[HN Gopher] Facebook testing notification to users about Apple p...
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes
Author : asimpletune
Score : 387 points
Date : 2021-02-01 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| imheretolearn wrote:
| I am happy that this is happening. It was about time someone gave
| it back to FB. FB has time and again crossed boundaries for which
| it has had to apologize everytime. It seems like they cannot
| regulate themselves so someone from the outside has to step in. I
| hope this changes the individual tracking landscape a bit even
| though the Big G is still a larger issue that needs to be
| addressed
| grishka wrote:
| > Apple's new prompt suggests there is a tradeoff between
| personalized advertising and privacy; when in fact, we can and do
| provide both.
|
| We provide both as long as you trust us.
| kerng wrote:
| To be honest, I dont accept the argument that extremly detailed
| tracking is the only way to show relevant ads. High level
| information is probably enough and I'm sure FB would still make
| tons of money by even showing random ads.
|
| Makes you wonder if there is actually another reason for
| collecting all that data? Like building AI and ML models for
| other purposes.
| cwkoss wrote:
| If regulations don't prevent them from doing so, I expect FB to
| pivot into Surveillance As A Service for authoritarian states.
| 0x0 wrote:
| So I guess you should click "Allow" in the first facebook-
| designed prompt, to trigger the second Apple iOS level system
| prompt, and click "Don't allow" there, to actually register the
| do-not-track request to be enforced on the OS/API level?
|
| If you just click "Don't allow" on the first FB screen, it
| doesn't look like iOS will know about the do-not-track preference
| at all?
| temp667 wrote:
| Thank goodness we've all been conditioned by the EU cookie
| consent screens to say yes to every damn popup that pops up!
|
| Seriously - the EU is bombarding us with damn cookie notice
| screens. I wish apple had been more in charge of the web than
| these EU folks.
| ruined wrote:
| do i get a consent screen if i don't have an account
| metalliqaz wrote:
| if you don't have a FB account, why would you install the app?
| rolph wrote:
| in my case i would install so i can sniff the connections and
| suss out the code where possible, likely tuck all that away
| into a folder for development of a putative anti app.
| code_duck wrote:
| FB has been known to maintain marketing profiles for people
| who have never or no longer use their services.
| moolcool wrote:
| "Support business which rely on ads to reach customers"
|
| Well if you put it that way... still no.
| yters wrote:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theonion.com/cias-facebook-...
| reaperducer wrote:
| Non-Amp link: https://www.theonion.com/cias-facebook-program-
| dramatically-...
| yters wrote:
| I wonder if Google ever sanitizes web pages filtered through
| its amp servers.
| acheron wrote:
| I thought the more appropriate one is
| https://www.theonion.com/entire-facebook-staff-laughs-as-man...
| racl101 wrote:
| I'm ok with Facebook having to beg for my permission to use my
| data instead of just taking what they want without telling me.
| Lammy wrote:
| I'm impressed (in a bad way) at the subtle emotional manipulation
| in the combination of "support businesses" and the header image
| they chose for this design.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| i wonder if that would have even be a useful ploy if covid
| hadn't of damaged so many businesses in the last year. tugging
| on the ole heart strings.
| cronix wrote:
| From what I gather, Apple has been using IDFA since 2012. It's
| baked into the OS and Apple generates the ID. It was enabled by
| default. Before IDFA, Apple used UDID. My question is why did the
| privacy focused Apple ever include such a thing in the first
| place? They provided the tools. Others, like FB, used it and were
| profiting. I'm no fan of FB (I don't have an account) but it
| seems the blame is being laid at the wrong feet?
|
| https://branch.io/idfa/
| rolph wrote:
| actual title:
|
| "Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy
| changes"
| dang wrote:
| Yes, that was bad. Changed now. (Submitted title was "FB
| testing screen to encourage users to accept active tracking")
|
| Submitters: please follow the HN rules, which ask you " _Please
| use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait;
| don 't editorialize._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Myspace wasn't that bad after all.
| tnt128 wrote:
| Here is the logic, if you allow tracking, we would show your more
| relevant ads, if you don't allow, we will spam the shit out of
| you. Either way, you see tons of ads, but allow tracking, you see
| ads more relevant.
|
| Of course that's not how they word this. They framed it as a
| benefit,
|
| Notice how it's worded - allowing for better personalized ad
| experience - I bet when worded this way, a good percentage of
| people will think, of course I want the ads to be more related to
| me and click allow.
| gowld wrote:
| What's wrong with ads? Facebook costs money and effort to
| produce for its users to enjoy.
|
| I don't use FB, but people who do use presumably enjoy it.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Because Facebook's ads require a panopticon of surveillance
| across every page with a FB like button in order to function
| in current form.
|
| People are sending much more data to facebook than they
| realize, and are typically upset when they learn the scope of
| facebooks dragnet.
|
| If Facebook only used data from the Facebook platform itself
| (and none of their web of acquired companies), I think people
| would have much fewer objections to the tracking.
| wackget wrote:
| It's hugely ironic that this article is written/hosted by a
| website which runs entirely via the Google AMP platform.
|
| You can't read the article without going via Google's AMP
| servers, unless you use a website like https://printfriendly.com
| to parse it for you.
| ffpip wrote:
| Disable javascript for axios.com. You can do it with uBlock
| Origin.
|
| Then simple click Firefox's reader mode icon. Even if the page
| is blank, just click the reader mode icon.
| golondon wrote:
| if FB stops using IDFA completely and just create the profile out
| of the logged in user ID, wouldn't that be enough? At the end of
| the day, mobile Facebook app gets most of its data from FB
| servers? So, If someone has liked /YellowBirds page and spent 2
| hours on /BirdsBirdsBirds page, you kinda get they are into the
| birds? Wouldn't that already provide looots of information?
|
| If they don't use IDFA, I guess they would loose capability of
| linking the events from different apps. I don't know targeted
| advertising world that much, but is that a big deal? I think even
| without cross app tracking, FB has capability to provide quite
| detailed targeting. I'm not sure why they reacted this
| aggressive, feels to me like there is egos involved, possibly
| Zuck struggling to accept Tim can force him to do something.
|
| Other thing I wonder is how this notification going to look like
| in the apps using FB SDKs.
| ArmandGrillet wrote:
| Wow, those encouragements are very weak. "Get ads that are more
| personalized", "Support businesses that rely on ads to reach
| customers": why would I support businesses relying on that when
| only 1 out of 5 ads in my feed is not garbage?
|
| These encouragements make me think that Facebook seems to believe
| that their ads are useful, which is a bit insane from a user
| perspective.
| gameman144 wrote:
| Agreed that a lot of ads are useless, but I've personally seen
| a few that I wouldn't have otherwise known about. For instance,
| there's a really cool used technical bookstore near me that I
| only discovered because I saw an ad for it. Also I would have
| missed a Humble Bundle that I really liked without an ad.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I probably hate the average ad more than
| most people (any Liberty Mutual ad just makes me angry), but to
| say that ads are _not_ useful from a user perspective is a bit
| too absolute a position; for me, the good ones definitely are
| useful.
| grishka wrote:
| Have you ever talked to someone who works in adtech? They do
| sincerely believe that ads are helpful to people.
| lumost wrote:
| I worked in ad-tech for years, ultimately the convincing data
| is that people actually do click on ads. They do buy the
| products, and they do this more often than they would have
| had we not shown the ads at all (for some market segments).
|
| I've often wondered if there is a population of users who
| simply hate ads to the extent that any impression will be net
| negative value to the advertiser, and what mechanisms could
| be used to stop showing them ads. There used to be services
| which let you purchase all of your own ads, but I think
| people want something more transparent which outright removes
| them from the services they use.
| local_dev wrote:
| >if there is a population of users who simply hate ads to
| the extent that any impression will be net negative value
| to the advertiser
|
| This segment of the population absolutely exists and I
| would guess that it is growing. Many people in my circle
| block ads on every device possible. Seeing any ad is an
| immediate negative impression for my group of friends.
|
| This is entirely anecdotal, but I've seen this same
| sentiment in many other circles and am hearing it more and
| more often.
