the ones that were scarily accurate (though I do agree with you).
I don't know what the hit rate was, because as you suggest I likely ignored the irrelevant ads. However, the ads that were relevant were so eerily accurate (including things many of my friends and acquaintances wouldn't know about me) that I didn't want anything more to do with the platform.
It’s an insidious racket at worst, and at best a case of an emperor with no clothes.
Mass advertising needs to die off already. Just hold better search and filtering tools and empower people to discover what they want instead of telling them what they should want.
