I don't have Facebook and I'm generally skeptical of Apple's pro-privacy messaging. However, seeing this response from Facebook has gotten me very excited for this update. There must be more to it then Apple's generic 'Most Advanced Update Ever' marketing. I'm still skeptical of Apple's commitment to privacy, but I'm certainly happy to get this update. Apple should thank Facebook for the free marketing.
> I'm generally skeptical of Apple's pro-privacy messaging
That's a very healthy attitude towards Apple's claims. They developed all these APIs that allow app makers to spy on their users, and then blame the app makers for spying.
For example, why does any app need to know which other apps I have installed, and how long I use them? This permission should very sparingly pass the review process, and only for apps in specific categories.
I completely agree that it is a healthy attitude to have, and all of Apple's claims should be independently investigated. But I also agree that you should check facts or provide citations before spreading FUD:
- There was never any API for a third party app on iOS to get the time spent in another app. The only workaround I saw to this was an app that asked you to screenshot your app usage screen, and it was able to process those screenshots in an automated way (can't find the link).
- There is an API to open URLs between apps, so that one app can link to another app. When developers realized that they could check whether or not a given URL was openable to check if an app is installed, they started abusing this API to check every app on the system. Apple cracked down on the API in iOS 9 and made it so that all apps declare which other apps they can check, and App Review decides if they have a legitimate use: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio...
Good summary. And it’s common for apps that might not otherwise have a URL handler to have one for things like authentication callbacks from login with Facebook, emails from the app, etc.
APIs are great.. i want an app to be able to list all the apps installed. I just don't want facebook app to do it, because it really doesn't need that data, and I don't want to give it to them.
This should be done the same as with location and microphone access... ie. "ask the user". "Flashlight 2000 DX app wants to access list of apps installed - allow once, allow always, deny now, deny always". Facebook wants to track 50 different things? Well.. ask the user 50 different times and try to explain why you want access to their call history and calendar data (adding calendar entries could also be a write-only option, with optional unique ids to change/remove entries).... and give your UX team a headache. Also, "deny" should be the "bolded" default. Maybe even give the user a list of unchecked permission the app wants, with explanations why it needs them, and have the user check the ones they want to give to the app (default state is unchecked (deny)).
Also granularity is key... giving location access for bluetooth connections, giving "manage calls" access to stop playing music when you get a call, etc. is just stupid.
I don't think they're great, it seems like a way of obfuscating what the app really does. Your approach might work for savvy or paranoid users, but not everyone notices much beyond "contains ads" or such.
Apple needs to force them to be up front from the very beginning that their stupid game or screensaver or else is also a tracking app. And boot any app that uses your phone to do anything beyond what they told you they would do in the app store description.
IDK MacOS blocks saving exports from Sequel Ace every single time I try. Have to do a file dialog dance each time or it silently fails. Guess devs just have to stay on top of the changing API requirements.
I guess timing and education matters. People would just click through all those Windows alerts. So they were useless. And maybe people weren't so savvy about privacy and security.
Nowadays, people are more aware about such things, so maybe you can start to assume the users are more comfortable about computing and the internet. So they should change their direction.
I'd agree with the sentiment if it was like Samsung making fun of removing a headphone jack, only to do the same thing less than a year later.
But i want to be able to use an app to act as a VNC server (screen capture, inputs,...), or an app (eg. tasker automation) to start a vpn connection and an ssh server when i send a SMS to the device. I just don't want a screensaver app to be able to do that.
Basically, i'd be happy if those "risky" permissions would be hidden in app management in settings, disabled by default, and enabled only by power users.
The problem now is, that due to fscked up permissions schemes, some apps are unable to work at all, even the stuff they work now, some due to play store issues (eg. termux because they want to run downloaded code), and some due to missing apis (eg vnc servers).
> why does any app need to know which other apps I have installed, and how long I use them
What are you referring to? As far as I know, one app can't query the list and usage time of other installed apps on iOS. This stackoverflow question[1] seems to confirm this. But please enlighten me if I'm misunderstanding what you're referring to.
Why does an app need to know which other apps you have installed? Because it might want to interface with those apps obviously. Apple has actually ratcheted down permissions on that API because it was abused.
People want apps to be able to do things and those things can often allow tracking in addition to being useful to the user. There is pretty much one API Apple devised specifically for tracking users and this very issue is Apple attempting to shut down.
Clarification: Just to be clear, Apple isn’t shutting down the API entirely, they are changing it from opt-out to opt-in.
I can think of a few. An app might need to know if Twitter is installed so it can show a button to open a link in twitter or a web browser (This was before App Deeplinking was a thing). Maybe if an app company had multiple apps that it wanted to cross sell and see if they have both apps installed to enable certain functionality.
> For example, why does any app need to know which other apps I have installed, and how long I use them? This permission should very sparingly pass the review process, and only for apps in specific categories.
Since I can't edit my original comment, I chose to reply to it instead of replying to everyone who corrected me. Yes, there's no API to directly query installed apps and usage on iOS. I think I got the wrong impression from years ago, when the function canOpenURL() could be abused to detect which apps were installed[0]. Thank you all for the corrections.
Not only do they develop these technologies (wifi location db, ibeacon, deep linking, findmy, etc)
They don't give you the ability to block them.
and of course, you can't find out what is going in and out of your phone over the network, and you definitely can't firewall it. ("content blockers" are nerfed)
You can disable almost all of those things in one way or another.
The problem is all of these things you mention are also useful for things users want. Often they are useful for things users want inside their applications. Nobody wants a neutered OS.
To disable ibeacon you turn off bluetooth and/or location services. I don't know about find my - it may locate other people's stuff no matter what you do. You can't really disable deep linking. If you get a text message with an amazon link, the amazon app will see it.
It is not apple's way to advertise this capability is available, and give you granular control.
For some reason I have a bad feeling about this update actually getting released. I'm worried that FB is going to convince some judge to tell Apple they can't do this, and delay it for months or years. Maybe (hopefully) this is an irrational worry, but you never know the extent to which people will go when billions of dollars are on the line.
I think what's more likely than any kind of legal injunction is that FB and Apple will come to a "mutual understanding". Maybe Facebook will license Apple Maps (for a princely sum) and make some symbolic compromise on data collection that lets Apple water down the permission dialogs.
I’d argue that Apple executives realize that privacy is one of the unique USPs of Apple compared to their main competitor, since the value exchange between Apple and their customers is simpler (customer pays Apple money, Apple delivers hardware/software).
Now that so much news has spread about these privacy additions, Apple selling out will actively hurt this image they have spent a lot of time building. It’s going to have to be an extremely lucrative agreement between them and Facebook for it to be worth it.
The problem is Apple relies on hardware sales. FB's entire business from the top down is ad money. And source for a billion dollar ad business? That sounds way higher than my initial impression. (And google paying to be the default SE is not advertising imo)
> Apple’s most recent earnings report revealed that it earned $12.51B from Services in calendar Q3/fiscal Q4, though there is no breakdown on how much of this comes from ad revenue.
Notice the 'could's:
> Samik Chatterjee argued the company could leverage the millions of users who search its App Store and Safari browser daily to generate the stellar growth seen by Facebook and Google in recent years.
> he launch of Apple TV+, coupled with Apple Inc’s foray into digital services, could help the company increase its income from advertising by more than five fold to $11 billion annually
This article is literally just speculation. Actually, it's quoting someone's speculation.
There’s a lot of guesswork there. It’s even worse than that actually, they assume that their advertising operation will grow as Facebook’s. It is extremely implausible under current conditions (no tracking and ads limited to the stores). So yeah, if Apple were Facebook, ads would be important to them.
And even the wildest estimates put it far short on the actual money maker, which is hardware sales. When push comes to shove, if they have to choose between ad and devices, they won’t hesitate long.
I saw a few articles when I searched from the previous year which also projected growth to the $2b number the next year but as Apple bundles it all in services who knows?
This is honestly pretty reasonable. Apple already knows which apps I download and this is made fairly clear (you're logged into the App Store and your account lists all apps you obtained).
Apple also knows which App Store ads I saw given that their server sent them to me in the first place. The ads are (at least for now) limited to the App Store and don't carry over across the web or other Apple apps.
Thus I don't see the problem with Apple using the data they've already got to provide anonymized conversion metrics to app developers.
I see what you mean, but iPhone says are something like 150x that. If privacy concerns weaken even 1%, that wouldn't be worth it. Maybe that's unlikely, I'm not sure.
This looks like simply naive thinking. Without evidence to backup your statement about Apple, everything about it breaks the cardinal rule of the ads business.
On the contrary—I’m not sure if you’ve ever watched Mad Men, but there are some pretty good examples of ads in there that didn’t use tracking at all.
Calling tracking a cardinal rule of ads is like calling HTML a cardinal rule of communication. Sure it might be ubiquitous now, but if HTML were to suddenly disappear I guarantee communication between humans won’t stop — it would adapt. Tracking isn’t a foundation, it is merely what has worked this past decade or so.
My point is that advertising right now uses tracking because it can be used, and it makes money.
But in no way does it need it. We could easily go back to untargeted, reasonably effective ads that appeal to broad markets instead of extremely specific ones.
Facebook could not afford not to as they would lose a huge amount of users. Apple is just doing to them what FB does to people: Accept these terms, be tracked everywhere, or miss out on all the people providing us free content on our platform. Many people accept that because they don't want to be unable to communicate or view things in their garden. That is leveraging their huge scope to push less favorable terms.
So FB has Apple with some leverage over them saying accept this or else. FB is in a weak position because it would be hard to tell your users hey leave Apple because they won't let us take all your data without permission. I don't feel for them at all.
I think they would. Facebook products are a huge part of any app ecosystem, and without them, Apple customers would be pissed.
Ecosystem concerns aren’t as relevant today, since both Android and iOS have everything you’d want, but in the olden days of Blackberry, Microsoft, and many other mobile operating system vendors trying to compete, they were always seriously hampered by their lack of ecosystem.
You’d be surprised how many fb users (mostly less technical) just use a browser to access fb..
They don’t need an app in the App Store to do so..
So this might actually be a fight against the strange people working at Facebook that will get them to rethink what it is they do everyday..
I think this is a good case for what Apps bring to the table and highlighting what the cost is privacy wise. As a developer I think apps are cool, the way they're leaking data is awful. This is something the platforms need to step up control over and I think that because this isn't the case there's an incentive to keep things as they are. Like automotive and the iterative improvements.
I use the low bandwidth option if I need to get on there. mbasic.facebook.com no nagging about apps and you can actually use the messenger web interface.
I tell my mom she needs to use FF containers for FB. I set it up so she can't do anything else. She's happy & gets to see her extended family pics/updates.
Isn't this done automatically now in Firefox? As in, you don't need to even install the containers add-on as Facebook and related properties are automatically opened in a default Facebook container?
Apple customers generate a large chunk of the content there is to see in Facebook products, so losing them would diminish engagement across all remaining platforms. If competitors can capitalize on the opportunity, that could very well trigger a death spiral that would destroy Facebook within mere months, whereas Apple could weather that easily.
