Whenever I read articles like this, I get more and more horrified.

I mean, I know that adtech spy on us a lot, but I didn't knew for example that using Bluetooth while the app is shut down was possible.

Makes me very wary even of dumbphones, for example I bought a dumbphone recently, and yet it came with Facebook and Google Assistant both pre-installed.

There's a reason everybody wants you to install their app instead of just using their website, there's much more opportunity of tracking.

To hurt you. The reason is to hurt you and it's unfortunate that we're in denial about it.

I think "exploit" is more accurate than "hurt" here.

> The reason is to hurt you

I'm not sure how this reasoning works. Some company making money using your information isn't with intent to hurt an individual, generally speaking. It's rare that such an opportunity even exists.

To the extent that the individual and the marketer's interests are not aligned, the harm is borne entirely by the individual. It doesn't matter if the intention is to harm the individual; a blatant disregard for their interests accomplishes the same thing at scale. Not caring about what occurs to the individual means that systemically decisions will be made at their detriment.

Get put in a filter bubble? Have your government track you for protesting? Get on the wrong side of grey market price discrimination? Have your access to data and websites revoked?

Parties to a transaction that have no power don't come out ahead.

GP is saying disregard for the population's interests (plural "you") is equivalent to intending to harm many individual "you"s.

I agree that intent matters, but lack of intent is not a get out of jail free card.

There's a reason both murder and manslaughter are crimes.

In some way they actually DO have the goal to hurt you though, specifically because it is aligned with their way of making money. When it comes to the attempt to shackle you onto their platform, increase "engagement" (outrage and negative emotion), put dark patterns into place to make leaving as hurtful as possible, and also invading the privacy of people not even directly using their platform. [1]

Facebook hurting you might be because they want the money, but they specifically choose to make money by hurting you, and society. [2][3]

So in the end I don't think it is wrong to phrase it that way. Someone beating you up in exchange for money still has the goal of beating you up.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psycholog...

[2]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007995.2021.1...

[3]: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/social-media-news%20consumpt...

My data is worth money, that's why they want it. If they take it from me without permission, how is that not stealing? And then isn't stealing obviously hurting me?

Just because you don't know how much your data is worth, and may not even know the crime happened, doesn't make it not a crime or not harmful.

Consider voyeurs who take upskirt photos. Even though the victim may never know that data was stolen, it's undeniable that it's an invasion of privacy and often a criminal offence.

Isn't it disingenuous to say it's stealing? From my perspective, I would be exchanging my data with the services provided and if I have a problem with the level of data collection I can always stop using the service and delete my account. I'm sure there are services today that are useful to me that are not possible without data monetization.

It's a question of degree, I don't inherently mind being advertised too or getting targeted advertisements. I do mind having my entire location history known by many parties.

I can get the former largely without the latter. I am concerned when a random app has access to the latter because they feel entitled to collect it by virtue of installation.

The number of leaps you made in this one short post is truly astounding.

> If they take it from me without permission, how is that not stealing?

They don't take it. The value of your information is either inherent (is all information inherently valuable somehow?) or in how it can be used. There is no information "staked claim" as with a natural resource. If you don't have the infrastructure and relationships, you can't monetize it... similar to natural resources. Maybe there should be an individual "staked claim" (which is what the GDPR mostly does), but arguing as if it's a given because "I should be able to make money and nobody else should" is not compelling. This is why there are so few laws regarding it and there's the inherent quasi-legal issue of tracking someone's "staked claim" without tracking them.

> Some company making money using your information isn't with intent to hurt an individual

The Mercer family didn't personally want to kill, imprison, or cripple a bunch of people, but that's certainly what they achieved with their opiod business.

The hyperbole against adtech on hackernews is insane. I swear most people here think its the biggest problem that the world faces.

I mean, it arguably drives the out-of-control materialism that is currently devastating the environment. Not sure it’s hyperbole.

Yeah I'm no fan of it either, but i don't think its responsible for materialism in our society, thats been around much longer than adtech.

It's the biggest problem the online world faces? It's structurally unsound and it's making itself into the foundations of the future world in general.

Maybe we are among the few people who understands the issue??

I mean, grandma isn't going to figure this out on her own. She is happy to have a way to get in touch with her grandchildren and has no idea she is being exploited.

There's several reasons why everyone wants you to install the app, some of which aren't sketchy.

I get pop ups from sites all the time asking me to try their site, every darn time I visit. Mai it stuff like Reddit, Imgur, most news sites. I’ve tried the apps and they’re worse.

I’m not sure there’s any explanation other than more ad/data revenue.

Are there apps that give superior experience than web sites nowadays? Even not accounting for privacy, the apps are generally just shittier with less functionality.

I used to give the Google apps as examples of apps being better, but the gmail app is more buggy than just using gmail in a mobile browser, not to mention the integrated phone mail app.

Our experiences overwhelming align but one counter example is Discord. The chess.com native client is also reasonable.

There are some apps that provide some functionality that genuinely works best and I use the Discord mobile app. Of course, I didn’t instal it based on the pop ups.

Similar, there’s quite a few chat/video apps and games where apps make sense. And none of them prompted me to download the app or show lies like “better in our app” crap.

Sometimes we can solve problems with technology and as a HN reader that is maybe more interesting.

But it is always better to address the root cause of the problem. This often means a policy or legal issue rather than a technical, but has the advantage of not becoming a whack-a-mole technical race.

> Are there apps that give superior experience than web sites nowadays?