| grishka wrote:
| > I've often wondered if there is a population of users who
| simply hate ads to the extent that any impression will be
| net negative value to the advertiser
|
| Yes, I would characterize myself as such. The best products
| gain their exposure through word of mouth, and don't need
| paid advertising. Incessantly raping my eyeballs with your
| brand would just make me hate it even more. Especially so
| if it's happening on my own electronic devices against my
| will.
|
| But then there are people who legitimately _want_ to be
| advertised to -- I know some personally.
|
| > I think people want something more transparent which
| outright removes them from the services they use.
|
| These are called ad blockers. I use them in some form on
| every device I own.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > I worked in ad-tech for years, ultimately the convincing
| data is that people actually do click on ads. They do buy
| the products, and they do this more often than they would
| have had we not shown the ads at all (for some market
| segments).
|
| This says nothing about whether ads are useful or
| beneficial to people. Buying a product does not mean the
| product was not a net loss for the customer, with the
| classic example being cigarettes.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Complaining about advertising is like complaining about
| money. Advertising is inevitable in any economy.
| wtetzner wrote:
| I'm OK with advertising existing, it's just the way in
| which it's being conducted that's objectionable.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Tech companies have been using this kind of rhetoric since the
| early 2000s. Back then, people were sympathetic to helping keep
| websites online, especially blogs and such owned by
| individuals. The line has lost its charm when it's turned into
| an inescapable global surveillance apparatus.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I'm not on Facebook so I can't speak to what you personally
| see. However, I think the "support small business" angle is
| going to be somewhat compelling. I have, for example, two
| friends who are starting a niche business, offering a good and
| ethical service, and reaching people in that niche through
| Facebook and Instagram ads. The customers they find _love_ what
| they're doing and happily paying. If I had Facebook, I could
| see doing my small part to help them find a few more of those
| types of good businesses succeed.
|
| I also kind of despise Facebook, hence no account, so I don't
| mind if this permission screen fails. :)
| purplecats wrote:
| I have no empathy for them. I tried to advertise my dating
| business on there, and got insta-banned both times because
| they basically don't let you compete with their dating
| services.
| ddoolin wrote:
| Wow! Really. I'm currently working on a nascent dating
| business and that's kind of disappointing to hear as I was
| counting on being able to advertise through that channel.
| Thanks for sharing.
| bluesign wrote:
| I bet for every one small business like your friend, there is
| 10 scammy business (something like selling 1$ item for 20$
| with 40% discount) who is betting 10x more than your legit
| friend for impressions.
| blinktag wrote:
| I don't know if the mockup is what will actually appear in
| production, but there is some psychology about showing a flower
| and a smiling black woman. The image plays first to trust
| (nature, a mother figure, the smile) and if that isn't enough,
| secondly to guilt (I need to start trusting black women) to prime
| the user into accepting the prompt. Imagine if it were a
| cartoonish Mark Zuckerberg with his tight little smirk, and
| instead of a flower, a piggy bank.
|
| Facebook isn't stupid or random. This image must have been very
| carefully developed and run past some of their staff PhDs.
| Assuming this is real.
| bluelu wrote:
| I know that this is unpopular here, but a lot of people
| (including me) don't mind that they get targeted ads.
|
| If you fear for abuse, then there should be clear laws what
| should not be allowed and severe punishment for this.
|
| But forbidding facebook to track behaviour and then allowing
| apple to do so (e.g. they even track what programs you run, is
| just wrong. Who knows, maybe apple will even start its own
| "privacy" network later on.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| The button saying "Ask App Not to Track": is it binding or non-
| binding? If I kindly asked an app to not track, I'm fairly
| certain the app would tell me to pound sand.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| "Ask App Not to Track" just means the app will be denied access
| to the IDFA (which you can already do by turning on "Limit ad
| tracking" in settings). It's worded like that because this
| can't prevent the app from using something else (IP address or
| device fingerprinting) to track you.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Is the discussion moot if users can be easily fingerprinted
| without IDFA? It makes life slightly more difficult for
| advertising partners and social media companies, but not
| impossible. It's just a small additional barrier to friction
| that buys Apple some good PR.
| K0nserv wrote:
| That's against Apple's guidelines, violations of which will
| get your app kicked off the only distribution channel on
| iOS. We'll have to see how this shakes out in reality, but
| as a deterrent it's pretty strong.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| There has been an article on here just a day ago where
| the "app privacy" labels turned out to be false, so
| clearly Apple doesn't actually police this very well.
| K0nserv wrote:
| I found at least one instance of that in my own research.
| Do you have the link to that submission?
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Apple might dislike Facebook, but it's difficult to
| imagine a world where it's removed from the App Store.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Apple, almost exactly 2 years ago, revoked Facebook's
| _enterprise signing key_ after shenanigans they had
| pulled with their fake VPN. Until that was fixed,
| Facebook devs were unable to install new builds on their
| testing devices.
|
| Based on that history, I don't think Apple is scared of
| Facebook. They probably won't pull the app because it
| would be flipped back on Apple, but I'm sure they could
| find something to push back on Facebook with.
|
| [0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-
| and-google-...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| At least it's a start.
| criddell wrote:
| If it was irrelevant, Facebook wouldn't be worried.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| That's all well and good, but does anyone believe that this won't
| be a broken feature?
|
| Edit: Also, I am absolutely positive that some of my family will
| agree because they'll think FB would not work correctly (update
| their feed) otherwise.
| 3gg wrote:
| Do not miss the Facebook articles linked from the page.
|
| "We disagree: personalization doesn't have to come at the expense
| of privacy. We can do both, and we can do both well. We've built
| products that lead the industry in transparency and offer
| settings and controls to help people manage their privacy."
|
| "So if you recently bought a hiking backpack from a local outdoor
| gear supplier and are no longer looking for a new one, you can
| choose to remove the outdoor gear supplier from this list of
| businesses, and disconnect that information from your account."
|
| For a company that prides itself with transparency, you could
| start with not lying to people in such a blunt and despicable
| way. See, I don't want you to know that I bought a hiking
| backpack. Why should you know? Why do you think you are the
| arbitrer of the market, that people cannot do their own research
| and that small business need you? This is a false premise, and
| your position is a blatant JOKE that at this point is also sad
| and unremarkable.
|
| Stop lying to people, you sad surveillance capitalists.
|
| https://about.fb.com/news/2020/12/personalized-advertising-a...
|
| https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/a-path-forward-for-privacy...
| danShumway wrote:
| > "Apple's new prompt suggests there is a tradeoff between
| personalized advertising and privacy; when in fact, we can and do
| provide both."
|
| It's a somewhat bold but not completely implausible claim to
| argue that highly personalized ads are compatible with privacy.
| There are theoretically schemes that could make that work.
|
| But it is, however, a wicked bold claim for Facebook to go a step
| farther say they are already _currently_ providing both privacy
| and personalized advertising. Does anyone, at all, believe them
| when they say that?
| midrus wrote:
| The more I know about Facebook, the more I like Apple
| chrischen wrote:
| Facebook makes so much money off of tracking users... why don't
| they just start paying us.
| yalogin wrote:
| I am really surprised the amount of tantrums FB is throwing in
| this saga. This is a golden opportunity for them to reset their
| platform and change their brand in the world.
|
| Large businesses don't get these kind of opportunities often and
| this is something, I thought, they will seize. I really thought
| they will build security/privacy into their platform and weed
| things out. They could have gone to a paid model in some cases
| and doubled down on privacy in others. They would have lost
| revenue in the short term but would be great in the long term.
|
| However, they are doubling down on the catering to fear
| mongering, cult marketing type things and kicking and screaming
| without much to show.
| Balgair wrote:
| Likely this is because they do not have other options. Ever
| since 2016, they have been 'alerted' that their stack is
| fragile to regulation and other outside forces. Zuck has been
| hauled up in front of Congress a few times now over many
| things, including the tracking issues. The C-suite is very much
| aware of the problems.
|
| I suppose they are trying to throw a fit now, and then relax to
| their secondary position when they must. But knowing how large
| bureaucracies (don't) work, there is no fall-back position.
| There is no 'there' anymore.
| Havoc wrote:
| >Ask App Not to Track
|
| Gotta love how they flipped that phrasing around from facebook
| asking you for permission to you requesting something from them.
|
| This whole thing reeks of having been A/B tested to death for max
| psychological manipulation without straying into territory where
| they can be accused of aggressive dark patterns.