Few things could flat out annihilate Facebook, but punching a large hole in their network is probably one of them.
I would be delighted to have that sh-t gone from everyone's iPhone,
because it would create an obvious a compelling opportunity for someone to finally break the stranglehold of FB's monopoly.
I miss my friend and family connections, but most people in my community won't go near that ecosystem with a flaming 10' pole any longer, and many friends like me, despair that our loved ones' reaction to e.g. the Social Dilemma and ongoing revelation after revelation of sociopathic corporate amorality is "yes that is sad but I have choice" because "all my friends are only insta" or "my cottage business depends entirely on my pages" etc etc.
They are almost certainly doing this; question is whether they will file it.
FB's noise around this feels very out of character, even for something that's devolved into a personal conflict. They may be truly scared of the update.
Facebook has been reported as assisting Epic Games in its lawsuit and been preparing for months for lawsuits against Apple. For the kind of company it is, it might pull a “Peter Thiel on Gawker” move, though it won’t reflect well on its name. But not enough people seem to care much about Facebook’s practices or what it does. After the uproar over WhatsApp’s upcoming policy change on data sharing with Facebook, several people moved to other chat platforms. But I still see those people stuck with WhatsApp and also using Facebook and Instagram even while knowing that these are all part of the same company.
FB undoubtedly knows enough about powerful judges and politicians to get what they want. J. Edgar Hoover's wildest dreams didn't contemplate what Facebook can do.
The more likely scenario in the long run is that Apple is forced to allow alternative App stores, which will probably be riddled with malware and spyware.
I know nothing about legal system, but it seems like Apple could make an argument that they are helping their apps be GDPR and CCPA compliant? That could explain the strange wording "Ask app not to track" - apps can still track, just not as much as before, so perhaps more of a compliance permission. Just speculation.
I think they say “Ask app not to track” because, if they say “Make app not track you” or something similar, they open themselves to huge lawsuits if (much more likely when) any app turns out to keep tracking users.
I don’t have the link handy, but Apple’s policies on this require apps not to track users across apps through other means if a user chooses “Ask App not to Track” at the prompt. The prompt text is just to show that Apple cannot technically prevent tracking even when a user tells the app they don’t want to be tracked across apps. There are a lot of shady practices being spread through common/popular SDKs used by apps.
That Apple is unfairly privileging its own ads business. It's a tough cookie though; the offending behavior is simply Apple's truthful (if arguably hyperbolic) notice and consent popup.
It could work if they demonstrate that Apple does track its user across apps for advertising purposes without showing consent dialogs. I am more than a bit skeptical, but you never know.
Apple isn't a monopoly -- they're a walled garden.
I'm all for regulations that force Apple to open up their hardware so that people can install different software on it, or to disable the walled-garden mode of their software platform akin to how you can install lineageOS or freedroid on android devices but I don't think it's reasonable to mandate that Apple must allow Facebook to do something with their software simply because Apple does it with theirs.
iAds will definitely be privileged. If you read the documentation on what is available to Apple vs. others, you will see Apple's own ad business will definitely benefit from this.
It's one giant fighting another. Apple wants to destroy ad revenue and shift everyone to a paid App model because Apple can get its 30%. I bet you if Apple loses control of the AppStore for anti trust reasons, they would be all for ads.
That's Facebook's claim, yes. And when it comes to Apple News and even the App Store, Apple also serves advertising on behalf of its partners. It's also true that Apple themselves runs a lot of ads, and benefit from ad networks through the services they've integrated in the past. In fact, Apple justifies their 15-30% cut by suggesting that the App Store is itself a platform that promotes apps, and has featured apps in its own advertising on billboards and television.
So it's hard to come to a conclusion that Apple hates ads. It's easier to say that Apple dislikes advertiser networks, since their own attempt at a generic network (iAds) failed miserably. It's not even clear to me that blocking tracking is going to kill ads as a revenue stream, all it will do is make ads more expensive because they're slightly less targeted on iOS?
Also, Apple runs their own seemingly successful ad market within the App Store app — something I'm reminded of each time I search for an app and see a competitor's app I don't want at the top of my search results, filling my screen with the new design. So it's hard to say that Apple does this for the best user experience. Showing extra popups isn't great UX. And Apple likes free apps, it makes their phone and platform more valuable, so they can charge more for the hardware knowing folks can get great apps inexpensively or free.
While I'm in favour of Apple losing its complete monopoly over App Stores and apps that compete with its own, I actually am in favour of Apple enforcing these policies on apps from its own App Store and platform. And while I would say that third-party stores could have different stances on permissions, the idea that a third-party app store could prevent a popup asking to share a phone's identifier, for example, is frankly a security bypass. The same is true if apps want to communicate with other apps without the operating system knowing.
Personally, I'd love it if Apple went a step farther and used the network layer and code signing to identify which apps actively use which trackers and tracking networks the same way they currently identify apps that use the microphone and camera. It'd be fascinating to see an operating system feature that says 50% of my network traffic in Application X was telemetry being sent to Facebook, for example.
> Personally, I'd love it if Apple went a step farther and used the network layer and code signing to identify which apps actively use which trackers and tracking networks the same way they currently identify apps that use the microphone and camera. It'd be fascinating to see an operating system feature that says 50% of my network traffic in Application X was telemetry being sent to Facebook, for example.
If you had broken this paragraph out into a separate post, it might get more and highly deserved attention.
This is Facebook’s narrative, but if Facebook makes a bit less money, how exactly does that “shift everyone to a paid App model”? Facebook’s annual net profit is an 11-digit number. Apple’s move is bad for Facebook’s stock price and good for users, and that’s probably all the noticeable impact.
Even if Apple’s motives are somehow nefarious, Facebook is being scummy in the first place, so it’s a fair move for Apple to take advantage of that, IMO.
> how exactly does that “shift everyone to a paid App model
You nailed it. Facebook wants to confuse and distract. There's absolutely no reason why Apple's push for user permission on tracking would cause the Facebook app to become subscription-based. WTF?
It already is ‘unviable’ for most companies because Facebook and Google dominate it.
It wouldn’t become unviable for Facebook because even with a smaller number of users consenting to tracking they would still have a gigantic ad market.
I'm skeptical as well considering Apple selectively leaves gaping holes depending on levels of public knowledge (e.g. talk a big game on encryption, but don't encrypt iCloud backups while using dark patterns nudging users towards using iCloud backups).
This is definitely good for privacy in the short term, but long term will depend on if Apple decides to monetize this data themselves.
Most of iCloud backups are encrypted with your PIN — the one you unlock your phone.
Some more sensitive data are backup only if you choose backup locally
iPhone users must login to use the phone. Those users need to provide valid identification info considering the phone is linked to their phone service account. Combine that with apple defining every single action the phone takes, they could easily flip a switch to start collecting "anonymized" data.
Or they could simply update the data-sharing default to "Yes" and 75%+ would never disable it.
> The don’t collect this data. How could they monetize it?
Your answer is essentially -
“in principle they could build tracking into all their software”
You seem to be suggesting that their plan is to fein interest in privacy to undermine all the tracking companies first, and then reverse their stance and become a super-intrusive tracking company.
That seems very far fetched and weirdly conspiracy like.
Also obviously not true, given that they have been lobbying for privacy legislation.
"Personalized Ads for Small Businesses" What a bunch of malarkey. I've worked in ad space and the actual ability for SB's to compete is laughable. Their budgets are so comparatively small that they simply don't get the assistance necessary. They're drinking through paper straws while the big dogs swim in lakes.
SB's absolutely need a platform to compete, but I'm absolutely incredulous that FB is that platform, much less Google or any other like company.
My GF built a small business with $12K MRR on top of Facebook and uses Facebook/Instagram ads. Apparently there are swarms of businesses like hers; buying and selling crystals.
I am against Facebook, but they are not lying at all. Facebook’s walled garden offers a robust advertising platform for small businesses that actually evens the field.
I do programmatic advertising on top of the open web, and your experience is correct there, but FB is different.
I know of a small business in upstate NY that gets 80% of their sales from FB ads. Without FB, this business which also has a retail store, would certainly be having a lot more of a rough time. And they are not an isolated story. I know of at least 5 other small businesses that similarly generate from 25% to 70% of sales via FB. It's given these small businesses a way to compete against bigger competitors.
The impact of these changes on FB ads depends on what kind of ads you run - VBO, AAA, and LAL will be challenged. But interest, geo, and demo targeting will continue as is. None of these iOS changes affect FB’s ability to serve ads, nor small business’ ability to run ads and find customers. It’s the tracking of activity and the deeper funnel events that is changing, not advertising for small business
FB and Adwords is fine, just apply a large dose of skepticism to any data they provide that you’re not able to verify yourself. For example Facebook will vastly over attribute conversions to itself, even if other channels have done the heavy lifting.
Small business is just a propaganda tool. The idea has some allure, maybe because it reminds Americans of their priomordial beginning as settlers, homesteaders, yeomans, craftsmen (or so the stories go).
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
In real numbers most businesses in the US are "small businesses" because they have 500 or fewer employees. It says nothing about their financials though. A hedge fund managing billions of dollars, a start up with millions in VC funding, and a mom and pop florist are all "small businesses".
I'm definitely not disagreeing "small business" has been turned into a propaganda term. That process was helped by the silly tax classification of what's a "small business". A lot of marketing dollars go into making people think the mom and pop florist when they hear the term and not the hedge fund.
> Some apps, like Facebook, allow for some data tracking to be manually disabled. But by default, it is turned on. That gives the company reams of personal data on who we are and what we are doing, which it then vacuums up, packages and sells.
My understanding is that Facebook does not sell this data, but rather lets advertisers create hyper-targeted ads, which are only possible because of this data.
Edit: Certainly not trying to defend Facebook here (in the slightest). Just trying to correct an inaccuracy in the article.
It's a nice bit of semantic ju-jitsu to say "they take this data and sell a service that wouldn't be possible without it" isn't the same as "selling this data," isn't it? Especially given that the targeting mechanisms don't have any k-anonymity guarantees, and I'm aware of at least one paper showing information leaks through the ad portal [1]
It isn't the same. At least only FB has my data instead of thousands of advertisers who paid for a copy. Leaks may be an issue, but it still isn't the same as selling the data to anyone who will pay.
You certainly say they exploit it on behalf of their customers, but we need to maintain the distinction between this, and the companies that actually do sell the data they collect, because once sold, you can never trace who is using the data, whereas with Facebook and Google’s model, you can.
It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not in Facebook’s interest to sell the data. If they did, they would lose their advantage quite quickly.
For example Telegram has a very specific approach to security based on "you can trust us", by default chats are not end-to-end encrypted, they use non-standard encryption and the app is free, but they are upfront on why such tradeoffs are made and their point of view in making them.
Facebook could have a position of "personalized advertising is the future" and allow ipertargeted marketing by means of gathering every scrap of data they could find. But they could draw the line to keeping it within their own databases and never distributing any of it. Apparently their main line of bussiness is exactly like that, but they do not do only that, they also partake in sharing that data.