The IMDB app is far better (to me) than the dumpster-fire that has become their website. Other than that, I agree with the sentiment that most apps for websites are not worthwhile to install.

> The IMDB app is far better (to me) than the dumpster-fire that has become their website

Funny, to me the IMDB app is the perfect example of a dumpster-fire app, with every 3rd tap/action resulting in an “invitation” to sign up for an account.

Works for my use case, which is being signed-in and managing my reviews/watchlist.

It is not necessarily a dumpster fire if one uses something else besides a popular graphical web browser to make the HTTP request and view the text. The "modern" web browser is complicit in creating the dumpster fire. Web developers can provide the inflammable materials, but a "modern" browser that by default auto-loads resources and runs Javascript is required to ignite it. There is no fire unless the right (=wrong) HTTP client is used.

I use a text-only browser and write simple command line "apps" (scripts) to retrieve text from sites like IMDB. It works very well. Opening pages on these sites in a "modern" web browser is an entirely different experience. We cannot ignore the complicity of the "modern" web browser in degrading the "user experience" in cases like this one.

My primary use case for IMDB is to figure out names of actors, for which I need to see the photos. There’s a lot to dislike about the modern web, but images are fairly useful.

1.sh takes an IMDb URL on stdin, saves the page temporarily and outputs a "lite" version, a more minimal page containing only actor photos. Of course, if desired, other film details could also be extracted and added to the output. 1.sh takes a single argument: photo size. Options are 140, 210 and 280. Requirements: curl (or quivalent), grep, sed, cut, sort, nl.

Example:

    # Don't forget the trailing fwd slash else 302 redirect
    echo https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9484998/ | 1.sh 280 > 1.html
    firefox ./1.html

    case $# in 1);;*)echo "usage: echo URL | $0 size";exec echo size options are 140 210 280;esac;
    read x;case $x in https://m.imdb.com/title/*/);;*)exec echo error: URL \(should end with fwd slash\);esac;
    x1=$(echo "$x"|cut -d/ -f5); 
    curl -H"User-Agent" -0 -4o "${x1}" "$x";
    (grep -o "<title>.*</title>" "${x1}"|sed 's/  */ /g';
    echo "<h3>Image size: $1</h3>";
    (exec grep -o "title-cast-item__actor\"[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's>.*href=><a href=\"https://www.imdb.com>;s/?ref.*\"/\"/;s[.*[<p>&</a><\/p>['|nl -s,
    exec grep -o "title-cast-item__actor[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's/.*>//;s/.*/<img alt=\"&\"[^\>]\*/'|grep -of /dev/stdin "${x1}" \
     |case $1 in ---////////////////////////---IMDb-CAST-PHOTOS-ONLY---\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\---)
      ;;140)cut -d\" -f1-2,7-8,15|sed 's[.*[<p>&/></p>['
      ;;210)cut -d ' ' -f1-3,9|sed 's/https:/src=\"&/;s[.*[<p>&\"/></p>['
      ;;280)cut -d/ -f1-2,18-21|cut -d\" -f1-3,8|sed 's/class=\"/src=\"/;s/\.jpg/&\"/;s/ 280w//;s[.*[<p>&/></p>['
      esac|nl -s,;
    exec grep -o "title-cast-item__char\"[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's/.*cast-item-characters-link..//;s/.*/<p>\&quot;&\&quot;<\/p>/'|nl -s,;
    ))|sort -n|cut -d, -f2- 
    rm "${x1}" 2>/dev/null;

Just disable scripts in the web browser you crazy cat.

What are some of the none sketchy reasons for "everyone" wanting us to use their apps. Like for major companies, where the service is deliverable through a website, what benefits does the user get from an app?

I can see why GPS based apps, or camera apps with filters, or networking apps 'need' to be installed apps (I don't know if an easy way to do GPS through a browser; speed and fast access to storage) ... but Amazon, Reddit, newspapers, ... what am I gaining?

Genuine question as a one time web dev I've always considered web sites written as an app, shipped with a browser, to be a negative. What am I missing out on?

Easy access to push notifications (which can be sketchy, but doesn't have to be) and believe it or not: Letting users put a shortcut on their homescreen. Sure, you can place a shortcut to a PWA in the Chrome browser but most users won't be configuring that, even if you guide them through it.

In Brave/FF mobile you open then menu and click "add to home screen", do other browsers not have that? Push notifications are pretty common on the web now, aren't they? (I don't use them).

Both Chrome and Safari have the "add to home screen", but Safari doesn't have push notifications, not even for "installed" webapp.

I remember the time when news were flooding the internet evangelizing iphones as the platform of the web, a platform that would allow websites do anything a native application could.

What a letdown...

> I remember the time when news were flooding the internet evangelizing iphones as the platform of the web, a platform that would allow websites do anything a native application could.

> What a letdown...

The original iPhone demo showed the actual desktop version of the NYT website loading in Safari. Websites were the ones that later optimized for mobile.

And I don’t remember iPhones being promoted as giving websites anything approaching native app capabilities except when Apple tried to sell that line to developers before they had a public SDK. Nobody bought it, even then.

These seem like reason that help the business, not the user. Are there any legitimate reason that help improve the user's experience for having an app? I can see this for some games and things that native access is usable. but a shortcut to the homescreen and push notifications are mostly an annoyance for users.

What? Those are pieces of functionality that some users actively want. The experience of having to hunt for Yelp in Safari sucks vs. having it as an icon. Being able to get push notifications is effectively the only thing messaging apps even do! If these features weren't important then why do they even exist?! The irony is that Apple knows if they provided push notifications to mobile websites then suddenly their catalog of apps would have a lot less value as people would be much more willing to just make websites.