| RL_Quine wrote:
| That's the text provided by apple.
| erentz wrote:
| What would happen if legislation were passed to ban all tracking,
| across the board? Perhaps also inclusive of limits on targeted
| advertising also (to reduce the incentive to gather personal
| data).
|
| It seems this kind of universal disarmament (so to speak) still
| leaves FB in the same dominant position from an advertising
| perspective. It has the same huge audience, and it's advertising
| product is the same as everyone else. If so why wouldn't FB be
| actively lobbying for this right now?
|
| (I'm just putting aside questions of monopoly, etc. Purely from
| an FB self interest stand point.)
| gameman144 wrote:
| One worry I have is regarding poorly handled legislation
| hobbling national companies more than intended and driving
| consumers to worse options (as opposed to just preventing them
| from doing creepy things.) One of the prime examples here is
| search: if Google didn't keep a history of my search terms
| and/or other data about my account, the results they'd return
| would be far less personalized. I could (and do) use DuckDuckGo
| instead, but the search results are far less convenient (e.g.
| when I look up "compilation", DDG shows me literary
| compilations, Google shows me code-related things).
|
| This in itself is fine, as long as either: 1. The drop in
| convenience isn't so high that people would prefer an
| alternative service 2. We can impose these rules worldwide.
|
| If the drop in convenience isn't too bad, then even though
| there's a little more friction, there's not a mass exodus from
| these services. If we could impose these rules worldwide,
| that'd also make this an easy decision.
|
| Given that the web is global, however, my biggest area of worry
| is that we squeeze all national companies to protect privacy,
| but it turns out the consumers really _did_ like the
| personalized and convenient experiences and immediately switch
| over to Baidu or some other site that falls outside national
| jurisdiction _and_ personalizes user experience well
| (presumably through even stronger privacy invasions).
|
| tl;dr: I am cool with legislation, but given the global scale
| of the web we need to make sure we get the incentives/changes
| _just_ right.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| I have a different idea other than banning: make companies pay
| a tax on each bit of user information they hold.
| vaduz wrote:
| Great idea! It means that the company gets to do the tracking
| as much as it wants as long as it shares some of these
| profits with the government, and as a bonus gets to enjoy a
| reasonably confidence that any initiative to futher enhance
| privacy will be quashed in a hurry - with bipartisan support,
| too, especially in the current tax revenue slump thanks to
| the ongoing pandemic. /s
|
| The word you were probably looking for is _fines_ , but they
| would have to be punitive and extraordinarily risky to stop
| the practice...
| flavius29663 wrote:
| what I meant was taxes high enough to matter for the bottom
| line. Also, this would force the companies to open up their
| databases for government or public inspection, kind-of like
| we do today with uranium processing. This alone would
| expose dark behavior much earlier than today
| broknbottle wrote:
| Tax, how about royalties to the user. They use that data to
| advertise to other users within a family or circle. It's data
| about us, why shouldn't they have to pay a royalty to users
| and get our permissions beforehand when they want to utilize
| the data in different ways.
|
| We have different licenses for code and projects. Why not
| have something similar for user data / metadata
| gameman144 wrote:
| You could argue that they _do_ pay a royalty to users, and
| that royalty gets put toward free access to software and
| services. Whether or not that royalty is sufficient is fine
| to debate, but at the end of the day someone is footing the
| bill.
| chias wrote:
| > ban all tracking
|
| That's a whole can of worms. Does the existence of things like
| your website's Apache request log count as "tracking"? Or does
| it only count if it's multiple domains? Maybe we'd need to say
| multiple organizations, to account for applications with
| multiple domains (e.g. facebook.com, fbcdn.com, etc.) But then
| what is an organization? If I sign an agreement with you to
| sell you my Apache request log, is that now illegal? If so,
| what was it about that that made it illegal? How do you make
| that illegal without also making it illegal to share these
| otherwise benign logs with people for the purpose of debugging
| website issues? Are you going to base this on "intent"? That
| is, "you're free to share this data with X as long as X does
| not intend to use it for advertising, or to share it with
| anyone else who might [...] who might intend to use it for
| advertising"? These kinds of intent-chains are spectacularly
| ineffective, in part because the advertising ecosystem is set
| up to make these chains as convoluted as possible, and suddenly
| someone just has some data there and _why not_ make profiles
| out of it? etc.
|
| :\
| lumost wrote:
| There are a few factors at play here when it comes to
| advertising.
|
| 1) Digital is taking over all ad-channels
|
| 2) Digital ads can be tracked and attributed ways that were
| never possible with traditional media
|
| 3) It turns out most non-targeted ads aren't actually that
| effective, and aggregate ad spend is falling.
|
| FB ads are effective and high value _because_ of tracking. If
| tracking goes away, FB ad revenue will fall to that of banner
| advertising at roughly 1 /100th to 1/10000th the price per
| impression that FB currently receives.
|
| Such a change would effectively force a rethink of the entire
| consumer technology business, and see FB/GOOG re-structure to
| some form of subscription revenue or shutdown large feature
| sets and product offerings which would no longer be tenable.
| mgreg wrote:
| > 3) It turns out most non-targeted ads aren't actually that
| effective, and aggregate ad spend is falling.
|
| While this is a commonly held believe in many corners it
| doesn't appear to be well backed by data & research.
| Freakonomics also covered this topic in some detail recently.
|
| Some examples where it's proven untrue:
|
| Nytimes drops targeted advertising in Europe:
| https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-
| cut...
|
| >"The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral
| targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of
| what advertisers want to do with us," he said. "The
| desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting
| capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue
| standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising
| business continues to grow nicely."
|
| Danish broadcaster grew revenue after dropping targeted ads:
| https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/24/data-from-dutch-public-
| bro...
|
| >The data shows the NPO grew ad revenue after ditching
| trackers to target ads in the first half of this year
| lumost wrote:
| Typically, platforms with smaller reach ( read < 10 million
| DAU) will only have a few big advertisers who are willing
| to purchase _most_ ad positions. Behavioral targeting on
| such platforms with large advertisers will probably only
| limit spend by cutting out bad impressions, and the in-
| house or external behavioral targeting isn 't anything
| close to what FB offers.
|
| FB/Goog dominate ad-spend as they are able to effectively
| match _small_ advertisers with the appropriate audience,
| and these advertisers typically have specific customer
| goals in mind. If the goal of the ad buyers on the NYT is
| simply to associate their brand with the trustworthiness of
| the NYT, then there won 't be much benefit from behavioral
| targets.
| grishka wrote:
| How much does Facebook earn from one user, $1 a year? No one
| would've died if they switched to a $1/year subscription
| model. People tend to respect companies that are honest with
| them. Except Facebook won't ever be able to regain its
| reputation, but still.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Doing that would equate to $2.7 billion a year in revenue.
| They currently generate about $70 billion a year. So, yeah;
| they'd pretty much die if their revenue dropped that much.
| grishka wrote:
| Imagine how much money they could save if they stop
| redesigning every little thing all the time to squeeze
| every last cent. Imagine not needing hundreds of
| developers working on a single app.
| judge2020 wrote:
| https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-
| every....
|
| Depends on the metric you use.
|
| > Facebook's revenue per user is roaring. For Q4 2018 vs.
| Q4 2017, it's global ARPU increased by 19 percent to $7.37,
| and the US-Canada ARPU by 30 percent to $35. Between 2011
| and 2018, the social network global ARPU rose nearly 6x,
| while the US-Canada grew 11x. With a domestic revenue per
| user of $112, Facebook is the equivalent of a publisher
| charging $9 a month. It does that with a free service.
| grishka wrote:
| TIL. I thought these kinds of numbers weren't at all
| possible with an ad-supported business model.
| lumost wrote:
| Assuming that the only users who would be willing to pay
| are those who use one of FB's services at least once per
| month; then FB would need to charge $26/yr to match their
| current revenue. Given that they already have 2.7 billion
| MAUs it's unlikely that they could grow their way out of
| such a change, and serving ads is ultimately inexpensive.
| marketingtech wrote:
| In Q4 alone, they made $53/user in US/Canada, and $10/user
| worldwide. This revenue is not evenly distributed, and the
| type of user who is willing to pay $50/quarter for FB is
| worth much more than that to FB advertisers.
|
| source: Slide 4 (ARPU) https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/file
| s/doc_financials/2020/q4...