Because that wasn't a data selling scandal? Cambridge Analytica didn't buy data on millions of people from Facebook, they harvested it for free due to lax permissions.
I guess they paid for that service and the reason they paid why they paid was the possibility to gather data. they had to gather the data themselves, but that is the difference between robbing an house and opening someone else door to robbers
They may not "sell" access to user data, but they certainly allow access to it:
"In total, it said the social network had special arrangements with more than 150 companies to share its members' personal data. Most of these, it said, were other tech firms, but the list also included online retailers, car-makers and media organisations, including the NYT itself, among others."
A plain fact that requires looking realistically at how colloquialisms are used combined with a little bit of technical know how. How many businesses do you know actually "sell data"? The only market I can think of are companies like Zoominfo. Outside of that there really aren't that many companies that "sell your data". However, you'll see a ton of social justice campaigns against "stop companies selling your data". They aren't going after Zoominfo, they're going after Facebook.
Does facebook capture data? Yes.
Do they literally take that data and sell it byte for byte to other people? No.
Is that data absolutely necessary to sell their products or services? Yes.
So, in effect, its easier to say to the common person "they're selling your data" than "they're harvesting their data so they can sell products and services". Facebook is trying to defend itself in the public eye by responding to this slogan - not by the real factor that matters.
There are thousands of companies like ZoomInfo. They all trade csvs of data of dubious origins, mash and resell it to the highest bidder. There is a tranche of these companies who build algorithms to do fuzzy linking between huge datasets, including sources like data breaches (where name/address info is included).
There are conferences. Much of the data can be obtained as Salesforce "apps" - connect your CRM to our massive data portal and we'll fill in information that you don't have. The biggest of these is owned by SF and called Data.com.
Not to hand waive away anyone's pre-baked hatred of Google/FB/etc., but there is an actual data industry that does buy and sell your data, with no controls over it and what it can be used for. By comparison, FB and Google are much better stewards.
And Facebook can absolutely go fuck itself. Whether they're collecting data for their own usage, to resell to other directly or indirectly, or for any other usage, they can get royally fucked. Especially when they are still tracking me even after deleting my account.
Right, I mean prostitutes don’t sell sex right, they just sell access to their private parts temporarily.
From a user privacy perspective, I’m skeeved out that Facebook sells access to data rather than giving out copies. The only difference is that Facebook makes more money.
It’s like those asshole companies that say they don’t sell data, but only rent it. That’s not the point that I care about.
Well I guess there's a distinction required between what Facebook does and actual adtech/data broker companies that do outright sell .csvs of user data.
The thing is, localised advertising is the sweet spot that i've identified in advertising value. If you forget all other data, this is one piece of information that can provide value to both consumer and small businesses.
Facebook, if you know any small business that have a specific region of operation (e.g. one city) derive significant benefit and growth from Facebook's targeted advertising that they just were not seeing before.
Of course, if anyone logs in and fetches their data from facebook as a download and go through it, it is really rather unbelievable how much data there is beyond geographical data. Some of it pretty scary.
What intrigues me further, after i tried to do the same with google, i don't believe google are nearly as open to how much data they hold on a person. There doesn't seem to be any takeaway service that indicates the same depth of information. But of course we know for a fact they do hold some of it.
Anyway, the long and short of it is advertising is all we have to support enormous social networks and I feel some level of personalised data provides mutual benefit. It should of course all be opt in with no exceptions.
I'm actually conceptualising a service/product around this concept right now.
There's no incentives for Facebook to "sell" their user data as long as this is the primary advantage over their competitors including Google, Amazon, MS, etc. Big techs naturally tend to monopolize connections to its users and FB is no exception.
In fact, if they "sell" their user data, anti-trust regulators will be very happy; they want big techs to share user data to its competitors but the big techs are using user privacy and security as their excuses to rule out new competitions in the industry. Apple took the lead and other big techs are now following.
"We never sell your data" is a meaningless statement. It's the online service equivalent of saying that a bottle of water is "fat free". It is consistently and prominently written because it is a definitive statement. Facebook used to feature it on the signup screen with some other statements that sound principled like "We don't charge for Facebook, and we never will", etc.
But when you parse out what it means you are left with something more accurately stated as: "<Company> will not sell its proprietary assets."
It sort of like the operator of a hotel saying "I don't sell rooms".
> My understanding is that Facebook does not sell this data
Even if they don't, Facebook is not the only app in the world. Tracking being disabled by default is a good thing, no matter what Facebook does with it.
I would attribute this to the "packaging" the article references. As you correctly point out advertisers don't want "the data" they want the hyper-targeted ads that it allows. That's the FB value-add.
I agree, with the addition that Facebook wants to keep control of their user data and repeatedly sell it via ads, rather than directly sell it to some third party org to repackage.
It is not that simple. Facebook can also customer data from a variety of sources and parties. In addition, it will share measurement data to outside parties. Even if the data shared outside its walls is translated to a new ID, you still end up with an open loop where a user ID is used for targeting, measured, and potentially shared. That user ID is based on their iOS device ID and we know those are unique.
I don't care if they sell it. I don't want their business partners to have my data, but I'm not any more ok with Facebook having it in the first place.
The often-quoted statement 'if you aren't paying, you are the product' is closer to the truth but is actually misleading. As per the book on Surveillance Capitalism, our interactions with Facebook (or Google) are the raw material from which they create their products, which are sold to advertisers, namely the ability to target ads at specific groups of people.
Data does not change hands. Facebook is selling services that internally operate because of processing on that data. Even then they do not sell the processed data or access to read the processed data.
How can an app track activities in other apps? Is it only possible if those other apps use the same tracking networks, or can the app track activities in _any_ other app? How does this work? What can facebook extract today?
(I'm surprised a bit, i thought phones offer app isolation).
The only things that comes to mind is to correlate device ids from different apps if the apps use the same analytics/advertising networks.
> The only things that comes to mind is to correlate device ids from different apps if the apps use the same analytics/advertising networks.
This, and also anything that uses "Sign in with Facebook". (That's one of several reasons I have for never using anything that requires signing in with Facebook or Google; if I can't create a username or enter an email address, I generally don't want to use it.)
Facebook, Google, and other aggregators entice developers into using their APIs (or even their ad platforms). The developers get use of a nice analytics package, authentication, or other features, and in exchange Facebook and Google use those APIs to exfiltrate data from your device.
They can tie all of this data neatly together using an identifier which Apple has to date provided as an opt-out service. Apple is now changing this to opt-in, so all these developers who have included APIs which are sneaking data out to the Google and Facebook will need to include a pop-up to get permissions to tie their data to the rest of Google and Facebook’s acquired knowledge about you.
My understanding is that, by default, Apple devices have an IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) that apps can use to correlate usage to a specific device. That identifier is going to be the same regardless of app, so it can easily be shared between data aggregators. You've been able to turn this off for ages deep in your apple settings - but of course most people don't bother with that (70% is the number I found). This update brings that feature front-and-center by making it a popup. I suppose that it also makes it app-specific instead of the previous system wide setting? Not sure on that one. At least that is my understanding, if someone knows better please inform me.
Facebook offers libraries for iOS (and Android) developers to add features Facebook login, but which include other features like native app analytics and drop-in widgets that serve Facebook ads.
If it's not obvious, these Facebook libraries are trojan malware, full stop. And, even though iOS apps are sandboxed, if 50% of a user's apps have the same Facebook library baked into them, it's not hard for Facebook to link all that data together to determine usage patterns across apps.
The reason why they're fighting with Apple now is that it used to be much easier for Facebook to obtain a device-unique identifier that each app could forward along to Facebook, giving them device-level usage data. Apple now sees the privacy flaws in device-unique ids, and has either started or plans to start rotating those device ids and making them unique at the app-level only, which reduces the resolution of its tracking from the device level to the network level.
> The only things that comes to mind is to correlate device ids from different apps if the apps use the same analytics/advertising networks.
A long time ago, device IDs were available to apps. But that changed because those are typically immutable and the user has no control on revealing a different one to apps. So the makers of the operating systems brought a new identifier (IDFA in Apple’s OSes) that can be controlled through settings. Even before the forthcoming iOS update, you could just turn off cross app tracking completely by turning on Settings->Privacy->Advertising->Limit Ad Tracking in previous versions. But this was off by default, meaning tracking was allowed unless disabled by the user. Now it’s an explicit prompt when an app asks for the IDFA. The IDFA can be used to uniquely identify and connect a user across apps.
“which includes which apps are being used and for how long, which websites are visited, and data about a user's location“
This is probaly in the “/tmp” or similar directory and probably useful for the system as a whole to be readable (or probably /dev or /proc). It is not a big deal unless you are facebook and, for instance, want to know if your user watches foxnews or has the cnn app or whatever.
AFAIK just doing “ps” gives you a LOT of info on any unix env.
Apple should be applauded for this. Their revenue does not depend on software to clandestinely steal and sell users data.
One day, we will look back at history and see facebook similar as to how people view myspace now (junkyard of software).
Good on Apple not selling devices with a facebook backdoor in them.
I know apple probably has deals with malicious governments regarding data access, but at least they are standing up to FB and exposing their vulnerable points where it hurts badly, Zuckerberg has no clothes.
Between this privacy fight and the form factor of the iPhone Mini, there's a 90% chance my next phone will be an iPhone after more than a decade on Android. I'm done with this ad-sponsored trash ecosystem.
I moved to iOS for the specific reason of getting the Apple watch because of some heart issues I was having. Did it a year ago. I wasn't thrilled, but I was sick of the Android adware/malware problem (every time I installed an ad-supported app I got malware within a week or two).
How do I feel now? I absolutely love this ecosystem. I don't fear OS updates like I used to with Android. I don't fear my device will be stranded without updates. The UI is clean. The 11 is as fast today as when I got it. It seamlessly works the watch and my Bose headphones. BT was always finicky with the Android phones I had.
The m1 is honestly selling me to move back to apple stuff again. Also I'm sick of trash process handling on Android where apps just stop running because some other one is sucking down the ram in the background. I could have every app opened on my iphone even on 1gb with an SE and no issues noticed whatsoever. I really think apple is delivering an upswing they need to after the whole trash 12 in macbooks and butterfly switches.
I'm worried the iPhone mini will be canned next update cycle. I wish I was in a position to buy one, but I only got an iPhone X in Jan 2020 to replace my dying iPhone SE with great reluctance. It's too soon for me to replace, as it works perfectly and I can't justify the cost or the waste. I just hope there's a mini iPhone in 2 or 3 years when I need to upgrade.
I waited a long time for a new small iPhone and eventually got to the point where I had to buy a new phone, because my SE lasted about 15 minutes & I needed to carry around battery packs just to use it.
I know there have been reports of low sales of the mini but I'm hoping that Apple continues to make new ones for at least 1-2 more cycles before giving up. The mini isn't for me (I use a Max) but with the recent release of the SE2 I have to assume some people just weren't ready to upgrade (like you). One thing Apple needs to understand is just because a product line isn't a smashing success doesn't mean it's not needed to provide options for all their customers.