Like seriously; compare your comment to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27348626 . You just so happen to be weird: that's all.

Most of the non-sketchy reasons are related to iOS Safari being crippled.

For example, I worked on a rich text editor, and we wanted to put a bar with text formatting tools above the touch keyboard. This is not possible in the browser: your webapp cannot measure the keyboard or the remaining available viewport (and the keyboard's size depends on the input method and the iPhone model).

Another example I experienced is when we wanted to have full-screen dialogs with buttons at the bottom. If you do that, then the users have to tap your buttons twice, because the first tap only expands Safari's browser UI, and your buttons near the bottom of the screen only work while that UI is expanded.

I have an app for most sites, its called my browser. If the app isn't taking advantage of a feature on my phone then it doesn't make sense to package it as an app.. unless they are getting something out of it. Going to make a broad and sweeping generalization here: they are getting money from tracking.

Counterthought: I've been running a popular web-only site for about 5 years now and I get a little under a hundred requests per month for it to be made "into an app". A lot of users just want to be able "to install it" or to "get to it from my home screen" or "to get to it faster" (even after pointing out they can add bookmarks to home screens). It's also tempting from my POV to make an app just for discoverability reasons (e.g. users browsing the app store discovering my site).

I haven't made an app (don't know how!) and I definitely wouldn't add a "download our app or else!" banner/wall, but I've been extremely surprised from the other side of the table to see just how many users seemingly just want an app for an app's sake, even if it's functionally no different from a responsive mobile view.

That is interesting!

You can contract out the app development.

Freelancers are cheap if you hire from poor countries.

Seriously, what are they? Every time I get pointed at an app, I can only think of https://xkcd.com/1174/

Many (most?) apps don't do it, but the useful feature for me that's not possible with a web page is reliable, unobtrusive, background updates.

Things like weather (with or without current coarse location), sports scores, headline news benefit from up to the minute data fetches, but older data is still useful.

For communication apps, often people would like notifications on inbound messages, so that can fit with web push apis to get data; but if you don't want notifications, you can't consistently make messages available to read offline.

Only 5 is really a legitimate reason, all the other things can be done on par with a website.

I think we need "Demand explanation" button for comments like this . It's a useless statement as is. It's essentially trolling and trolling shouldn't be happening on HN.

I know the reasoning of that statement but it's not providing an argument to refute. What am I supposed to say? "No. You can't, that's why it's not happening".

I do not see how you could read it as such. Because the reason / explanation is already given, as all the options that were mentioned (1-4) can be easily matched by any website, I think it is rather self evident.

1) You can add websites as app icons to iOS and Android. 2) Websites can hold persistent identities, and devices can otherwise remember the login details. 3) Websites UI can be anything and have nearly all options that apps can have, depending on the quality of the UX, which depends on the designer in any case. 4) A professional website will not be any slower if properly designed.

Now on 5, that depends on the specifics of the app. Some types do benefit greatly from being boarded on a device. An example would be Procreate for instance, which can not be mimicked on par in webform.

1) As I said, it's too involved. Only a fraction of your users would know how to do it, you will need to teach them.

2) Websites do that through Cookies and Local Storage. These have limits and users would be purging them en mass. The data of the app doesn't disappear for no reason.

3) As I said, the problem is that it runs within a browser if not added to the homescreen. It is a window within a window.

4) Professional or amateur design, websites data is managed by the browser and not you. Caches get invalidated, you download everything again. It happens all the time.

Just being able to do something is not enough, Apps are much smoother experience.

As an android user, I personally hate having to use apps. Websites are much easier to use and I can zoom (and override if they try to block it). I can use extensions on firefox (yes it's possible) and modify the behavior when needed.

I also cannot bookmark pages from apps. I can, however, add websites to the home-screen. I don't see any reason to download fat binaries for a worse experience.

Are you an app developer? You seem to be very biased.

I do Web and Apps. I also hate apps on Android, it feels like invasion.

BTW, I’m not talking about websites(articles and forms) but Web apps(task achieving experiences). Of course it’s just as bad experience to have a website as an app. it’s even worse when you are being forced to.

6) notifications.

Though, (1) is wrong on iPhone; there’s an “add to home screen” action in the share menu.

This exists on Android browsers as well (and has for years).

>Though, (1) is wrong on iPhone; there’s an “add to home screen” action in the share menu.

As I said:

>WebApp shortcuts are quite involved.

Most people don't know about that functionality, you need to teach them. It would have been cool if Apple supported that, then I guess everyone would have been trying trick you into it like the good old days where every website was trying to trick you into making it you start page.

Without examples I think the downvotes are justified, note they said there are reasons and suggested that those reasons are widely applied. Which is different to 'there could be reasons' and 'it would be good if everyone moved to using those aspects that give justified benefits'.

The expectation is 'everyone wants you to use their app so they can track and advertise better' and the parent basically said 'nuh-uh'. We need more to be able to consider it substantive and benefiting the conversation, IMO.

we can have privacy, security, autonomy

and it is possible to do it with apps if we shift to apps being a service for the user, rather than a service for the developers sponsors

There's a reason that they're cranking up lawsuits and rhetoric against the Apple "monopoly" on app stores, too.

Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1174/

> Whenever I read articles like this, I get more and more horrified.

> Makes me very wary even of dumbphones

If you care about it, consider GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, which run FLOSS and have hardware kill switches for microphone and other things.