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > It turns out most non-targeted ads aren't actually that
| effective
|
| Non-personalised television advertising is still doing great.
| marketingtech wrote:
| No, it's not. Eyeballs are down, thus prices and market
| share are down compared to digital. Different industry
| sources have different figures, but everyone agrees TV
| spend was down >5% in 2020 and expected to drop faster in
| 2021 as digital continues to grow at >30%.
|
| There's now a mad rush to standardize tech for personalized
| tv advertising, as providers plan to use the email/phone
| number you used for your cable/streaming service as a
| personal identifier that can be joined against 3rd party
| targeting data.
|
| I'm not trying justifying this - just describing where the
| industry (and money) is going.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| Is it not right that 2019 was the highest spend ever for
| TV advertising?
|
| And a 5% drop would be less than the drop in broader TV
| production, via coronavirus?
|
| Major events that are associated with large advertising
| budgets haven't happened: the Olympics didn't happen. The
| Eurovision Song Contest didn't happen.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > FB ads are effective and high value
|
| Not really.
|
| Digital advertising, frankly, sucks from the advertiser's
| point of view. It's just that people are online now and
| advertisers have no choice: the inventory providers are
| monopolistic and unregulated.
| lumost wrote:
| A more fair comparison might be that all advertising sucks
| from an advertisers perspective... but we just didn't have
| a good way to measure it.
|
| In the world of Nielson and print the only consistently
| measurable ads were brand ads - and brand awareness had a
| loose correlation across businesses with revenue. There was
| no way of rigorously testing whether individual customers
| propensity to purchase a good from a given business was
| actually tied to any of the brand awareness ads that were
| being purchased, or customer's brands they had heard of for
| trust reasons after deciding on a purchase, or if
| customer's simply didn't care about the branding. Bear in
| mind, any negative datapoint that indicates customer's
| didn't care could always be taken as a sign that the
| "brand" had to be improved. Not that the ads were
| worthless.
|
| Now on digital any brand exercise, direct pay per
| conversion, or other form of ad gets attributed to
| downstream revenue, and we're quickly discovering which
| half of the marketing budget isn't working.
| Permit wrote:
| > Digital advertising, frankly, sucks from the advertiser's
| point of view.
|
| What advertising does not suck from the advertiser's point
| of view? How are metrics gathered that demonstrate these
| forms of advertising work?
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Does Android have any analogue to this kind of tracking
| protection?
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Ok I found that Google does have a GAID/AAID and you can hide
| it in Android under Settings -> Google Services -> Ads
| munchbunny wrote:
| I'm glad Apple is at least making sure users are aware that this
| is even a thing. While people on HN are much more likely to
| follow the issue and do something about it, a lot of laypeople
| are just vaguely aware that Facebook might be a privacy problem
| without really understanding what levers they have to manage it
| themselves.
| VRay wrote:
| all I hear from my non-tech friends is "Oh yeah, the government
| and companies have 'my data' nothin I can do"
|
| they basically just assume they're living in a totalitarian
| society already and don't even think having any semblance of
| privacy is possible (or understand how easy it is for sinister,
| small-time third parties to spy on them via publicly-
| purchasable advertising data..)
| throwaway789394 wrote:
| There's also people here who have a financial incentive to
| dismiss privacy concerns bc it conflicts with their RSUs.
|
| For a forum named Hacker News were very accepting of Zuck and
| his shenanigans.
| whammywon wrote:
| Yes, but I think it would be a bit naive to think that Apple is
| doing so out of the kindness of their hearts.
|
| Apple already has access to all the metrics that Facebook would
| be interested in. It seems to me like this is a set-up for
| Apple to force FB to buy the data directly from them.
| judge2020 wrote:
| But Apple isn't selling any of that data (which is really
| just 'downloaded apps' - they don't have the web browsing
| habits that FB and GOOG have). Their financial interest here
| is selling privacy with the price being the ongoing
| commitment to buy Apple products.
| whammywon wrote:
| Perhaps, but who is to say that they don't have plans to
| branch out into that business?
|
| It's possible that they have no intent to do so, but a
| corporation's primary interest is making profit. And what
| would be a simple, yet significant, source of new revenue?
| Selling user data.
| TimothyBJacobs wrote:
| They tried offering an ad service called iAd that would
| do things the "Apple" way. No one used it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it would be a bit naive to think that Apple is doing so
| out of the kindness of their hearts_
|
| Good. If they were doing it out of charity, a bit profit
| pressure, shareholder activism or change in management and
| the move is reversed. Being grounded in sound business logic
| and self-interest makes me trust it.
| whammywon wrote:
| I never meant to imply that I thought Apple's (possible)
| intent was a good thing.
|
| I just think that a significant number of people will see
| what they're doing and thing "Oh, they're looking out for
| me." I think it's best to be skeptical of any company's
| motives, whether their current business decisions seem to
| help their users or not.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I don't think it's that. More that Apple in this case is
| the old "devil you know".
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| Apple is openly trying to sell 'premium' privacy services
| at consumer costs, be as skeptical you want but this is
| an obvious business decision and in many ways they
| actually are looking out for people...at a price
| alex_young wrote:
| Can't FB incentivize this a bit? I understand that they can't
| gate the app with ad tracking approval, but what if they promised
| to provide you with discounts on the merchants this tracking
| promotes or something like that?
| sneak wrote:
| Better: Opt in or your WhatsApp stops working.
| nerdo wrote:
| Opt in or get universally deplatformed and lose access to the
| banking system. Private companies btw.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Why would anyone agree to this? I don't see a benefit to letting
| Facebook or any company track me across the internet. When did we
| ever decide this was what consumers wanted?
|
| Every time this topic comes up I check Facebooks stock price and
| realize how detached people are from facebooks revenue driven by
| the advertisement market.
| chias wrote:
| I think a big factor is that you don't have an easy choice.
| Notice it's not "Allow" or "Reject", it's "Allow" or "Ask us
| not to".
|
| The only "Reject" is to flat out not use Facebook, and probably
| throw a few related domains into a blackholed HOSTS file.
| That's a steeper price than most are willing to pay.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Facebook is a dying sexapp platform and they are hoping to....
| save face. YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAHH
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| You're not the consumer here. You're not paying for anything.
| catacombs wrote:
| > You're not the consumer here. You're not paying for
| anything.
|
| But you are the PRODUCT.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| You are quite literally the consumer - you consume the
| service.
|
| You're just not the one paying for what the service is.
| meekrohprocess wrote:
| People like you and I didn't decide that it was what we wanted.
| We just have no other options, because the companies which
| impose the terms aggressively snuff out or buy up their
| competition.
|
| I would argue that people are accepting these terms under
| duress; "consent" is the wrong word.
|
| The market believes that Facebook et al will be able to
| continue enforcing their will unilaterally, and that is good
| for the companies, so their stocks go up.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| Everyone has options. I deleted FB years ago. No one actually
| needs FB.
| _jal wrote:
| I never signed up in the first place.
|
| But I don't go to a school that posts assignments on FB (I
| have heard of this quite a bit), my workplace doesn't use
| it (ditto) and I'm in a comfortable-enough place that
| putting up with the passive aggression from family and
| friends when they whine about my comm preferences is no big
| deal.
|
| Yes, everyone has options. But not everyone operates under
| the same pressures.
| samstave wrote:
| I absolutely detest FB - and I don't like the fact that you
| can't determine if FB is tracking you even when you do not
| use it.
| meekrohprocess wrote:
| I agree in principle, and so did I, but there's no denying
| that it puts a major crimp on your social life. It's wrong
| that people are forced to decide between accepting
| predatory terms or losing touch with friendly
| acquaintances.
|
| Also, if you own a small business, there's a real chance
| that you'd rely on Facebook for a significant portion of
| your business, because without a presence on their
| platforms you had may as well not exist.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > but there's no denying that it puts a major crimp on
| your social life.
|
| I completely deny that.
|
| I deleted Facebook when I was 25 and never once missed
| it. It never once put a crimp on my social life because
| my social life was never really organised around facebook
| in the first place. I still wanted to keep in touch with
| friends, and they wanted to keep in touch with me,
| without facebook.
| logifail wrote:
| > if you own a small business, there's a real chance that
| you'd rely on Facebook for a significant portion of your
| business
|
| Source?
|
| Even if this is true for _some_ types of small business,
| in _some_ markets, it 's a bit of a stretch to claim this
| applies across the board.