Similar to how they let the Mac line languish for a while because it wasn't their top seller without realizing if they sleep on that segment it will hurt the iPhone in the long run.
I got an iPhone 12 mini (my first iPhone since the original) I’m also worried they won’t keep the form factor around. It hasn’t performed well in the market. I like the size, but apparently most people prefer the larger size and battery life.
My hope is that Apple realizes they created the apparent scarce demand by not having the mini format for so long. They need to keep the format over several years so the demand can materialize as people finally upgrade their old 5S and SE devices now that there's a viable iPhone for them. But those same people are clearly patient and are not in a collective rush to go out and buy new phones, it will take several years of availability and their old devices succumbing to age or physical damage.
Apple released a $400 to $550 iPhone SE in Apr 2020 after years of not having an updated small phone option, so I imagine many who really wanted a smaller phone jumped on that. And then 6 months later they came out with 12 mini, so I wouldn’t expect a size able amount of demand for the 12 mini would have been sucked up by the new SE.
The SE is fantastic as it’s much cheaper and works well. I switched from an XS and years of latest models and forgot how much I love thumb reader over face.
Apple Pay in particular is better with thumb reader instead of the tap, look at, tap again buggy process.
The pricing is killing it, and Apple probably knew it would, but they don't want to cannibalize margins here. There really isn't a competitive product, so they have no incentive to lower prices.
Apple are also assholes to users in places (no own software, no simple customization, absurd seeming prices, extremely limited and proprietary connectivity) ... but they also protect them like nobody else and are unusually reasonable in places, like with their software update policy.
It's a reason I keep thinking about replacing my current phone with a used iPhone X, though the 12 mini would be nicer for the screen size.
Apple isn't perfect, I'll admit that all day long. But, frankly, the "absurd prices" argument just doesn't hold water to me. I paid almost $3000 for the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on--eight years ago. Meanwhile, everyone I know that has had PC's have gone through at least two replacements during that time. A little over $300/year for a computer is a bargain. I pay three times more for Internet access!
I think you will find most people with PCs replace them because they think they need to. My friend just replaced his 12yo asus laptop which he had to keep plugged in to work as the battery no longer held a charge.
People with apple products tend to keep better care of the products than the latter too.
> most people with PCs replace them because they think they need to
Why is this important. Are you saying that PC users are stupider than Mac users or something? The end result is that PC users go through more hardware than Macs. I consider myself pretty decent with computers and use both. My five year old MacBook Air runs fine, I’ve gone through two PC laptops (that were always bigger) and they don’t tend to survive windows updates. I’ve even churned through yearly chrome books that seem to be made out of paper mache or something.
Perhaps people are trainable to do the right thing. But it’s been decades, maybe we think about why this training fails on aggregate.
In the meantime, my personal experience of cost/year being cheaper with Mac vs PC stands for me.
> In the meantime, my personal experience of cost/year being cheaper with Mac vs PC stands for me.
My personal experience is my all my laptops last. People have problems with macs. People have problems with PCs. Doesn’t mean any are better than the other. But people with pc laptops will more often update their laptop for next to no gain over what they already had.
I've never used anything but spotify on my iphones for years and this has never been an issue for me - i wouldn't have known or cared until reading these links.
This is true, but in practice on an iPhone the "default" music app didn't make a difference for me. I always had Spotify running (not necessarily playing, just the app open in the background) so when I pressed play it always played Spotify rather than Apple Music.
Then Apple is bad and Android is bad too. So the ethical choice is to buy neither. I'm not being facetious. I'm considering moving to pure AOSP based, Linux based, or just foregoing a smartphone entirely.
Yeah because of exactly these two reasons, I switched to iPhone Mini. Love it so far. Now working on removing Google and Facebook dependencies from rest of my life.
the problem here is that every single one of these alternate OSs requires advanced knowledge. Granted, it's not difficult to flash your phone via a USB cable + web interface but consider that the average smartphone user isn't even interested in removing bloatware like facebook.
The advanced knowledge i'm referring to is to first know that GrapheneOS exists, know how to enable OEM unlocking, know how to select the correct factory image and so on.
People don't care and cannot be expected to care. Apple, as much as i dislike several of their practices, provide a phone that works when you need it to. AFAIK, the iphone's primary purpose as a phone - has never had an incident where a software bug prevented someone from placing a call.
I've been on Android for a decade as well but just got an iPad mini. The one thing I still cannot figure out how to do on iOS is block ads at the system level. Android has lots of apps that act as a VPN that block ads/trackers via DNS. It blocks ads in the browser, but also in apps.
I can't find the equivalent on iOS. All my searches lead to ad blockers using Safari's content blocking, but the VPN-style ad blockers appear to violate Apple's terms, and so aren't in the app store. I've also seen recommendations to use Pi hole on my network, which is fine until I leave the house.
If anyone has recommendations for system-wide VPN/DNS-based blockers for iOS, please share. That's the last real thing keeping me on Android.
You could set your DNS server IP address to one of AdGuard's public DNS servers that are configured to operate like a PiHole without installing anything.
I use NextDNS [1] and I’m very happy with it so far. It works on the DNS level. So far for our entire home we’ve never gone above the free level once, but I’m happy to pay as soon as we do.
I'm moving to Apple after being a long time iPhone hater. With how insidious Google is getting with Android they should be paying me to use my flagship phone, not me paying roughly the same amount of an iPhone. I do everything I can to not feed into the (free*) services with the cost being sucking down more data about me than I know about myself.
It's already like myspace. Facebook is giving me super trashy friend suggestions of random foreign women with slightly suggestive pictures, and aside from my demographic I can't think of anything I've personally done on or off the internet which would make them good friend suggestions.
Instagram would do this to my discovery feeds. Every month or so I’d mark the photos with sexy women as something I don’t want to see, but they’d inevitably come back. I figure I lingered too long at a photo that featured an attractive woman. Deleted Instagram after this annoyed me too much.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe Facebook’s algorithm is amazing and these people could become best friends. But I tried this a few times and they all sucked.
I suspect it’s as stupid as ranking all members based on some dumb algorithm like “25 year olds like females, this is a female” and just shoveling garbage.
Years ago Facebook just kept recommending people I hated over and over. I wish they would have a mode of “you’re good, we can’t think of anyone else you like.”
It’s like going into a store and the salesperson says “this is perfect for you” and they are just showing you every item in their store.
One of my coworkers shared an interesting thought with me the other day.
Apple is positioning itself as The Privacy Company today, but they've benefited immensely from the attention economy over the last 15 years.
They would not have sold as many millions of iPhones, iPods (heck, even Macbooks) in the last decade, if Instagram & Facebook weren't there to suck people in to their platform (clearly, the same is true for Android). Now that the iDevices are a self-sustaining status symbol with mass adoption and institutionally-ingrained utility outside of social media, Apple no longer needs to trade user privacy to build their moat, and they can pretend that they've been on the user's side all along.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's motions here are very good. But the entire mobile computing industry was bootstrapped with addiction. Facebook and its ilk might have been the perpetrators, but they were not the only beneficiaries.
I think there is also another part to it. The smart phone market has so many options for users, and there is a limit to camera improvements they can make. For many people (including me) privacy can be another reason to chose IPhone over Pixel. With so many options differences like this matter.
I think it’s really the only true difference they can have with Android.
Google can’t provide privacy that users want as it would bankrupt them. Apple can. Other than that, they can both do the same hardware, software, apps, etc.
I’m surprised it took them this long to really start driving it home. I think they were either trying to figure out if monetarily they wanted to start selling data. Or the buying public finally started caring.
Instagram was created by 10 people, and it was already good enough at that stage to get hypergrowth.
The truth is that all the huge advertising revenue is just a plus for the investors, the apps would have been created anyways, and then network effects take care of the content.
> They would not have sold as many millions of iPhones, iPods (heck, even Macbooks) in the last decade, if Instagram & Facebook weren't there to suck people in to their platform
I really don’t see the logic in this.
It’s pretty obvious these devices were useful for many things - messaging and the web would have been enough to guarantee growth.
I think you have the causality the wrong way round.
People only use Facebook so much because the iPhone put it in their pocket rather than on their desk.
I doubt the iPhone's long-term success was dictated by Facebook et al whoring out user data. There are plenty of useful apps that don't hinge on violating the privacy of users.
> [FB revenue model] depend[s] on software to clandestinely steal and sell users data
Isn't it opt-in by using their platform? Or is your argument that targeted ads are not common knowledge to Facebook users? I likely wouldn't use Facebook or Google etc. if I had to pay cash; fine with paying with personal data; but for people who aren't fine with that, they shouldn't use it.
I realize that any attempt to discuss this is inviting downvotes, but I just ask for a quick comment if you do choose to downvote. I try to be very open minded.
The real problem here, and what Apple is getting at, is lack of consent. The willingness or not to "pay" with personal data is meaningless if there's no awareness. Sure, tech-savvy people are aware and can make informed decisions... but my grandma is not aware that Facebook is tracking her. And most non-techy people are like that: I closed all my Facebook accounts last year and people were surprised. I had to explain it to them! I can't wait to see their reaction when I tell them I closed my Google account as well.
The iPhone update doesn't even immediately forbid tracking, it just requests apps to ask for permission. That simple change pushed Facebook to buy newspaper, radio and TV ads to try to get people to reject the update. Think about it: they feel threatened by user awareness.
I don't think this is an entirely fair argument unless it is exceedingly clear what you are opting in to. The fact that FB (and others) are so resistant to being more transparent about this is in itself informative.
If it was dominant, the ads would come sooner or later. MySpace is only thought of sympathetically today because News Corp acquired it early and let it rot. Facebook didn't start out with ads, it introduced them in 2008 or later. By that time MySpace was well into its death throes.
I remember that years ago they had a page like "we will delete this page if we are forced to give out data under the so and so act of the USA because we can't tell you explicitly". Does anyone remember more details?
Yes. Apple has its own problems though. The only reason it can do this is that it has a generally authoritarian behavior wrt app access (see Fortnite), as with closed standards for accessory connection, etc. This is a company that uses platform-exclusive APIs as a cudgel for compliance.
I applaud the fight in that it hopefully makes Facebook weaker but I'm not cheering for Apple having this power either. I'd rather wish for their greed to cause these two to destroy each other.
If personalized ads are really so beneficial to their customers, Facebook should have no problem convincing them to allow the tracking they need and opt-in.
Part of the messaging (the title and buttons) is built-in, but in all of these sorts of dialogs apps provide their own strings to explain why they're asking for permission. The screenshot in the original article shows where Facebook can explain to end-users why they need to track them across other apps and websites.
In addition to my sibling comment, most apps now have pre-prompts for permissions, like where you see a full-pager telling you why the app wants to use notifications where you consent before getting the real consent prompt.
> Some apps, like Facebook, allow for some data tracking to be manually disabled. But by default, it is turned on. That gives the company reams of personal data on who we are and what we are doing, which it then vacuums up, packages and sells.
Facebook would be giving away money if they ever actually sold your data. As everyone here knows, they use that data to target the ads that they sell.