>If you care about it, consider GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, which run FLOSS and have hardware kill switches for microphone and other things.

Last time I checked in with the Librem project, the phone was completely unusable as a phone because the power management and in particular the sleep mode wasn't working properly. Sometimes the phone would wake up from sleep, and since the power management was buggy it would blow through the entire battery charge in an hour.

So essentially you'd need a backup phone for your Librem 5 because you never know if it'll be dead when you need to call 911.

Currently, Librem 5 lasts about 10 hours on battery (sleep isn't there yet), and Pinephone can last 24 hours.

Last time I checked, these phones are not allowed in my country.

In my country all phones must have permission from the government to operate, and the phone manufacturer that need to ask this permission in first place, any phone detected by cell towers that aren't one of them, can be legally banned from the network (not just YOUR phone, but all identical model phones!)

Waiting for MMS support, my friend.

> I didn't knew for example that using Bluetooth while the app is shut down was possible.

On modern Android versions, there's some serious limitations on apps running in the background at all. In most cases, if you want your app to run in the background, you gotta put up a notification that is displayed the whole time that background service is running.

Oh and also. Scanning for bluetooth devices is a fairly battery-consuming activity as far as I can tell.

On the other side though Google uses this stuff, also wifi hotspots, to track you as well.

Whatever the opinion on tracking, Google definitely carves out their own moats and are hypocritical in a lot of respects. Arguably pushing changes to hurt their small competition given they have better/more pervasive personalized tracking without the low hanging fruit.

if it has facebook and google assistant, isn't it really an (Android) smartphone which looks like a dumb phone?

It could be running KaiOS which is the 3rd most popular mobile phone OS, but not quite as functional as Android or iOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

It was KaiOS actually, that is based on FirefoxOS.

Unfortunately they went so hard on dumbphone specs that it ran poorly, kept crashing all the time because it kept running out of ram. (it had 256mb of RAM I believe, or 128, don't remember, one of the two).

Newer Nokia/HMD dumb phones come with a Facebook app, they are not running Android.

> I mean, I know that adtech spy on us a lot, but I didn't knew for example that using Bluetooth while the app is shut down was possible.

And now that so many of us leave BT on all the time for our BT earbuds and airpods, I'd assume it's become better at tracking, not worse

Some years ago, I questioned those sort of pre-installations on smartphones of Facebook and G-whatever on HN. I got some reply that this is what users wanted. Total nonsense. At that time, most people who bought these computers had zero familiarity with these things. Anyway, users were never asked. There is no opt-out. There is a long history of pre-installed crapware on computers. It predates "smartphones" and "apps". Resistance from computer purchasers today seems nearly non-existant. Not too long ago, we used to remove this stuff after purchasing a new computer, e.g., a laptop.

Custumors need to be taught agency to avoid this stuff.

How can we teach it to them?

Perhaps it is not customers that need to be taught something but developers that need to be taught something.

Bluetooth scanning is actually considered a location privilege on Android already. You see lots of angry reviews on apps for accessing Bluetooth devices saying "this app has no business accessing my location", not realizing the contradiction. Maybe they're breaking it out to avoid this confusion?

I thought it is precisely because it wasn’t possible that contact tracing required a special API

You have to go full FOSS and run debian on a pinephone.

I would have assumed there is an os notifications api, and the apps have no idea what surface the notification will be shown on.

You are assuming they were aware of that capability.

Not OP: I have a fit band but it only gets notifications if Bluetooth is on. I'd be (ie, I am) surprised to find you couldn't turn Bluetooth off and that they purposefully provide a switch that doesn't work so they can fool you to thinking you can turn it off.

Presumably only Android works like this?

The beacon technology that uses bluetooth when apps are off originated with Apple: https://developer.apple.com/ibeacon/

They've also taken a hardline stance against right to repair, which is a deal breaker for a lot of HN. Unfortunately, there aren't many modern options for people who care about both owning their devices and not being spied on by them.

>They've also taken a hardline stance against right to repair

By which you mean Google, Microsoft and Apple?

>Apple, Google & Microsoft Have Teamed up to Block the Right-to-Repair Law

https://wccftech.com/apple-google-microsoft-team-up-to-stop-...

Which is why I buy Apple: I may, on rare occasions, want the ability to mess with my device, but I always want privacy.

> for a lot of HN

I wonder what fraction

"Facebook _could_ still fingerprint users using BlueTooth"

This article's title and narrative makes it sound like Facebook is using bluetooth fingerprinting to geolocate users against their wishes, and that Android's new permission will end that. However reading the text carefully it never actually claims Facebook is currently doing that. Are they or not? Is this article a hypothetical? That seems very disingenuous but also very typical of the kind of stories on privacy and advertising I see online.

My hunch is that the could language is couching since it can be hard to know for certain of Facebook is storing the data or just doing something else. But I think the implication is that they at least were looking at it when they weren't supposed to be

I think if Facebook did such a thing, a journalist could find out about it by now.

Facebook isn't open-source, so it's hard to analyze what the app does, but not impossible, and Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny.

If the author had a smoking gun, he/she would have put it in the lede. Parent is right, this is disingenuous.

So we basically are seeing that google was "right" from their point of view in securing a mobile OS.

Facebook maybe thought this day would never arrive and could have avoided that by doing their own mobile OS too.

Well, maybe they declared this battle as lost and focused on the next one: VR. Problem is that VR took too long to arrive and death on mobile can kill Facebook?