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| Yes, valid points. Also don't think they should hold
| social interactions hostage in an effort to not lose
| their grip on selling your attention span. If their
| product is worth paying for or the individuals in
| question are too cheap to pay for it without using ads
| then so be it. Let them monetize on ads, but I don't
| expect anyone to give a shit about small businesses
| profiting off our data. I didn't agree to support them by
| selling my data so I don't feel any emotional attachment
| to their situation.
| umvi wrote:
| > but there's no denying that it puts a major crimp on
| your social life
|
| In what way? Social lives existed before 2008 when FB
| went mainstream. I don't have a FB anymore, and I still
| text my friends for get-togethers.
| artful-hacker wrote:
| I deleted my facebook account a long time ago, but I
| definitely do not get invitations to some parties and
| events because of that. Facebook events are the easiest
| way to invite people to a party or other gathering.
| logifail wrote:
| > I definitely do not get invitations to some parties and
| events [..]
|
| Our 7 year old goes to an arts and crafts centre, in the
| aftermath of the furore over the WhatsApp Terms of
| Service update the organizers changed their contact
| details to suggesting reaching them via Signal instead.
| So we switched. Job done.
| ska wrote:
| > In what way?
|
| In the obvious way for some people? It's disingenuous to
| pretend that opting out of FB doesn't have negative
| social consequences for some (many?) people, and
| dismissing their concerns probably isn't a good way to
| change anyone's mind.
| MonAlternatiu wrote:
| A lot of my friends use social media to stay in touch.
| Not being on social media would keep me out of the loop,
| which is not desirable. I try to restrict its usage as
| much as possible though.
| umvi wrote:
| Collect alternative methods of staying in touch with
| friends you care about before leaving social media (phone
| numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, etc.)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea. If your friends will abandon you just because you're
| not on social media anymore, then I have bad news for
| you: they probably aren't really your friends. When I
| ditched Facebook about 10 years ago, I lost contact with
| a whole bunch of people who weren't really part of my
| life anyway, they were simply "names I recognized."
|
| My social life actually got better after dropping social
| media simply because I'm spending less time scrolling in
| front of a screen.
| MonAlternatiu wrote:
| > If your friends will abandon you just because you're
| not on social media anymore
|
| That's a very binary view of the world that I don't
| share. But that's not a topic I want to get into.
|
| Can you keep in touch with a certain group of friends
| through non-social media platforms? Absolutely. I do it
| daily, but that's not the point.
|
| The point is that staying away from these social media
| platforms reduces your ability to have a social life.
| It's quite like saying that you decrease your chances of
| finding work without a driving license or cellphone
| number.
|
| I could probably get away without social media today
| (modulo telegram/whatsapp). But at what point would I
| surrender? Most people of my generation use it, and it
| looks like newer generations will have even higher
| usages.
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| Actually I run a live theater venue and the vast majority
| of our tickets are purchased through a combination of
| Facebook advertising and Facebook event pages. There's no
| getting around that. I had deleted Facebook but needed to
| reinstate my account once I got involved in the theater
| industry. It's really frustrating actually. Facebook is the
| Comcast of social media, you don't really want to use them
| and you know they're abusing you, but you don't really have
| a choice.
| ska wrote:
| > No one actually needs FB.
|
| No one actually needs a car either. Or to eat industrially
| produced food. Or etc. etc.
|
| "Nobody actually needs X" where X is a thing that
| empirically a huge percentage of people do, is I suspect
| never a compelling argument.
|
| edit: bordercases brings up a good point, I picked
| particularly entrenched/difficult areas for examples but it
| wasn't necessary.
|
| My point was more about the futility of observing a common
| behavior and rejecting it superficially, so perhaps I
| should have used "Nobody needs a smart phone" or "No family
| of 4 needs a >2000sq/ft house" or the like as examples.
| zepto wrote:
| "No one actually needs a car either. Or to eat
| industrially produced food. Or etc. etc."
|
| This is a false equivalence.
|
| Facebook is nowhere near at that level of need yet.
| ska wrote:
| I think it's not really a false equivalence, as a matter
| of degree - but see edit made in response to this.
|
| There is also an issue of Maslow style leveling here, but
| the core point is identical.
| zepto wrote:
| I still think it's essentially a false equivalence:
|
| > Nobody needs a smart phone" or "No family of 4 needs a
| >2000sq/ft house" or the like as examples.
|
| Even these are in a totally different class of 'need' to
| Facebook which is trivially substituted by comparison.
| ska wrote:
| I think you miss the point the point I was trying to make
| (i.e. I didn't articulate it well).
|
| Regardless of how trivial you think it is, the fact that
| so many people demonstrate a preference not to should
| make you think harder about the problem. It's not just
| the technology, and many tech people tend to get this
| wrong consistently.
|
| Let's put it another way: if it was actually as trivial
| as you seem to think, it probably would have happened
| already.
| zepto wrote:
| That makes the point a lot worse, and really just comes
| across as you responding to a set of assumptions nobody
| is actually making.
|
| What is the 'it' which you imagine people think is
| trivial?
|
| Who is saying anything is trivial?
|
| Where is anyone saying it's just technology?
|
| Who said people don't have a preference to use Facebook?
|
| How do you know how hard people have thought about this?
|
| I don't think Facebook is trivial to replace, but that
| isn't because people are dependent on it in a way that is
| comparable to the other examples you mentioned.
|
| Unlike the examples you listed, _people can easily do
| without Facebook_. There just isn't much incentive for
| most people to do so, since they don't perceive the
| downsides adequately.
| bordercases wrote:
| Categorically yes, but the connotation is that it's still
| possible for the vast majority of people to get rid of
| Facebook and still lead a satisfying life. I can buy
| this. I can reason that it's likely true from e.g. the
| hedonic setpoint. There are a lot of people that were
| happy before Facebook and will be happy after Facebook is
| gone.
|
| Facebook is only ~15 years old and it deals mostly with
| aggregating text-based communications from people that
| feel the compulsion to post almost entirely because it's
| there. And they don't need Facebook, they just need the
| functions it provides; there was a time when these
| functions would have been split up into separate services
| until they were acquihired or integrated.
|
| And although Facebook is monolithic, its monopoly is
| primarily enforced by network effects and conventions.
| Shit happens, like stock rallies or privacy scares.
| Facebook might still be around but the exodus of e.g.
| WhatsApp to Signal still shows the power of close
| substitutes to challenge what is "necessary".
|
| There's also nothing fallacious in your counterargument.
| Both cars and industrial farming are being challenged in
| their own right. Cars for issues behind pollution and
| sprawl (resulting in ride-sharing, electric cars and
| transit) and industrial farming for its ethics and
| chemical impact on the environment (organic food,
| veganism, greater awareness of bioaccumulation of
| pesticides and microplastics). In educated circles these
| have become widely considered as Good Things, but would
| involve challenging the assumption that things we take
| for granted as necessary are actually so. That's just
| progress.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Is Facebook still creating shadow profiles? Whether or not
| you have an account with them, they might still be
| harvesting data about you. An individual can't really
| "delete FB".
| dTal wrote:
| It's very narrow-minded to assume that because _you_ don 't
| need Facebook, no one does. Facebook clearly provides some
| value, or no one would use it at all. Some people can't
| afford not to take advantage of that value. You can't tell
| a small business "don't use Facebook for social media
| outreach, it's evil and monopolistic" when the alternative
| is being outcompeted by those who do.
| phito wrote:
| Totally agree. I have a very niche small business (you
| can check my comment history) and all the community is on
| facebook, it has completely replaced forums. I don't have
| a choice, I need facebook and instagram otherwise I
| wouldn't be able to reach them.
| intrasight wrote:
| Also, remember that this is only about the FB app - and
| only on iOS. You can use only the FB site like I do and
| have all tracking and ads disabled.