Do journalists phrase it this way out of ignorance, or is it an intentional lie to make Facebook look even worse than it is?
I agree that the most used phrasing of "selling your data" is factually wrong. On the other hand, I think it is approximately true enough for the general public.
I don't expect the usual reader to understand how that data is commoditized inside Facebook to serve better ads. Do you remember how a US Senator had a hard time understanding how ads allowed Facebook to remain free? People will not grasp without significant effort the ads economy and no journalist wants to take on that every time they write about tracking.
It's a tough situation. I'm not satisfied with how they do it, but I understand it's a limitation related to the medium and target audience.
But that still means a real estate agency doesn’t have my address, and the painter doesn’t have the list of shoes I have bought.
Only being able to show me ads in some apps is a comically narrow way of way of “having sold all my data”, akin to “Thugs have sold my house” for “temporarily skinny-dipping in my swimming pool while we were on holidays”. Not nice, but they didn’t sell my house, and Facebook didn’t sell my data, just told an advertiser they could put a picture in a window where there would be house-owners passing by.
I don't think the analogy helps. Digital goods can be sold infinitely many times, unlike your house. Explaining the difference between selling data and selling a service enabled by that data is not as easy as it sounds. It means that a real state agency doesn't have to know your address to assess how much your property is worth - someone else is doing the math and connecting you and them.
I think there's room to be charitable and that most people don't see a meaningful distinction between "sell ads based on your data" and "sell your data to people to use in ads".
This is often the problem of journalists not consulting experts on topics like these (although, a case could be made that the scale they had to adapt to with the Internet forced them to churn out news stories too quickly to get an expert for every story). They can still write an article about this problem (because targeted advertising is considered a problem to most people and/or NPR wants to make more people aware of it) but nuance is important and saying they 'sell your data' isn't misinformation I would want spread.
That's a circular argument. If journalists actually understood the distinction and explained it, more people would see the distinction after reading their articles.
User can still easily opt-in to tracking - so saying this is bankrupting small businesses is really admitting that they need users to be tracked without their knowledge and/or against their will.
I mean, it was always kinda obvious, but seeing them confirm it out right is interesting, to say the least.
I could be wrong, but I think the argument is against the framing of "do you want this app to track you" being one-sided, rather than against an opt-in interstitial in general.
E.g. if anti-vaxxers started pushing a campaign saying "doctors want to stab your arms with needles", I'd expect a similar pushback from the medical community about the perception-coloring of this phrasing (even if it's technically true). In both cases, it seems like the argument is more of "Yes people can opt in to that, but the opt-in process shouldn't bias you against opting in"
Whether that's a fair argument or not, I'll leave to society.
"This owners of this app are looking to gather as much information about you as possible so they can use it as leverage against you. They will sell that information to political agents who will use your demographics against you. There will be advertisers who know when you are having your period, when you are pregnant, and that you've searched for penis enhancing tools. While they probably won't share this information around, they will let advertisers buy adverts discretely targeting your race, gender, and sexual preferences."
Is that a better message?
I think Apple is being quite generous here myself. I'd have the dialog be bright red with a toxic logo on the yes button.
I think the prompt's phrasing is completely fair, especially since facebook can make their case in their pre-consent screen and in the string in the system popup.
This is a fair point. I hold that there are still scenarios in which opt-in text could sway users one way or another, but given that individual apps can make their case before the user sees the interstitial here, I don't personally see anything wrong with the phrasing of "Can this app track you?"
I’m technical enough to be using PiHole[1], and also have AdBlockers[2] at the local machines. I live with very typical friends, family, and relatives who would still ask my help configuring Wi-Fi, buying the right UPS models, scared when papers got curled up in their printers. (I moved to NextDNS[3] from PiHole, where I don’t have to manage something for a small premium.)
I’ve been successful enough to train my family to use 1Password[4], calendar their school works, etc. I’m not against paying for the things that my family and I get happiness from, such as YouTube Premium, Zoom, and the like.
I stopped using Facebook 5+ years back but maintained my account just so I can help families, friends who will usually ask me to fix their page for their tiny businesses, find or set up something new.
When Mark Zuckerberg said something to the effect of -- we do algorithms to help and serve people get the right ads; my thoughts were, “Wrong Question. Why the f*k would someone wants ads in the first place?”
But then, I realized that my wife likes the ads that come up on her Facebook, Instagram accounts. That is where she “discovers” all the awesome things she likes. So does my daughter. She loves the ads about Roblox, Minecraft, and the like. She had warned me to stop messing with her computers and trying to make them “behave like yours!”
The real world is an entirely different place where most people barely know anything of the underlying technology beyond the thin veil of interfaces that they use. Facebook and many others take advantage of that. If I'm choosing between the devils, I'd choose the lesser one.
The way to fix this is not to ask the user whether Facebook should be allowed to track them. That approach is doomed because it gives the FB app the option to diminish its functionality or refuse to work altogether without those permissions.
This kind of stuff happens a lot. Almost every (Android) app I've downloaded in the past two years refuses to run if I don't allow it to see my location. Why does an HP photo printer app need my location? Answer: It doesn't. So now I have to install a GPS spoofer app just to print a photo.
The way to fix this nonsense permanently is to give the user a single dashboard that lets him/her determine for every app whether it can see true or random data when it tries to snoop. That way the FB app cannot tell when it's being denied something it wants, and thus it cannot arbitrarily decide not to work for that reason.
It's critically important that by default apps should not be allowed to know when they are being denied access to private data.
Does anyone support Facebook with this? Does their point below make any sense? I'm supporting Apple now but any merit to the opposing side? Curious to get some informed viewpoints.
"This discouragement, this is going to have a real impact on the Internet as we know it, which is increasingly going to move to a paid experience, which again, benefits Apple's bottom line..."
The gist of the argument being that, regardless of what you think about Facebook, hyper-targeted "lookalike audience" models to target ads against actually do level the playing field for small businesses who do not the resources to produce large scale ad campaigns. Highly recommended reading.
While that might be true, it does not change the fact that modern tracking practices are intrusive and anti-consumer. Frankly, I can't sympathize with any business, no matter how small, that is dependent on tracking to thrive.
For "ends justify the means" argument to work, we all have to understand and agree to what the "ends" are.
Typically, the "ends" is to "maximize aggregate utility across all actors" i.e. also often described as "the greater good". As shown by your example: "By stealing your kidneys we can give them to starving orphans."
However, when it comes to targeted advertising, the "ends" is "maximize aggregate utility for small and large capitalists". As such the example should be: "By stealing kidneys from starving orphans, we can sell them to temporarily[0] sustain capitalists". Which frankly is a very poor "ends" from my (and hopefully the majority of consumer's) perspective.
[0] Why "temporarily"?: Because the capitalist growth mindset will require more kidneys soon. Arguably, this implies there is no "ends" and therefore it might be incorrect to use any "ends justify the means" argument in this context.
If you know people who don't make a lot of money (just getting by), being able to exchange your privacy for a service might be an option they're willing to do.
I think transparency and allowing people to make the choice is fair. I don't suspect a lot of people give the "free" aspect much thought, and I'm glad this is getting the news out there.
I really wish companies would give you the option to pay to not be tracked, or exchange your information for tracked ads. I don't love that even though I subscribe to some online publication they still have ads.
Jaron Lanier a good set of videos on the problem and has a proposal to get you paid for your information (videos).
One need only look back at the previous threads on the App Store to find people arguing that Apple should be legally forced to open their platform up to competitors, which would pretty much gut these kinds of privacy-protecting moves. Facebook will immediately move exclusively to a separate app store that doesn't ask developers to justify user-relevant reasons for the permissions it requests, and immediately start demanding full permissions or else you don't get to use the app.
So essentially, people here tend to agree in principle with Apple protecting user privacy and think Facebook is overbearing and infringing on user privacy, but think Apple should be legally stripped of any tools to actually protect users' privacy, because muh sideloading is more important than people's privacy.
Not being able to sideload apps really is feckin' idiotic, though. One ought to be able to install whatever they please on a handset they've purchased -- especially when they've spent that much.
You can sideload, just pay for a developer account and you can sideload whatever you want.
Going further than that effectively removes the point of app review - Facebook/etc will immediately demand that you sideload to bypass the app review and just demand all permissions.
this is not a theoretical problem, Facebook has already been busted for asking users to sideload a version signed with their developer credentials that scrapes up data that apple won't let them collect on the public release. You are basically suggesting that they be allowed to do that officially.
The first point falls flat. It is as good as saying, earlier you could steal data, now you have to ask and respect consent.
Second may have some ground. But does seem shallow once you consider that in order to support small business you are opting to take away privacy controls from individuals. What ethical model favors the ability of small sized businesses to spend less on marketing over individual's right to privacy?
Fuckin' let 'em. I'll pick Apple over Facebook eight days a week, and if Facebook takes their ball and goes home, well, even better since it'll finally get me to completely pull the plug on their platform.
The problem with Facebook tracking is that even if (like me) you don’t use Facebook / don’t have it installed random apps on the App Store will push your data to King Zuck.
This is what the data sharing is about. If you’re a regular user a Facebook that ad from the Charleston SC burger joint will still reach you. They don’t share that data with anyone else.
It’s the random game or app you install that will no longer push their data to Facebook.
> Apple says in the coming weeks, it will update its iOS software for iPhones to require apps to get explicit consent to track what people are doing on their phones for the purposes of sharing it with third-parties.
That's all they are doing. They aren't preventing companies from tracking users in this way. They are just requiring them to get permission.
Says a lot about Facebook's business model that this is a cause for "all-out war," and that they'd rather try to stop the feature than convince their users to enable it. I guess they know that at the end of they day if they can't do this behind their users' backs, they probably aren't going to be able to do it at all.
What is to stop Facebook from making a picture show up all fuzzy and then tell the user that they should opt-in to tracking to get the highest resolution pictures.
Honestly If apple can't afford to stand up to FB who can ?
I dislike Apples closed ecosystem (anf google trying to do the same), but if it can weaken FB's grip on people, it might bring some benefit even to non apple customers.
I appreciate this kind of a view. You may disagree with a few policies of a company and remain in favor of some. Works for people, brands, governments equally.
Apple pulled FB's enterprise cert a while back, basically pulling FB's internal apps offline. I don't think it's a huge leap to pulling the app from the App Store if it comes down to it. In fact, I'd argue that pulling the cert was a shot across FB's bow: "oh, you think we don't have the balls, do you? Anything else you think we don't have the testicular fortitude for?"
I don't know how it was received (if at all) in the rest of the world, but in Australia at least Facebook is still reeling from their news ban, I suspect the populace would support Apple for a few days, and that's realistically as long as the ban would last if implemented.
Without a doubt. They nuked Fortnite from orbit, and had to be stopped by a judge from nuking Epic's developer cert, which would have killed any app using the unreal engine.
Facebook isn't concerned with what happens within the Facebook App itself. Everything there is already tracked and filtered. What they are most concerned about is that a huge pile of outside apps which are feeding them data by including their APIs will opt out of including Facebook's APIs because the indie apps don't want to display this warning.