'...and death on mobile can kill Facebook?'

Seriously wondering what impact this would have on the world other than a positive one?

I'm not sure, going to a more monopolistic world still seems bad to me, even if I like and trust this particular player a little bit less than the others.

Facebook is a monopoly, in most parts of the world. I know some would claim that Twitter is a competitor, but I don't really see the two having much in common, other than being social networks.

Probably not positive for Facebook stock owner's world.

But I personally agree with you. My world will be better without it.

> Problem is that VR took too long to arrive and death on mobile can kill Facebook?

Facebook owns the most popular messaging app in the world (WhatsApp) and two of the most popular social networks in the world (Facebook, Instagram). Are they really in trouble because of the Android/iOS changes?

People need a phone to use Instagram. Instagram makes money out of ads, not out of its users. So anything that threatens this revenue source can kill Facebook.

They can still do ads without tracking, but would that still be a trillion dollar business?

Yes, but it would be worse for everyone involved

Welcome to Milton Friedman's capitalism. Beat earnings expectations every quarter into perpetuity or watch your share price drop.

"Kill facebook" might be a tad hyperbolic for a company which basically prints money. "Facebook might be forced to get a haircut on mobile revenue" might be more accurate

Question is does google still collect the location data. And are they acting monopolistic here.

My understanding is that even the latest version of android phones home your location in real-time. Which google uses itself for ads.

> Which google uses itself for ads

Do you have a source? Google providing a location-based service for Android OS functionality is different from using it for ads.

Take a look at recently unsealed documents from court about google location.

I guess that's what happens when you start late. Everyone else has their moats in place and you either 1) start from scratch at hardware level and develop a new phone from the ground up - electronics, OS, utility apps, dev tools or 2) focus on creating the next platform.

Both are really high cost, complex, multi-year bets with lots of moving parts and no real hint of consumer adoption/market size until way after the ship's sailed.

In my opinion, as a consumer, they're really on the path to make VR happen and their wrist-based tech and Oculus is very promising. What VR still needs, after all those years since it's been accessible to the general public, is a killer app, and one can only guess why no one has developed it yet.

What would the "killer app" even be, you make it sound like it should be very obvious what it would be, but even knowing exactly what it should be, a killer app is still just luck and the right timing.

The only app that I could imagine bringing mainstream appeal would be a Ready Player One Oasis kind of thing (I've only seen movie, not read the book), but seeing and testing all the social vr apps we have now, the Oasis is the most fantasy thing about that universe.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, my point is exactly the opposite: since we know commercial VR for quite some time and there's no killer app yet, maybe there won't be a killer app at all unless technology improves so much it'll look like magic (like Ready Player One).

VR's probably not going to be bigger or even equivalent to mobile, so they should've tried harder.

I personally believe VR and mainly AR are the next and natural step in personal computing.

Ubiquitous computing may be the next step from there. Something like “the world is the computer and you just interact with it”.

It feels like VR is 5 years away forever.

Realistically, I feel like there are two near-intractible problems for widescale consumer adoption.

1. The space problem. For some experiences, yeah, you can sit in a chair and wear a helmet, but I'd expect many of the more compelling immersive experiences would involve flailing your arms and moving around. That's a recipe for disaster inside a small apartment without dedicated space-- you're gonna trip on something or break something. I seem to recall some designs for an "omnidirectional treadmill" to keep someone contained while giving them more room to roam, but that's a whole different thing to design and perfect.

2. The motion-sickness problem. I'm not sure if tracking will improve to the point where this isn't the factor it is now, but I'd expect some people are going to always have issues because of an conflicting sensory experiences-- the helmet says you're being blasted into hyperspace, but your stomach and legs say you're standing still.

VR also requires 100% task dedication

You can't alt-tab over to HN to browse during loading screens

Even assuming everyone had the hardware, the barrier to use is magnitudes larger than using a mobile device

Personally, I think VR has already plateaued

Hopefully VR will end up with a more permanent footprint than 3d cinema.

It is hard to evaluate VR with just the perception of what we have today and fantasies about how good the tech will be.

VR has been 'the next big thing' for a lot of decades now.

Be is gonna be more like 3d tvs.

Ar might be big, but vr is just silly

I don't see why it would kill Facebook. They still have the user profiles and photos with location and all kinds of other valuable signal.

Facebook realized that no amount of money was going to will a third mobile OS into existence. cf. Microsoft.

Microsoft actually had a winning formula. Make cheap phones that work alright. And they were getting market share with later wp7 and throughout wp8.

Between wp8 and WM10, they merged the phone team with the regular OS team, and eliminated (or at least gutted) their QA teams, and they decided to target the high end market only. There were no low spec WM10 phones, and there hadn't been many high end buyers anyway, so who was going to buy WM10? And upgrading to WM10, when available, was often a bad experience.

Also, mobile Edge had a nicer renderer than mobile IE, but it was sooooo much worse UX (laggy, slow, navigation buttons went into some sort of button press queue to be resolved seconds later). When you've driven away app developers, ruining the browser isn't a good choice.

So, it's not that you needed more money (although I'm sure it would help), you also need to not abandon the market niche you found in search of an unobtainable, but potentially more lucrative one, and you need to make releases be consistently better each time. (It would also help if one of the big players stumbled, but you can't count on that).

IIRC Microsoft didn't eliminate their QA teams until after Windows Phone 10 was mostly dead.