| rdiddly wrote:
| So that the ads you don't want, are also creepily specific to
| things you mentioned recently? :D
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Every time this topic comes up I check Facebooks stock price
| and realize how detached people are from facebooks revenue
| driven by the advertisement market._
|
| People don't drive stocks. Banks and bots do.
|
| Except for GameStop. But that's a different fish.
| flatline wrote:
| If you think that's all retail driven I have a bridge to sell
| you...
| [deleted]
| adrr wrote:
| More relevant ads would be the benefit for the user.
| api wrote:
| To see the dancing bunny, of course.
|
| (There's a term "dancing bunny attack" for putting interesting
| content behind a confirmation dialog you want people to click.
| Facebook kind of does that implicitly. All they have to do is
| hide appealing content behind this option.)
| sneak wrote:
| Millions of people already agreed to this: this is how every
| iPhone works right now, and always has.
|
| Apple shipped this tracking feature in the first place.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| They didn't agreed per-se, it was just a default and Apple
| should be shamed for this.
| m463 wrote:
| > Why would anyone agree to this?
|
| And that is the entire story of dark patterns.
| newscracker wrote:
| > Why would anyone agree to this?
|
| To help small businesses that thrive because of Facebook and to
| show the finger to greedy corporations like Apple. /s
|
| That's kinda how Facebook will paint this, without directly
| mentioning its disgust for Apple in the message prompt.
| Facebook will also paint a picture of it being the protector of
| privacy of the user and how it doesn't "sell" information.
| There will be a lot of smoke and mirrors, for sure.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Why would anyone agree to this?
|
| Because the opt-out is hidden under the third pane behind the
| per party 1 by 1 drop-downs of the opt-outs for "legitimate
| interests", in a list of 120 "vendors" that require individual
| sub-pane drop downs and a radio button all having an "agree to
| selected" button that will immediately negate all your previous
| selections and just blast you to the content as if you "agreed
| to all".
| HotHotLava wrote:
| There's no opt-out, that's the whole point of the change.
| naiveai wrote:
| So that the ads are more personalized. I know this sounds
| weird, but if I'm going to get ads anyway, I'd like them to
| potentially be products I'm going to maybe have a use for and
| might make my life easier.
|
| I get the privacy implications, but asking "why would _anyone_
| agree to this " is kind of narrow-minded.
| afterburner wrote:
| Funny, I feel the opposite. If they're going to try to
| manipulate me, I want it to be shitty and ineffective, not as
| effective as possible.
| ryanianian wrote:
| There are many ways to have relevant ads that don't track you
| as an individual.
|
| You may find that only 70% of the ads are relevant versus
| 75%, but you will not find that you've unwittingly given away
| your personal information for the pleasure of buying
| something.
| bavent wrote:
| Does that actually work though? I've been buying things on
| Amazon for over a decade. For a while I got my groceries
| through them, I watch a lot of stuff on Prime Video. You
| would think they, of all people, know what I like. I can't
| think of more than a couple times where anything suggested to
| me was actually something I wanted.
|
| Even when I used FB, the ads were so off target from things I
| am interested in as to be laughable. Like, THIS is the best
| you can do with teams of engineers making > $200k/year
| throwing AI at everything? I'm not convinced that all of this
| tracking crap is just a way for them to market their ad
| business - "Look we gather all this data about people, your
| ads will definitely be seen by people who we know for a fact
| will be interested in them because of coding and algorithms
| and machine learning and blah blah blah."
| Terretta wrote:
| Perhaps a small cohort of targeted-ad-susceptible users
| skew the targeting efficacy stats so far it looks like
| targeted ads work overall.
|
| Perhaps this cohort doesn't overlap much with, say, New
| York Times readers, which might be why NYT and every other
| brand that tried first party non-retargeted ads saw an
| uptick in ROI.
|
| For most of us, perhaps these ads don't work or are
| negative, while this cohort are more like Candy Crush in-
| app-purchase whales -- for them they really really work, so
| they spend enough that most players think the game is "free
| to play" while griping about the endless in-app-upsells.
| bavent wrote:
| Ah so it's the "Nigerian Prince" scam, basically?
| reggieband wrote:
| > THIS is the best you can do with teams of engineers
| making > $200k/year throwing AI at everything?
|
| Maybe it is the best we can currently do and maybe it isn't
| objectively great. But the real question: is it better? I
| mean, better than the random shotgun approach that was TV,
| magazines, bus wraps, billboards, etc. Is it better than
| the spam flyers or "yellow pages" the post office delivered
| to every single household in some geographic area?
|
| Rather than compare to some idealized perfect, we should
| compare to the practical alternatives. Maybe this is
| legitimately the best we can currently do given the state
| of AI and machine learning. If that is the case, the right
| question for both advertisers and consumers is whether or
| not it beats the available alternatives. Because if it
| does, and advertisers seem to think it does, then that
| explains why Google and Facebook are worth what they are
| worth and how they can afford to pay what they pay.
| svachalek wrote:
| Is it one tiny increment better? Maybe? I'm with others
| who are not really impressed. For years the best Facebook
| could do were "Hot single [your gender preference] in
| [your city] are looking for [your age] [your gender]".
| Thanks, Mad Lib ads.
|
| But for the sake of argument let's say there is some
| small increment. What is the cost we are willing to pay
| for that? Databases that know exactly how much time we
| spend on the toilet? Political disinformation campaigns?
| Insurrection attempts?
|
| It's like making baby monitors a little bit more
| convenient, but in the process opening the door for pedo
| hackers to speak directly to your children's cribs. Tiny
| conveniences aren't worth sacrificing everything we have.
| bavent wrote:
| I don't buy that. For example - I bought a rowing machine
| on Amazon. It was the first piece of home gym equipment
| I'd ever purchased. For months after, other rowing
| machines were suggested to me. I already bought one, why
| would I buy another, especially if I hadn't returned the
| first one?
|
| Ads like this are very common for me - a purchase that I
| would consider to be a one-off thing (at least, for
| several years, whatever the standard lifetime of that
| product is) just leads to more ads for different models
| of that same thing. Occasionally, accessories that only
| go to a different model or brand of that thing.
|
| I don't see how this is any better than the random
| shotgun approach - these ads that are 100% irrelevant and
| not going to lead to a purchase are taking up space that
| ads that are possibly < 100% irrelevant (even if
| completely random) could be occupying.
|
| It seems like this would be a solvable problem for Amazon
| - aggregate the data of everyone who has purchased X
| model of rowing machine and see how many of them
| purchased a second rowing machine, which brand it was,
| and how long after purchasing #1 they bought #2. Don't
| show ads for rowing machines to people who have purchased
| X until time is >= avgTimeBetween1And2, with some fancy
| statistics in there somewhere.
|
| Clearly I'm missing something in my logic, because plenty
| of people a lot smarter than me work on this adtech
| stuff.
| reggieband wrote:
| > Clearly I'm missing something in my logic
|
| Your logic may be solid but you probably lack sufficient
| data. Plato was a pretty smart guy but he thought the
| four elements were Water, Fire, Air and Earth. His
| mistake wasn't intelligence or even flaws in his logic -
| it was missing data. If you begin your logic from one or
| more faulty assumptions then you will arrive at wrong
| conclusions regardless of how intelligent you are or how
| flawless your application of logic is.
|
| I don't have the data either - but you should at least
| use logic to consider possible reasons why you are seeing
| the same products you have purchased previously. Perhaps
| this is a strategy that wins significantly more often
| than you assume and you just lack the data to illuminate
| why.
|
| As the other commenter noted, you are but one data point
| in the literal hundreds of millions of data points
| available to Amazon. It would be humble to consider that
| they've tried your best first guess approach and it was
| suboptimal compared to the alternatives running now. Or
| maybe you choose to believe you are smarter than every
| single engineer that has worked on the problem there? And
| you believe this while lacking any data, having performed
| no experiments, etc.
| kd0amg wrote:
| > Clearly I'm missing something in my logic
|
| Sampling methodology. Every ad impression in your sample
| was shown to the same person, but the ad industry is
| interested in billions of people.
| bavent wrote:
| I'm sorry, I don't really follow. Could you explain a
| little bit more?