Honest question here, as this story almost got me to buy an iPhone. And really don't like them, just a personal taste thing. If I don't install apps, say facebook, it can't collect this data right? So by being careful of what I install, and staying clear of facebook, which I am already, using an Android should have a similar effect, right? Or am I getting this wrong?
Not entirely, Facebook collects a lot of information about you when you're browsing third-party sites. This tracking is done through the Facebook Pixel, which is loaded via javascript on ~15% of sites you visit.
It’s so hard to feel bad for Facebook. They’ve made shadow profiles for non-Facebook users for crying out loud! But they are really going out of their way to oppose Apple on this move.
The burger restaurant clip in the audio...couldn’t they still target users just based on interests? And not actually linking those interests to a specific person?
And on the other hand, I don’t hear much from Google.
I can't get that article to load, so I'm hoping they address how she knows that 90% of her business comes from facebook, and how hyper targeted ads are more effective than just geo-located tags.
It seems like ads for her business would be good for users within 'x' number of miles/blocks/whatever of her business, and not necessarily based on their interests, correct?
Does Google’s tracking rely on iOS to the extent facebook’s does? I don’t use either but I would assume nearly all iPhones accessing fb are via app while a ton of iPhones accessing Google are via Safari, mail, and even iMessage now that you can play a linked YouTube video directly in the Messages app.
I wonder what would happen if FB and Google went a step further and decided to give Apple the Windows Phone (or Huawei) treatment, by pulling all their apps from the App Store, citing these changes as the reason they can't support Apple's platform. I'm not sure the majority of iOS devices users would be happy with any of the involved parties, and that includes Apple.
> I'm not sure the majority of iOS devices users would be happy with any of the involved parties, and that includes Apple.
I think Apple is smart enough to know how to spin it if Facebook or Google left the App Store because of privacy issues. Some users would be annoyed at Apple, sure, but I would bet many users would see it as a Facebook/Google problem. I didn't hear people blame Apple for requiring listing what data is being collected when Google started not updating their apps and warnings started appearing.
I like this idea, but I imagine it could be seen as anti competitive for Google to do this... I know it would motive me to use an Android phone, but that might not help Google case of being a none monopoly player... Also I could see Apple firing back by removing Google as their primary search engine inversely impacting Google search ads revenue... So definitely I think Apple has the upper hand. Although I do not believe Apple is honest in their privacy stance... Native apps IMO are far far less private then a browser application...
Google is the default search engine on iOS because they pay Apple $7 billion annually for the privilege, I don't think they're going to be strongly motivated to pull the plug on that
Eh? Revenue is affected by this, no doubt (otherwise thefacebook.com wouldn't go to war), but of course this is also about privacy and user data. How can you deny that?
There’s one big pie of US GDP. That doesn’t mean anytime someone gains or loses revenue that they are sharing it with someone else. Or at least there is no utility to be gained from that statement.
Is my income tax a price the government charges for providing roads, schools, and protection? Just because there are services rendered doesn't mean it's not a tax.
There is no opt out, and price is a function of earnings rather than value added.
I can not do business in the US, or I can not do business with iPhone users. My only 'opt out' is to quit doing business in their market. I continue to see similarities here
You're right that it's more of a difference in degree and not kind. That said, the difference in degree is so vast as to be consequential. It's trivially easy to switch phone platforms (in the last 7 years, I've flip flopped between Android and iOS twice). In contrast, it's extremely difficult and disruptive to uproot your life and move countries; and that also presupposes that the destination country is willing to accept you.
In business terms, however, it's much easier to target consumers of a different country than of a different App Store. Even if you blacklist the top two countries, US and China, you still have a lot of consumers largely in India and Europe to buy your product. If you blacklist two major app stores it's effectively impossible to make money developing apps.
This isn't bad for consumers, it's bad for producers.
In that sense, I don't think you can opt out of the "Apple tax" because there are exactly 2 platforms both of which you have to be present on, otherwise you're not gonna reach your users.
But that’s exactly the point. You pay it because they have something you want. You can say they shouldn’t be allowed to gatekeep their markets but that’s a separate thing. Taxes you have to pay even if you don’t want the services.
There are tons of things that are paid for on a percentage basis, and the "is this value added or not" line is pretty difficult to define clearly.
It doesn't make sense to think of it as a tax, really, sure taxes can be used to provide services (or other things) but the fee being paid here is directly tied to the service you are receiving. If you want to draw parallels with government, it would better match a toll road or bridge; you can still argue the total collected toll doesn't fairly match the cost of providing the service, but the mechanism is at least clear.
Regardless of how hard you try to justify it as being similar to government tax (which you go to jail for not paying), the fact is that calling it the "Apple Tax" is an editorial decision used to paint it negatively. Now, you may support calling it that (or not) depending on how you feel about Apple. But let's not pretend it is the appropriate, unbiased name for it.
Apple also insists that you must use their payment services, you can't use a competitor's. the policies are designed so that they get a cut of all revenue in the ecosystem, that's effectively a tax.
This isn't strictly true. Plenty of iOS apps use e.g. Stripe for payment processing, including the last company I worked for. The App Store billing/subscriptions requirement is only for apps providing strictly digital goods/services. Google has the same policy on the Play store.
The actual quote: Facebook has also launched a website and taken out full-page advertisements in newspapers, in addition to a recent TV and radio ad push, to put a spotlight on how many small business owners depend on targeted ads.
This is definitely a true statement. The vast majority of small businesses who advertise on FB will be hurt by this change. The best estimate to date is a 20-30% drop in marketing efficiency due to worse targeting capabilities. Some of these small businesses will inevitably go out of business due to this change (for better or worse).
The assumption that small businesses would see a drop in marketing efficiency might assume that advertising costs on Facebook remain constant. In a perfect world, I would think that a reduction in ROAS on Facebook would precipitate a decrease in ad costs, as businesses would be less willing to pay a premium for Facebook ads.
In the long term, I think Facebook is the biggest loser in this scenario, not the small businesses.
I think you're definitely right that Facebook stands to lose the most.
And, I also agree that most businesses will be willing to pay less of a premium for FB ads after this change. But, even for the businesses that adapt their spend accordingly, their final marketing budget will be smaller, and therefore, their net income/profit from ads.
I'm just biased. I hate advertising and I hate tracking even more. I'm sure some companies will be slightly hurt, but I believe it will be a net gain for society.
I worked at a small hardware store as a kid and we got all our business from word of mouth. IDK what the best argument here is, so I suppose I'm just admitting my feelings with this comment.
I don't see why we need to compromise our privacy to support advertising for small business. If I want to opt-in in order to get ads for services that would likely be relevant to me then sure, let me do that. But to be forced to opt-in and then create a moral hazard claiming I "don't support small business" - yeah, screw that! I don't see why Zuckerberg et. al.'s failed business model should be my problem.
Oh the irony that one of the most profitable and largest companies (facebook) is making the claim that small businesses will be impacted.
I think the honest answer is, yes if facebook protects their profit margins then it will impact small business as they pay more to get the same results. OR Facebook could reduce their margins since Apple's change will reduce their product effectiveness.
Once we frame it that way it is clear what the battle is about. Facebook is fighting apple to protect their own profitability and is using a sympathetic actor (small business) as a shield.
> This is definitely a true statement. The vast majority of small businesses who advertise on FB will be hurt by this change.
I don't think I've ever seen a source for this. Could you post one, ideally one which is not subject to conflicts of interest (e.g. funded by the advertising industry)?
Imo, the conclusion around "worse marketing efficiency" is a logical extension from how Facebook's ad ecosystem works.
That is, Facebook is a behemoth in advertising because of its capabilities to predict which users will convert from an ad unit. By predicting conversion rate accurately, FB empower small businesses to get more conversions out of fewer ad impressions and spend.
FB's ability to predict conversion rate is driven by a ML algorithm that takes as inputs: all the user data it tracks via the Facebook Pixel, all the user data it collects through its own domains, and data sent via server API's from advertisers.
Apple's tracking change reduces the amount of available user data to its ML algo by a large percentage.
As a result, prediction power will decrease. And therefore, marketing efficiency.
The actual 20-30% estimate is just that, an estimate. But, directionally, there's no question efficiency will decrease.
You’re making some assumptions along the way though. There’s been multiple articles published about how the data that FB shows to advertisers is not accurate:
I was thinking about that the other day when Snap reached $100B in market cap. That’s a mobile app whose continued success rides entirely on the good graces of Apple and Google.
It’s even more interesting when you consider that most people block ads, or they block them in their vision. How many of us actually look at ads anymore? I would say that very few people even pay attention to them, and we sort of block them out of our attention. Online advertising does not work, and the metrics are inflated. I would love to see a major company stop spending on Facebook advertising, and doing analysis to see if their sales actually drop.
I think I might become an Apple fan. Writing this on Android device to be replaced with the new iPhone mini.
Facebook's behavior becomes more and more disgusting with their continued push against privacy and transparency. although I think a 30% cut by apple in app store is too much I prefer apples way of building something users actually want to buy.
There is 0 drawback for users to ask for their consent before tracking them and sharing that data with who knows whom.
I'm only somewhat kidding. I imagine a flood of super cheap, but decent spec Androids would be pretty disruptive, despite sending everything to the FB mother ship.
>the App Store should not be the only marketplace available.
Wouldn't Facebook then simply stop distributing it's app through the Apple App Store and then create it's own app store that doesn't have any of the anti-tracking restrictions?
Is the permission popup that asks users to allow/block access to the location, tracking, etc, tied to the App Store?
On Android, it doesn't matter the source of the app. If the app wants to access your location, camera, files, etc, you need to give it access. I don't see why this new iOS feature to "ask apps not to track" has to be different, isn't it all part of what the "app sandbox" lets them do?
Apple can't control what's in the 3rd party stores, but they control iOS and what apps are allowed to do.
It's an iOS thing, but in the App Store you're not allowed to restrict functionality for users who don't consent to tracking, while elsewhere they can restrict whatever they like to bully you into accepting tracking.
You can block access to private APIs at the kernel level without any manual review--in fact, blocking private APIs is about the easiest thing to automate.
Yes, but if they didn't have to justify to Apple (because it's not Apple's app store) a reason they needed a specific permission, Facebook would just demand all permissions.
I think the issue is there two funding models at play.
Advertising vs. paid content.
Apple wants the tide to switch to paid content, and want to encourage people to do so through their own merchant gateways.
In my opinion, this feel reasonable _only_ if consumers have real choice. Telling users they can use a different platform if they're not happy, is not real choice.
You're not wrong with your first three lines but do you really think consumers will actually have any meaningful choice if all the trendy but privacy invading apps have their own app store with software free to run rampant on users devices?
With iOS, Apple was able to create a mass market of easy to use device for regular people that didn't get infested by various adware and malware. I think that's a really significant and impressive achievement. People choose to buy into Apple's ecosystem partially for this reason. When the next "must have" social/communication app is only available on a future Facebook AdStore we'll have the choice between installing some form of adware or not participating. That's even less of a real choice than having the freedom to switch platforms.