Regarding apps, bear in mind that Google went out of their way to prevent Youtube and their other services from working on Windows Phone, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/aug/15/... . There's nothing that Microsoft could've done to overcome that much of a disadvantage and anti-competitive scrutiny of Google hadn't gotten underway yet.

Google had apps for Windows Mobile 6, and Microsoft chose to throw that app ecosystem away for Windows Phone 7. WP8 could run WP7 apps, but for the best experience, you needed to redo a bunch of stuff in a way that only worked for WP8. Same thing for WM10, except that this time, Microsoft called it Universal, although a Universal app didn't work on the WP8 and WP7 devices; and AFAIK, WM10 never surpassed 7 or 8 in active devices; whoops.

Also, I had heard Microsoft blocked 3rd party browsers early on, when Mozilla wanted to develop Firefox for WP, that would have been a lot nicer than mobile IE and later Edge, and probably would have run YouTube just fine.

On the dates, I see a RTM date of Nov 2015, and GA of Mar 2016 for WM10; I think the end of QA and the merger of Windows Phone with Windows was actually at the same time, Nov 2014, AFAIK. It's a bit tricky to nail it down, but I think this article, read with hindsight speaks to those changes. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-layoffs-operating-sy...

Yeah, Microsoft had an exceptional OS that was competitive to iOS (and much better than Android) on its foundations and APIs. It had everything needed to succeed and get a big chunk of the market, except for a clear leadership.

Now, here we are, with extremely powerful Android phones that do little because they don't have a solid software foundation with which to build good software, an iOS has all the high-quality software.

We just retired a Lumia 950 XL in my household. It's an all around better experience than Android in my experience, but there wasn't much point in continuing to push the boulder up the hill. And I liked the ability to pop in a micro SD card, which Apple doesn't support.

From my vantage point, Google did everything it could to kill off Windows phone. There was the big spat over YouTube, where Google wouldn't write a native YouTube client and banned Microsoft's. Google bought SoftCard (I think?) and subsequently killed off NFC payments for Windows phones. When they bought Waze, they ceased all development for Windows mobile, allowing that application to atrophy.

There were certainly a lot of other reasons Windows mobile had difficulty. Not the least of which is developers didn't want to have to manage apps for yet another platform. It looked to me like Microsoft was making good strides there, nonetheless, with some nice tooling. I don't use more than ten apps with any regularity and there were solutions for each of them on Windows mobile, at least.

But, rather than make its apps available everywhere its users were, Google used its market position to starve a competitor. And it wasn't merely a case of deciding not to build apps for it. They took active actions to try to kill off Windows mobile before it had a chance to grow. I see no reason to believe they wouldn't do it with any other new entry. We're just stuck with a duopoly now.

> We just retired a Lumia 950 XL in my household.

Man, that's a lot of commitment! I gave up when an app I was using for work ended WP8 support and I updated my Lumia 640 to WM10 and wasn't happy with it (Mobile Edge is really terrible, but I already complained), I could give up that app and go back to WP8, but I wasn't willing to live with the notification center bugs in WP8 that were actually fixed in WM10. I still miss live tiles, and the janky photo uploader app I wrote. :(

The Lumia 950 XL shipped with Windows 10 native and was Microsoft's flagship phone, so it got updates for longer. But, yeah, live tiles were great and the UI was just super smooth. The dedicated camera button was fantastic. Being able to access Office apps in Continuum was really neat. I'm sure I have the timetable wrong, but there were features in Windows 10 mobile that took years before they were available on other platforms.

For now I'm using Square Home with a Samsung Galaxy, mostly because I like the hardware options on Android better. But, with the whole industry shifting to locked down devices much like iPhones, I may very well switch back to iPhone for privacy reasons. I really liked having a viable third option. C'est la vie.

There are some differences between Android phone, so it's difficult to judge if you don't list the right one.

They didn't even find enough users for their Android "launcher" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home

A Facebook phone probably would give even more critical reception ...

Years ago a Facebook phone was planned. Its differentiating feature as I recall it was the "like" button.

Nowadays it would be "share on insta"

But it's still interesting how they initially were late on mobile, with all the FBML embedded things (Zynga games) not working on mobile and things moving from their "platform" to mobile apps, but I assume for now with WhatsApp, Insta and messenger they "own" a notable amount of mobile screen time. Missing the underlying platform of course gives them "neutrality" that they can be on all OSes (till the privacy enforcements make it harder for them) instead of having to differentiate the Facebook phone from iPhone.

I can live without VR. I'm at a disadvantage without my mobile.

I remember that there was a facebook phone, don’t know what happened to it

While I'm sure personalization increases ad efficiency metrics to some degree, I'm curious to see how all this will actually "hurt" FB, either by making their ads worse in terms of CPA/CPC/etc or in advertisers pouring less money into FB and more money into other DSPs/inventories. As anything marketing, it's not that straightforward, really, and advertisers may very well keep running ads on FB despite all those changes.

So much this.

IIRC only a very few use cases exist where such kind of location data is absolutely essential. They’re still gonna get loads of data from other sources, which would be good enough targeting for most advertisers.

Google should be in favor of privacy, their advertising model serves ads only when you want them about the subject you’re searching for. Facebook relies on knowing everything about you to show you ads when you don’t want them, hoping they’ll give you something you’re interested in clicking on.

I believe you're missing the fact that most people use a lot of Google services so it already has a pretty good model of who you are and what you're interested in without even the need of any shady tracking methods.

But Google still gets that info, just not Facebook. How is this not abuse of its market position?

For me, it's a lesser evil thing I guess.

If I have to choose only between Facebook and Google, I'd choose Google to have my data.