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| >Ads like this are very common for me - a purchase that I
| would consider to be a one-off thing (at least, for
| several years, whatever the standard lifetime of that
| product is) just leads to more ads for different models
| of that same thing. Occasionally, accessories that only
| go to a different model or brand of that thing.
|
| I don't have the industry expertise to know how true it
| is, but I've seen it stated numerous times in threads
| like this that this is entirely intentional. Supposedly
| the data shows that a person who just bought a rowing
| machine is actually quite likely to buy another one
| (because they aren't satisfied with the first one,
| because they collect rowing machines, etc) compared to
| most other demographics.
| artificial wrote:
| It comes down to the advertiser who is creating the
| audiences on the platform. "I can haz this many people?!" A
| terrible analogy is no programming language can save you
| from yourself. The current issue is the inaugural purchase
| mechanic, like buying a big ticket item or something that's
| a one off like toilet/toilet seat and now that's all you
| get moving forward.
| tal8d wrote:
| Marketers aren't trying to match you up with products that
| meet some unfulfilled need you have, they are trying to get
| you to buy anything in the very limited window available to
| them. You seem to be under the impression that they'll
| maximize that opportunity by presenting you with something
| you'd find useful. There are more effective ways to sell,
| with an enormous amount of research dedicated to perfecting
| the process. Unsurprisingly, the result of such efforts -
| unbounded by any sense of morality, are pretty disgusting.
| Depression. Depressed people make the best consumers. That is
| what they are looking for when they're tracking your off-site
| activity. Do you imagine they are above trying to induce
| depression?
| pmlnr wrote:
| Long, long time ago, when last.fm radio was still a thing on
| it's own, I loved it: instead of pre-arranging a playlist, it
| kept adding the next song by searching for similar ones based
| on the one currently playing. It kept crawling away,
| sometimes into terrible direction, but more often into an
| area I'd like to refer to as "satellite".
|
| "Satellite" would be friends-of-friends or even friends-of-
| friends-of-friends in social media terms.
|
| And this is how it comes to ads: when I bought a magazine, I
| got a set of ads that only had a rough idea about their
| audience. Those edges were the ones that allowed ads to
| broaden my views on the world, and, therefore, ads were
| useful for me. This, and the financial impossibility of ever
| getting one - early teen in Hungary -, were the reasons why I
| loved Sony catalogues in the '90s.
|
| Targeted ads are the polar opposite: they want to change me,
| force me to buy a certain, specific product, instead of
| gradually opening my interest to a lot more things in the
| world.
| TRcontrarian wrote:
| I feel the exact same way about sampling 'alien' ad
| culture. It's fun to switch on the local TV station in a
| new city and see what ads are being shown to people there.
| It's like a form of social calibration that shows what 'is
| available.' Same thing with reading the ads in the back of
| Popular Science or The Economist. I don't get that online
| unless I VPN+incognito, and I absolutely cannot get it on
| my phone, which is locked down much tighter.
| Spivak wrote:
| I want personalized ads _when I'm searching for product_. I
| really don't get the fetishization of sticking ads next to
| unrelated content. Like I get the whole brand mindshare
| aspect but that's not exactly a small-business type of ad
| campaign.
|
| Like Jesus. If a company had good ad targeting I would
| actually pay to access it and use it as my product search.
| It's remarkably difficult given the type of product you want
| to buy to survey the market and find different people that
| sell it. I'm currently going through that hell trying to find
| a water filter dispenser/pitcher. All of the search results
| are garbage. I know there is more out there than just the 17
| models of cheap plastic crap from Brita/Pur but it's an
| absolute slog to actually find anything.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I remember the good, ol' days when you were on a
| kiteboarding site and the ads were for kiteboarding
| equipment and not for more toasters after I just bought
| one. I don't mind ads in the old style but I seriously
| resent the current state.
| ryanianian wrote:
| The Wire Cutter (NYTimes) is doing this more and more and
| iirc they're quite profitable in doing it. They find the
| "best" products and give you referral links to buy them.
|
| Sometimes your site searches will show lists of things
| ("looking for a jacket? see our list of the best cold-
| weather gear"). This isn't a dark pattern. It's not
| targeting you the individual, it's targeting you the person
| who just explicitly showed intent to buy X. It's really how
| buying online would ideally work in all scenarios.
| Const-me wrote:
| Interestingly, my preference is opposite. If I'm going to see
| ads anyway, ideally I want to see them in a language I don't
| speak.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Tracking aside, I prefer not to have "personalized" ads for
| two reasons. First, they create another bubble based on their
| perception of me. Second, their personalization is so poor I
| sometimes wonder how come advertisers believe them.
|
| And this is all assuming you actually _want_ to see ads. I
| don 't. It's only when I need to buy something I enter the
| buying mode: I disable adblockers and start doing research -
| this is the only small window when ads are allowed to bother
| me.
| ryanianian wrote:
| If ads weren't clickbait, obnoxious, or misleading (and
| didn't violate your privacy) you may find yourself more
| open to seeing them. Even if they're not always super
| relevant to you and only you.
|
| Respectful advertising will always have its place whenever
| the buyer has a choice. It's when the companies selling
| those ads learn how to manipulate their audience that the
| 'respectful' parts of the equation get dropped and
| consumers start to push back.
|
| My Kindle shows me ads. I could pay to opt out, but I
| actually like the way it handles them. My (former) Alexa on
| the other hand was IN MY FACE with ads whenever I wanted to
| even just set a timer. That is grossly disrespectful of me
| as a human being, so it was shown the door.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| > My Kindle shows me ads
|
| I have no experience on Kindles, but on my Amazon Fire
| HD, I have rooted it, uninstall 50-60% of the bloatware,
| I have installed "NoRoot Firewall" to cut down on the
| unwanted comms between my tablet and Amazon, and I now
| have a perfectly functioning tablet for reading.
|
| Extra tip: install ReadEra and you can read the non-
| Kindle-app pdf, mobi, epub, etc.
| ljm wrote:
| They're essentially asking their users to bail them out by
| trying to garner sympathy towards the nebulous 'small
| businesses' who probably wouldn't notice any difference anyway.
| Unless FB threw a bunch of them under the bus first and then
| tried to blame Apple for it.
|
| FB aren't entitled to a user's entire internet presence
| (digital and physical) just because the user doesn't pay for
| the account.
| idreyn wrote:
| I'm a simple man -- if I see a button with a primary intent
| color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned
| to press it, often before I realize what I'm doing or reading
| the accompanying text. Probably tens of millions of people will
| do the same here.
| rickdeveloper wrote:
| What do you think about a 10s delay (or whatever an
| appropriate reading time is) before the buttons become
| active?
| mqus wrote:
| I propably already learned the "don't klick the obvious
| button asap" lesson pretty early, when websites had like 5
| "Download now" buttons (ads) and you had to search for the
| small text with a link to actually get the download.
| godelski wrote:
| While I agree with your point about this and that most people
| will do this it really brings up a lot of questions about
| what consent actually means. Especially with dark patterns
| and asymmetric information.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| True but looking at my own iTunes App Analytics dashboard for
| example, about 50% of users don't opt-in to share analytics
| with us.
|
| At Facebook-scale 50% means at least a billion users will
| still opt-in, but probably significantly less than what they
| were tracking before at the 100% level.
| smhg wrote:
| > if I see a button with a primary intent color standing
| between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it
|
| While cookie-laws have good intentions, this side effect
| should have been properly researched first. An internet full
| of shady and useless pop-ups which drive this behavior makes
| me sad. I'm still hoping they will someday disappear.
| jakear wrote:
| The skeptic in me bets that side effect was quite
| thoroughly researched, by the media companies, who found by
| normalizing intrusive banners they could get users to agree
| to whatever they heck they'd want.
| asddubs wrote:
| used to be like this but these days there's so many dark
| patterns that try to make you pay for extra shit (or sign up
| for prime), i instinctively look for the non highlighted
| button if the button stands out a little too much
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Same here. If I understand correctly, the GDPR states that
| if the user is tricked into clicking that they give
| consent, that doesn't count as them truly giving consent.
| Despite this, many otherwise reputable websites try to
| deceive you into 'agreeing'. Disappointingly, TomsHardware
| is one such.
|
| These dark patterns will only go away once there are
| properly enforced laws against them.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Remember though that this doesn't replace Apple's prompt!
| idreyn wrote:
| That's true, I forgot about that. I appreciate that those
| prompts don't highlight a particular option which tends to
| force you to read them.