If app stores get regulated I fear we'll end up where windows PCs were in the late 90's. I don't know about you but I quite enjoy not having to remove spyware from the mobile phones of friends and family on a regular basis.
Also, slightly tongue in cheek, if Epic is able to force Apple to allow an Epic App Store on iOS will that mean that Epic will be forced to allow alternative cosmetics stores in Fortnite? How far should app store regulation go?
>Telling users they can use a different platform if they're not happy, is not real choice.
Finally why is this argument always made on behalf of users? I've never heard a user that wasn't also a developer complain about the lack of app stores where they can more easily download crapware.
I think this is a lot more about developer rights masquerading as user rights. I think it's self evident that in a lot of cases that the interests of developers are totally at odds with the interests of users.
> If app stores get regulated I fear we'll end up where windows PCs were in the late 90's. I don't know about you but I quite enjoy not having to remove spyware from the mobile phones of friends and family on a regular basis.
What's stopping an alternative market place being hot on screening for bad apps and crapware too?
> I think this is a lot more about developer rights masquerading as user rights.
I disagree it's about the rights of everyone _accept_ Apple.
I was trying to think of a good metaphor for these sanctioned app marketplaces.
To me it feels like living in a city where you're forced to buy from one city sanctioned shopping mall.
Every shop in the mall has to provide thirty percent of their takings to the city gov.
If you're not happy with the setup you need to move to another city.
Can you think of anyone who would think this represents a positive model?
Pros: great news for value app developers. Unfair competition won't be as big of a worry and users will finally have to start valuing their apps (with money!)
Cons: small retail sellers will find it hard to advertise and won't be able to compete with big ad spenders that use more wholesale ad strategies
> small retail sellers will find it hard to advertise and won't be able to compete with big ad spenders that use more wholesale ad strategies
I wonder how much of an issue this is in the real world, i.e. outside of the valley or where ever people change their buying behavior based on targeted advertising. I buy peanut butter when I need peanut butter and not based on any kind of advertising. I'm running low on socks, I'll go buy socks wherever I bought socks last time. Why would I buy something just because an algorithm shows it to me, that idea is so weird to me. I wonder if I'm the exception or if I'm missing something.
So the whole point is you don't have IDFA, but each app still has its own persistent ID. Before when you used the FB app and another app they both got same IDFA so FB could link them (the FB SDK in the other app posts the IDFA). However, even with Apple change, the apps can still make network connections. All FB needs to do is make its SDK ping a server with the app specific ID and correlate with IP addresses. FB app sends IDFA1 with IP1 and MyAPP sends IDFA2 with IP1, they both have same IP therefore IDFA2 is the same user as IDFA1. Statistically you can get 95%+ matching very quickly. If you never use a wifi and are always on the same mobile network in the same city, then FB cannot distinguish you from other people who never use Wifi and are on the same city as you, but even then, the mobile phone network traffic has 10+ external IP-s so a few days of traffic will correlate quickly. Even worse, when before FB could get away without beacons in the SDK, just sent IDFA once and then just request ads, no need to store IP address every 10 minutes. Now it needs to ping every 10min to get the correlations. Apples next step is then a universal VPN/Proxy that all apps need to use so all traffic goes through Apple servers in the name of privacy. Then FB would see the same IP address on all requests, until that happens though, this is just a smokescreen.
If Facebook exploits its software ecosystem to try and unmask users I think you'll see Apple pull the plug on any apps using those SDKs (including facebook itself) if necessary.
"This discouragement, this is going to have a real impact on the Internet as we know it, which is increasingly going to move to a paid experience, which again, benefits Apple's bottom line," Satterfield said.
The hypocrisy and dishonesty of this statement! Nothing comes from the new consent requirements that directly stop you from keeping your app free. Can't do it because commercially not viable? Well then, how much are users paying you right now?
Isn't this just going to drive all the tracking serverside?
Hash up the tracking data in the app, send it back to the app's servers, send it to whoever you like? Same is happening with browsers and 3rd party cookies.
Sort of. I was thinking how tracking will respond now. And the answer is known: device fingerprinting, i.e. collecting all accessible device details to uniquely identify it. But since Apple fights fingerprinting too to certain extent, this sort of tracking will not be as accurate as the current identifier tracking. Also, it is significantly harder to implement. So, some monetary losses for the likes of Facebook are given.
Facebook friend suggestions are such garbage. Half of them are legitimate acquaintances. Half of them are random women from south america.
I've never interacted with anything that should bring those up and I've never clicked on that sort of suggestion. The only reason I can think they'd show me them is my demographic, 30 something male. I haven't clicked on anything on FB or elsewhere on the web that should be getting me random foreign women as friend suggestions.
Facebook is terrible quality and has no idea what it's doing.
>My guess: given your set of data and browser history, to contact south american women is their best way to keep you engaged.
Let me re-iterate. Because I'm male and on the internet I knew people would question my premise.
I haven't clicked on anything on FB or *elsewhere* on the web that should be getting me random foreign women as friend suggestions. I'm not naive. And even if I were clicking on correlated things elsewhere, which I'm not, I have never clicked on one of these suggestions in FB. That's two layers of ridiculously bad targeting that just annoys their users.
> Facebook says Apple is attempting to push free apps, which often sweep data up and feed it to advertisers, to move to subscription models.
And I think most users will see no problem with this.
If I value the service enough, I'll pay for it. That Apple gets 30% is another discussion and as a user, not my problem.
If I don't value the service that much, I now get to be informed and can decide whether I value using it more than my privacy. Facebook's all out propaganda campaign shows which choice they think most users will make in this instance.
In fact, I would say apps would get a lot more revenue by switching to a paid model. I don't know the exact numbers, but I think I've heard monthly revenue from tracking is less than a cent per user.
Now imagine they charge $1 monthly for their app subscription. Hell, even a couple of cents would be an improvement. Or even better: they charge a one-time payment to buy the app.
I don't think there will be such thing as a war. Rules are the same for every company, Apple are just telling FB in advance that they are not making an exception.
Yup. The only way to implement Facebook login is through the SDK, so unless you are willing to give up all your users that use Facebook login, you are stuck with the invasive, crashing SDK.
No developer should tie themselves to Facebook. I sympathize with the existing developers, but no new developer should be insane enough to rely on Facebook.
I had to change some of my Business Manager settings this week in preparation for the iOS changes before my new ads would run. They specifically mentioned "Aggregated Event Measurement" for anybody who wants to look into it.
I think the Facebook case shouldn't be left to the market to "sort itself out", but instead this type of business model should be banned in its entirety, just like people cannot run ponzi schemes, they shouldn't also run "free" services in exchange for processing personal data.
Well, looks like NPR is fake news now. “That gives [Facebook] reams of personal data on who we are and what we are doing, which it then vacuums up, packages and sells.”
Even the most cursory investigation will reveal that Facebook does not sell this data as it is too valuable, they just rent out access to your eyeballs.
I see what you're getting at, and NPR definitely could have worded that better, but I think they're getting the point across fairly well. From a layman's perspective, ad tracking is the packaging and selling of user data.
I don't like the wording at all. "Ask app not to track" means an app can ignore a user's request, just like with "Do not track" on the web. The button should read "Deny", and the denial should be strictly enforced.
There is no way for apple to prevent apps from tracking, since many apps require persistent storage. At best Apple can throw apps out of the appstore after they become aware of an infraction.
I believe this dialog does control access to apple's advertiser-id (IDFA), so apple did implement some technical measures. Unfortunately that's not the only way for an app to track a user, so giving the impression that Apple enforces this denial would be misleading. People already blame Apple for apps lying on their privacy labels.
It is a combination of both. Clicking this will deny the app access to the very useful IDFA identifier, so this part is strictly enforced.
However, when phrased like this, it does not JUST represent the access to the IDFA, it is a direct request from the user to not track you in any OTHER way either. And yes, the app can ignore that, but then Apple is free to deny it access to the App Store.
exactly this. Facebook can still tie your actions in the app to your Facebook account, nothing's changing there and Apple couldn't possibly control that. They won't, however, get that IDFA, which _is_ something Apple can control.
You're jumping to conclusions about the technical implementation based on the button text? It is enforced. If the users chooses the 'don't track' option in the dialogue the app does not get access to the IDFA.
One reason that people buy and use Apple devices is because they want to use Facebook. If this ended in a situation where Facebook was no longer on Apple devices, or somehow crippled on them, Apple could significantly damage their own revenue.
I would say that's a false equivalency. In the Apple case, it's possibly gaining via marketing and driving people to paid apps that Apple gains revenue from.
Please don't misread me though--I'm glad Apple is doing this, I just don't think they're heroes for it.
I like how you say it's false equivalency but then kind of fail to actually show that... maybe because it's not?
In the real world there are few "heroic" deeds that don't benefit the entity doing them.
The doctor doing the transplant gets professional acclaim that is not worthless, would you say the doctor did it to market themselves?
Turns out doing good things can be profitable, it's not an either or.
This tired cynicism any time a company does something good and people admire them for it (ie consider the action heroic) is not novel or useful. Companies at the size of Apple and co are never going to be pure forces of good with no bad deeds, but they are still capable of being heroes in a specific context. Right now Apple is being a hero of their customer's right to privacy
Hero has become something of a joke word these days. It's used to describe acts as mundane as getting out of bed in the morning and going to a salaried job. It's too bad, because it's nice to have a word to describe people of near godlike achievement. Chuck Yeager would be an example of what I consider a bona-fide modern hero. Alexander would be an example from antiquity.
What people consider heroic is a personal choice. I had no issue with someone saying what Apple did isn't heroic, what I was against was the specific reason.
After all, to me Chuck Yeager is less of a hero than someone who helps out at a soup kitchen every weekend. One was doing their job (and a questionable person honestly) and the other is taking their own time to help others.
Won't this get handled by apps asking users to choose between all tracking, or multi-page-collapsible-ambiguous-form-for-selective-tracking ? Nobody spends minutes to deselect every category in those forms.
I don't really get this tracking thing. It seems like they should be able to use some kind of super AI to predict what I'm most likely to buy next, and that would actually be useful for me. Sounds great but I never or very rarely see ads that even remotely match my preferences.
Also, I think markets have changed so that those companies who have great products don't need to advertise at all. Those companies who have the worst products will spend most on advertising. So, when I see an ad for an product, I know that it's likely to be a bad product.
As an Android user, how much of this should I be worried about? I assume Google won't be pushing for this as much as Apple is? What can I do to reduce app tracking on my phone?
"which is increasingly going to move to a paid experience"
We already pay but with data instead of money. But we neither know the real cost nor the real consequences.
you could see this as a case of apple using their monopoly powers to drive another company out of business. This whole thing seems quite deliberate on the part of Apple. They have taken the applaudable step of prioritising user privacy, and i'm not a conspiracy theorist... BUT i assume that apple will never do something if it won't ultimately help the bottom line. I'm going to invest in some popcorn and see how this plays out.