Why is that? Does Cambridge Analytica-type stuff not happen with Google?

I feel the same way as you but not because I think one is less evil. Rather, it's because Google brings me much more value in its search engine and productivity suite.

Google has a reputation for good internal controls (that Facebook was lacking at the time).

Google employees do not usually have access to user data - only a very small subset of engineers do, and it's strictly controlled.

"Political activists" is just one (rather unlikely) insider threat among many that a company like Google has to mitigate.

That will be a problem with any company that doesn`t let you encrypt your data.

It is technically impossible for something like Protonmail to read my emails.

This feature does not exist with most other email providers e.g. Gmail.

Even if we drop the activist threat model there is still the possibility of external hacking.

Possibly organized crime. I heard of one Yandex employee caught selling access to Yandex users email accounts.

Maybe something similar could happen?

I do not know which internal systems Google or related companies have to prevent employees from accessing user data.

Does anyone here have resources on this topic?

What is not dangerous ?

Nothing. Therefore I'll go skydiving without a parachute; hopefully that water I can see down there is deep enough.

After all, not skydiving is also dangerous.

Wrong question.

In 10 years google could have 50% different work force and different leadership. Does that make you reconsider your choice?

Google absolutely needs to be sued for monopolistic practices. You literally _cannot_ share location data without Google getting it as well. This is beyond ridiculous.

Corporate warfare in the internet age. Interesting to see how Apple and Google can materially impact FB.

I'm not sure this is effecting Facebook as much as they are making out.

People are still using Facebook, posting pictures, tagging people they know, checking into locations, posting what they buy and so on.

Still pently of information to track and sell to advertisers.

Ultimately we will see the effect by how much adverstising costs on FB relative to Google.

Google certainly won't copy Apple here because being able to track the hell out of you is very important for their own business model. Apple can afford that because they sell hardware and services but not data.

You can turn off wifi and bluetooth scanning beacons in your device's settings. It helps.

The value of the location based tracking is overrated.

Anyway, if you post an image to Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, the EXIF data has your location, or it can be solved from the content of the image.

With the exception of people who travel a lot, I really don't see why location, beyond what users enter into Facebook themself, would be particular useful.

That seems to be the theme with Facebook, they collect a ton of information that isn't obviously useful. So what do Facebook know that the rest of us don't? Because the engineers at Facebook aren't stupid, they must have a reason for collecting all this stuff. Perhaps it's just in case they might find a use case some day?

> Facebook aren't stupid, they must have a reason for collecting all this stuff. Perhaps it's just in case they might find a use case some day?

The most obvious use, I would think, is to train machine learning model. Not necessarily neural networks, it could be much simpler models. Even if you don't need the data now, it can be useful to store it for later use. Maybe at some point in the future a new model will be able to see patterns that are useful. I think they operate based on the principle that data is a valuable resource, even if not immediately useful. How much data they have about their users is one of their key advantages over smaller players.

In general though, more data about you, such as locations you visit, people you're friends with, activities you do, gives them more understanding of what kind of person you are, which is undoubtedly useful when it comes to try and sell you stuff. For example, think about friends you know really well. Presumably, you have some idea of what kinds of things they would like to buy for themselves. That's because you have a good mental model of what kind of person they are and what they like, what they might be interested in.

Facebook maybe has one big advantage over Google, which is that they are a social network. They can try to influence your tastes based on the idea that you are likely to want to try things that your friends are into. They can subtly or not so subtly show you things your friends are doing with the hope that you will want to try or buy those things too.

I have an idea for what they could do but I don`t want to give anyone here bad ideas...

I'm just guessing, but they should be able to infer several things by where you go during the day, such as your socioeconomic status based on the specific stores you frequent, for instance.

Not that it's a bulk of the business - but this would give google a legup for location targeted ads - I got a google ad for an autozone or similar once when I was one block from it - I am sure other data was also used to trigger that, but blinding fbook to this would mean that kind of ad dollar would be better spent with G if F didn't have that location data.

I also think there was a big push by these folks to also try to determine when you visited places to show that ads worked.. by getting your location at place X on this day and they showed an ad with 24 hours before for example.

F and G are also into people's "purchase history" / (debit card transactions, loyalty card data) for the same reason aren't I think (?)

I doubt FB is selling location to repo men like other location brokers - but that could change.

Dunno if ICE and other letter agencies buy loca data from F and G.. but like the Verizon thing about people's info is the new oil - gotta remember oil is used to create many more things than just gas. Sprint made more than a few pennies being forced to give up data, and so do others.

Certainly makes marketing dollars well spent when you can prove effectiveness and vice versa.

Id assume that people who are currently traveling are much more valuable targets: things like tour packages are something high margin and highly contextual.

Like, even if you only leave your home town once every two years, it might be worth more to facebook on that special occasion than the rest of the time.

why recommend a location to buy a product on the other side of the city when you can recommend a location across the street or next door

I heard that Android strips the exif location data from images when opening them in other apps, but looking at the documentation, it might just be in the case that you use the camera intent.

I am assuming the file browsing permission bypasses any exif stripping - which maybe is why so many apps ask for it it...

I guess the guys who know the most what it’s worth are Facebook and they seem to care about it

What if iOS or Android start to scrub that data for you?

Which I wish they did...

On Samsung's version of Android there is an option to remove the location data before you share to an app.

https://i.imgur.com/PVAaA2d.jpg

On iOS 14 I have set the camera's access to Location Services as 'never'. If I inspect the EXIF on iPhone photos that I've moved to my PC the GPS fields are blank.