I am really not sure why is it only fb whose name pops up in media. IMO, this update will affect entire advertising industry. Be it giants like Google, Tradedesk, Amazon etc. In the end it is loss to the advertisers as lack of data will be hampering their measurements and targeting. Not sure if for internet platforms it matters. Will this be good for businesses in streaming TV like roku, apple, firetv?
Because Facebook is the most vocal opposition. There is a bit of media bias too because a headline with Facebook gets more attention, but there is no doubt that they are putting themselves in the spotlight by publishing big pieces in the NYT etc.
Fuck Facebook. Buy Apple. They’re the good guys in this case. They are fundamentally about advancing the case of sexy electronics and hardware and polished SIMPLE clean user interfaces and connectivity that just works. Don’t believe the lies about it being a “walled Garden” or some shit. Tim Cook can fundamentally be swayed that privacy is a FEATURE THE USER DEMANDS.
My guess is over time most free apps that depend on tracking will refuse to work unless allowed to track. And most users will acquiesce, just so they can use an app that they want to use.
Even the Facebook app itself could refuse to work unless tracking is turned on.
It's still a positive change overall, and still affects Facebook but it appears to me the effect will be minor, even temporary.
I wonder though, could they and still get approved by Apple? Apps have to have some level of minimum functionality to pass review. You can require a sign in but I wonder if you could require tracking.
You are right, and not only that: personalized ads are better for users and for small businesses. I’m ready for the downvotes, but this is very much true.
Can you elaborate on how targeted ads are better for users? Do those benefits outweigh the documented harms and abuses, the risk of further harms and abuses?
I wonder how much of the tracking would still be necessary if Facebook didn't limit the organic reach of local business pages, as I understand they do in order to boost their ad offerings, and allowed them some space in the feed based purely on the likes/fans/comments they have as they did in the early years.
>Two titans of Silicon Valley, Facebook and Apple, are in a bitter fight that centers on the iPhone data of millions of people and whether companies should be able to track that data as easily as they do now.
While two titans of Silicon Valley are fighting for control over our data my question is how we protect our data from both of them.
I'm wondering if there are people on HN that supports Facebook (aside from FB employees, or FB stock holders of course). Seems every time this topic gets rehashed FB seems to gain 100% of hate. Not saying anything about FB or Apple, but I just want to see if there exists people here that support FB.
Just remember that the facebook phone was an absolute disaster and they are trying to scrub it from peoples memory.
FB is a product designers nightmare. Its a horrible product trying to force its way into every aspect of your life to slurp cash from the massive stupidity of humans.
What does Facebook realistically expect to get out of this PR push?
Apple seems to be doing nothing legally wrong. So, I'm guessing FB is trying to sway public opinion. But, does the public really care that much about the health of small businesses who advertise on Facebook?
They may see their efforts to oppose Apple as seriously damaging to the public perception of Facebook, and so the PR campaign is an attempt to diminish that harm to their image.
Allowing AD tracking in the first place is on Apple. They opened the door for bad actors like Facebook. I won't praise them for fixing this hole; I'm upset they put it in and even more upset it's taken this long to consider removing it.
I'm still confused on why facebook needs to be an app at all. They should just make the mobile browser version of their website the best way to experience facebook and then have people add the facebook mobile website to their home screen.
It probably has a much wider impact on FB than what is currently known. If anyone uses FB ads, in almost every field of the campaign there is now a new warning icon that says this feature may not work for users on the latest iOS version.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Facebook has a lot of issues and we might applaud Apple on their push for "privacy" but we can't forget that Apple is no angel either.
Definition of looking at the glass half empty. Nothing is a zero sum game, we need to learn to reward good actions and punish bad ones. Here we need to support this decision by Apple instead of deviating attention to other issues. We will never get anything done if we always go back to the "but what about that..." mentality.
Nah, not a fan of Facebook, not a fan of Apple either with their closed system. This is how we cheered Google with their "don't be evil" mantra while they got evil. Who taught Facebook how to invade privacy? Google. Who taught Google about closed systems? Apple.
There is just absolutely no good-faith way anyone can disagree with requiring user consent to be tracked. It is as close to “pure evil” as you can get for Facebook to campaign against it.
What a great day. Next to prepare: Youtube with it's super creepy listening recommendation algorithm. If you say something out loud it will appear in your feed.
"Ninety percent of our customers are finding us because of Facebook, because of those personalized ads, so if something was to disrupt that, it's going to be a problem,"
Why is it so hard for people to understand that if your business relies on unethical practices, they're the problem - not those who pursue privacy. If your business relied on breaking into people's homes and reading through their personal file cabinet, it wouldn't even be a question whether or not that business should exist. Taking people's digital data without consent is okay though? Plenty of small and large businesses thrived just fine before Facebook. Sorry/not sorry that not everyone buys into surveillance capitalism.
What a fascinating story about an ALL-OUT WAR guys! You'll learn so much about cyber plots, tanks, politics, maneuvers and constant bombing between Apple and Facebook, actually even Mr. Zuck and Mr. Cook themselves taking massive risks in this sick conflict, a really crazy read! I felt like I was a soldier during WW2, no...even WW4? The title is so well chosen!
It's the "why is" in the original title that makes it not substantively different from the headline here. Both make the assumption facebook is in fact going to war
AFAIK, Google does this on its apps. Whenever you install a new Google app - you're asked if Google can "use your data to improve your experience". If you say no, you're almost not tracked all.
However, AFAIK, the majority of users actually do agree to this.
Forcing all other apps to do the same doesn't hurt Google much, but it could crush their competition.
Hmm I do find it interesting in the article that Facebook stated the reason Apple doing this is to push towards paid apps, i.e. subscriptions instead of ads, since Apple takes it's mafia 30% tax cut on subscriptions, but not on ads.
That actually does make some sense, I do enjoy this infighting between Big Tech, since the user will ultimately benefit by seeing each companies true colors (and that includes the "Cult" Inc., not just Facebook)
"Ninety percent of our customers are finding us because of Facebook" (Restaurant owner)
I don't understand why iOS Location perms wouldn't be better for targeting ads than full-tracking across apps and sites?
Don't get me wrong. The Apple Tax has potential to get out of control. But FB needs to present better arguments than SMBs who can already geo target ads using basic tools.
Asking for consent or informing about tracking is bullshit. I would bet 99% "voluntary conscious consent" is either not conscious or not voluntary. People just are given no real choice (they would be denied service or forced to go through an intimidating configuration dialog if they object) and/or have no actual idea about what does that really mean.
The point is to introduce some friction into app developers using these methods, by informing users what's possible.
It's disgusting what some apps do to slurp off personal information, that they are only able to get away with because users don't understand whats at stake.
Officially, no. That's against the Apple developer guidelines.
Whether Apple will have the courage to enforce them is another matter. We've already seen evidence that their new "privacy nutrition labels" are sometimes inaccurate with no consequences for the app developers.
Facebook is evil. It harms societies for various reasons, for instance by enabling spread of misinformation, and it hurts individuals alike.
Every measure that weakens platforms like FB is to be welcomed.
Apple is big enough to confront FB and harm them. That alone makes Apple even more valuable in my eyes and makes me keep buying their products although I dislike their walled-garden-approach and their philosophy that is against open systems.
Edit:
A couple of years ago my impression was that FB is so big that it‘s futile to fight them. Recently more and more people seem to realize how harmful these kind of platforms are, and it seems there is hope in confronting them.
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.
Lmao, just like all the businesses that build their platform on top of Facebook APIs only to have those APIs closed down, now Facebook will realize what it's like to build your business based on hardware device tracking, only to have manufacturer's like Apple restrict that down.
Please don't post like this to HN. I'm not saying you owe FB better, but you certainly owe the community better if you're participating here. We want thoughtful, curious conversation that adds new information on interesting things. A comment that starts with "Lmao" and ends with "rot in hell" is not intersecting that space.
IIRC, a while ago an internal memo from Zuckerberg leaked in which he detailed that this is why he's investing in Oculus. Zuck sees VR as the next frontier of technology, and he wants to own the platform instead of merely being an app on it.
Imho, Apple just wants money. FB will agree to pay 15 billions/year to keep tracking enabled, similar to how Google pays Apple to keep their search the default option.
At least give me the choice. Like a switch in the settings screen saying "let Apple police me and others". I would even be ok with it being ON by default.
Oops. Yes. But Apple is not applying it consistently. They are still policing us in a lot of different ways too. One of the many examples is that Firefox is forced to use webkit on iOS, and nobody is allowed to have their own web rendering engine in the app store, which goes right against the principles of general purpose computing and having control over your own device. It's nice that Apple has a content-filter for people who are not tech-savvy, or for kids who are not allowed to see certain content, but that filter should be optional.
Imagine a world with 0 tracking on any website/app. It would be horrendous. Advertising would not stop, it would just be so bad that we as users will be in even worse situation than today.
Now, current situation is also not good, with the amount of tracking/ers not only affecting privacy, but also the look, speed and size of the web pages in a very bad way.
Also no advertising on the web at all, as much as people say they would want it, I think they would even less want the effect of no advertising at all. So many services would be not be feasible, and everything else would be pay per month to access kind of thing. And you can only pay so much.
There should be a middle ground. But me personally would rather prefer _some_ (where that amount is less than today) targeted advertising to the alternatives. Even though I almost never click on ads, on any platform.
Why would you want effective advertising? The sole purpose of advertising is making you buy something you otherwise wouldn’t buy. Call me old fashioned but if I want to buy something I look up reviews, I don’t just scroll Facebook until a good advert pops up.
I just explained it. No advertising on the internet at all would be worse than some (because most of free services, publications, networks etc. would be shutdown). So, if need to see some ads, let them at least be relevant.
Apple some time ago recognized that they won't be able to compete on software with other BigTech giants so they are building an environment where certain software advancements are crippled. User activity data will be important to tune algorithms for maximum utility and by restricting access to user data for others, Apple wants to give itself the best shot to stay in the game.
In the long run this will be a net loss for the Apple customers whose experiences will likely suffer compared to Android and other players. Already in my subjective opinion Android on Pixel phones provides a much richer and engaging environment than iOS and the difference will only become even more pronounced.
Now it's a race. Will Apple superior hardware and privacy focus draw the majority of users before Google and others deliver clearly better software experiences, or whether the difference in software smarts will cause users to gravitate away from the walled garden of iOS and towards more permissive ecosystems.
> Apple some time ago recognized that they won't be able to compete on software with other BigTech giants so they are building an environment where certain software advancements are crippled. User activity data will be important to tune algorithms for maximum utility and by restricting access to user data for others, Apple wants to give itself the best shot to stay in the game.
That seems off to me. Apple isn't crippling anything, they're giving their users the choice of opting in/out of tracking. If, as you say, choosing not being tracked makes the users' experiences so bad, they can simply opt-in and all will be good again. What am I missing?
Getting users to opt-in will be very hard given the current partially justifiable negative vibe, so that will likely not happen at scale unless opting in results in a clearly better experience. However, if the majority of users jump into the Apple ecosystem before those clearly better experiences are materialized, there will be few remaining alternatives for Apple users to compare to and change their mind regarding tracking. Consequently there will also be little incentive to improve the software using user data.