Facebook can solve a location from the content of the image. Listen to yourself. Even you can identify a geographic location from many images, easily.

I don't know, it's kind of a stupid idea, give Facebook an image and yet the expectation is, they're not supposed to know or understand anything about it?

I've turned off location tagging on my Android camera. That setting exists.

> the user can breathe a sigh of relief as their location cannot be shared with nearby devices unless the app explicitly states it — which most users will unanimously deny.

If Facebook simply have their app say it won't work without accepting this, then I very, very much doubt that anything but a miniscule number of people would be uninstalling the app.

Under GDPR they cannot do this in Europe. You're only allowed to deny the user the experience of the app if the basic service cannot be met without collecting the user's data (i.e. location data for a turn-by-turn direction app)

While doing that anyway would be an egregious breach of GDPR I wouldn’t put it past Facebook to do it. They could release the update that prompts users to accept the tracking with the threat of being denied service, maybe pay a fine for breaching the GDPR regulations, take some time to ‘fix’ the issue and push out a new update after enough people have accepted to make it worth their while. I know it’s much more complicated than that but considering how much trouble people apparently have trying to leverage the data retrieval or removal requests under the GDPR[0] it looks like they think they’re above the law and are willing to make an effort to avoid complying with it. I wonder how far they’re willing to push it.

[0] https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

This is the Cauldron clamping down on the Kettle.

I'm not a big facebook user, but I suppose this is good for the privacy-minded that do use facebook. However, it seems hypocritical of Google to grant greater control to users over the data that 3rd party apps can obtain but practically none over what users can control in the Android & Chrome ecosystem.

> How I want the thing to be, "oh, the contacts permission is given but nothing here. Oh well. ". Same for location and SMS and other stuff.

Yes, that is a good idea. The user could also program in more elaborate filters, e.g. to expose a subset of contacts data, random data instead of the actual data, spoofed locations, etc. Also can be distinguish read-only or read/write, etc. (If the user does not have all of these elaborate options and more, then the app writer might realize what is happening and then might program it to complain if there is nothing there. Also, such options can be helpful for testing purpose as well as for user customizability, too.)

(I don't use the cell phone, but nevertheless such thing like you mentioned can be good idea.)

> How I want the thing to be, "oh, the contacts permission is given but nothing here. Oh well.

That's actually a good idea. I wonder if any Android distros do this. In theory, it should be possible, but I don't know how tricky it would be to implement.

Broad location narrows you down to a neighborhood where your economic value can be inferred so the optimal ads can be directed at your way. No sense in showing Bentley ads to the poors.

and i am saying that broad location can already be inferred from your cellular location

Just for Facebook though. Bet you they’re doing very little to encumber themselves in that respect.

Facebook is just a flower in someone else's garden.

What is that supposed to mean?

The app stores are the gardens, and Facebook is ultimately at the whim of the gardener.

Also, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_platform

On the contrary: Facebook is a garden full of people. If all the app stores banned Facebook, many people would work to get Facebook back – even those who don't like Facebook.

Or your contancts have done something that included you and you knew nothing of it. At least you liking something to action on your part. All of the other methods that Facebook uses to continue gathering data about you without your direct knowledge is the worst. It's this behavior that should be the nail in the coffin for Facebook.

I hope both companies burn in hell.

So, Google can make sure they are the only one's tracking you? I see. No conflict of interest there!

Facebook uses location data to learn where you live and where you go. For some, this location-based targeting might be fine since it serves them relevant ads.

Thanks, I hate it.

Why can't governments make tracking illegal?

These companies that manipulate population into buying products they don't want or need are the mythical "broken window".

Nobody mention how all this online business contributes to global warming. Factories produce useless products, that need to be stored, delivered, disposed of...

> Why can't governments make tracking illegal?

Because they're not really in charge anymore.

>Why can't governments make tracking illegal?

Why would they? These companies are collecting the data the government wants, it's a free service for the government and they only have to ask for the data when they need it.

Because some company with a successful app can build a real time population census for a foreign government.

Because web traffic for the purposes of advertising doesn't actually hurt anyone, and it pays for services the electorate likes.

> Why can't governments make tracking illegal?

Because then they won't receive a few million $$ in donation for the next campaign.

It's difficult to make regulation for a specific line that actually does disallow tracking without leaving loopholes and does not put weird restrictions on everyone else.

However, governments (at least some) are trying; GDPR is a step in that direction, but it has ovious associated difficulties have been discussed here in HN for years; California is moving in with similar laws, so there is a trend, but it will take years for it to get anywhere. I'd guess that EU will make "GDPR v2" (however that will be called) with severe restrictions on tracking by 2025 or so.

Well, GDPR went large steps in making it somewhat illegal, while users may still "consent" to being tracked ... which lead to big cookie banners nobody understands. Steps are being done, but lobbies are strong in their fight against.

> while users may still "consent" to being tracked

That's the problem, in my opinion. Users should not be able to consent to third party tracking because if they can, companies will use any dark pattern at their disposal to make them consent. Third party tracking in general should be banned.

Noyb, the NGO founded by Max Schrems, the guy who successfully sued Facebook, is preparing to build large cases against different users of cookie banners to get rid of all the dark patterns: https://twitter.com/NOYBeu/status/1399230262953787395

That's good progress.

However I agree to you that this isn't enough. Even without dark patterns too many people will click "yes" without understanding and this will live on in some way or another, till we make laws stricter.