|
| I wonder how often Apple will allow apps to re-request this
| permission when it's been denied; I have a handful of iOS
| apps that are constantly asking me to grant permission to
| see more of my photos, and I wish they'd rate-limit that
| kind of abuse.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Shit, every time I reboot my iPad it asks for permission
| to connect to my phone for wifi calling, and I keep on
| saying "no" and I wish I could just say "never ask this
| again". It's just as annoying when Apple does it.
| metaxis78 wrote:
| You can disable this feature, it's specifically a thing
| that you enabled at some point. The reason you're getting
| prompted is because you indicated that you want it. IIRC
| it's something to do with the wifi calling settings on
| your phone, not your ipad.
|
| It IS annoying that their nag box doesn't have a "go to
| settings" option, at least.
| [deleted]
| monadic3 wrote:
| > I wish they'd rate-limit that kind of abuse.
|
| They do. Observe that apps will prompt you in-app, and
| only if you indicate you're open to it will they invoke
| the system prompt, which will only trigger from the app a
| single time before you have to change it from the system
| preferences pane.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| It actually is. A while ago, someone (i think fb)
| produced an article that showed that to avoid the issue,
| they find it is best to show user their own similar
| screen, and only if the user clicks "yes", show the OS
| screen (cause for that one you only get one chance). I
| suspect you're seeing the apps' first "app-made" screen
| and not the OS one. Look carefully. If so, click yes
| there, and NO on the OS screen.
| roblabla wrote:
| Wouldn't this be against the Apple TOS? Might want to
| report application that are using this kind of dark
| pattern.
| monadic3 wrote:
| If it is, virtually every app on my phone is in
| violation.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Similar theory behind those "do you like this app"
| prompts that come from the app itself. If you tap "yes"
| they'll give you the prompt to rate on the AppStore. If
| you tap "no" they won't. This can seriously inflate an
| app's rating and help prevent low ratings. Nice,
| underhanded and effective dark pattern!
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The funny thing is when they do that, you leave a bad
| review, they delete your review, and then keep begging
| you to leave a review.
| Aulig wrote:
| This is called review gating and isn't allowed:
| https://appradar.com/blog/ask-users-leave-review-in-app-
| stor...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Interesting! It's obviously been a while since I was in
| the 3rd party app business because in my day, the use of
| these was widespread! Nice to see the vulnerability was
| closed.
| allenu wrote:
| Is it actually explicitly disallowed in Apple's
| guidelines? Their wording almost makes it indicate they
| want you to only ask for a rating when people are happy
| with the app:
| https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-
| reviews/ Make the request when users are most
| likely to feel satisfaction with your app, such as when
| they've completed an action, level, or task.
| another-dave wrote:
| I understood that to mean, if you've goals within you app
| (e.g. CityMapper -- completing a journey; Dropbox --
| uploading a file; some game -- beating a level), ask
| after the user has completed them, rather than what apps
| used to do (e.g. before you've been created an account,
| or getting in your way while you're changing some
| setting). But when they _do_ ask theyre meant to show the
| rating dialog either way, not first check what rating you
| would give.
| idreyn wrote:
| No doubt FB is preparing to A/B test dozens of variants
| for maximum "conversion" :)
|
| The dialog I am constantly seeing is this one, which
| seems to come from the OS:
| https://i.imgur.com/7JGotq3.png
|
| Now that iOS allows you to share only some photos with
| apps (which is great) I see this before practically every
| photo selection dialog in third-party apps. My choice
| here doesn't affect my ability to share a single image
| with the app in that moment; they just want to suck my
| whole library of photos in for background processing. I'd
| very much like to not see this dialog more than once a
| month.
| 0bit wrote:
| Go to Settings, scroll down to find the app, and select
| it. Then you get the "Allow <app> to access" and a list
| of entitlements, one of which is "Photos". Select
| "Photos" and you get three options "Selected Photos"
| (which is what you likely have), "All Photos", and
| "None". Push "None" and you should never see that dialog
| again.
| hobofan wrote:
| If the notification consent prompt on iOS is any
| indication, it will only be shown the first time it is
| requested, which is the reason these notification
| requests usually already have a "testing screen" like the
| one described in the article.
| Illniyar wrote:
| I assume the button will prompt a system alert of some kind,
| no?
| MonAlternatiu wrote:
| The article has precisely that prompt in one of the images.
|
| The thing is, just like certain apps require certain
| permissions (camera app wants to access the camera, device
| files, etc..) I believe a lot of people will just accept
| these conditions without realizing they are completely
| optional.
| Illniyar wrote:
| A lot of people will.
|
| But there's also strong education regarding system
| prompts. Users know when an app is asking for extra
| permissions (which this is basically the same of). Those
| people who care about what permissions apps have will
| know what to click.
|
| Those who don't care, that's the most you can do. Besides
| even Facebook estimate that only 10-30% will click allow.
| I'm not sure if you can ask for more at this point.
| MonAlternatiu wrote:
| It would be awesome if the users were forced to navigate
| a settings menu, find the app on a list of apps, and
| manually enable the option.
|
| One can only dream.
| drran wrote:
| Better ads.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| </s>>
| retrac wrote:
| Why would anyone ever agree to the terms in most software
| EULAs?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Because otherwise you can't use the software?
| ATsch wrote:
| This is said so often it's become a platitude, but: Your free
| labor of creating and curating things people want to look at is
| the product. It's the companies bidding on access to content
| you're willing to look at, in hopes of changing your behaviour,
| that are the consumers.
| godelski wrote:
| There's weird cases. In my DnD group only one person has not
| switched to Signal and they refuse to. Their answer is that "I
| can't fight them so why switch?" Which weirds me out since this
| is exactly how you fight tracking. Btw, this is someone who has
| a PhD in computer science so it isn't like they are tech
| illiterate. But I've seen several people like this and honestly
| I don't understand.
|
| I think at this point a lot of people are now apathetic and
| have given up. And we know people like to double down on good
| or bad positions when faced with adversaries. Doing things like
| "switching to Signal" (when you already have most of your
| friends there) and "using an adblocker" seem like very simple
| things that easily respond to "what can I do about it?"
| purplecats wrote:
| wow what a weak mindset your friend has
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I would rather get advertisements about tech toys than get
| advertisements about debeers diamonds.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'm the opposite.
|
| I spend 8+ hours a day in the tech world; if the "tech toy"
| is any good chances are I already know about it and/or have
| it.
|
| If I absolutely have to see ads (which I don't - haven't seen
| online ads for years) the last thing I want is _more_ tech. I
| 'd rather see ads for stuff I don't actually know about.
| criddell wrote:
| If HN were supported by non-tracking ads, do you think you
| would be more likely to see an add for a tech toy or a
| diamond here?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I hope it would be ads about recent companies Y has helped
| start :)
| fabatka wrote:
| Why would anyone read this and think about the implications? I
| may be overly pessimistic, but I think the average user just
| sees this modal as a potential obstacle between him/her and the
| content their brain tells them to consume. I know _my_ first
| instinct would be to go on the path that minimizes the risk
| that I don 't get to do the things I set out to do.
| [deleted]
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| what... benefit can facebook offer to its sheeps now with this
| consent screen? pennies?
| albanberg wrote:
| It would be great to see the public bombard these companies with
| a demand for privacy. Petitions/demonstrations/email
| campaigns...whatever it takes.
| cellar_door wrote:
| lol @ people who think Apple pushing back on FB tracking is out
| of their goodness of heart.
|
| They want FB to introduce a subscription model so they can rake
| in that sweet 30% commission.
|
| I am in favor of more consumer options, always prefer
| subscriptions to ads/tracking, and am a huge fan of Apple
| products. The issue is more that 30% commission is extortionate
| imo.
| twostorytower wrote:
| I would hate to be the PM on this project. They would be lucky to
| get 5% conversion. That's still worth billions in the long run.
| DLay wrote:
| Are all the smaller social media companies like Twitter,
| SnapChat, TikTok, and Reddit struggling with Apple's new rules
| too?
| bezout wrote:
| I think that this is going to end well if:
|
| - Facebook educates people about how the company uses their data
| - Apple doesn't make it hard to access data for companies that
| got their users' consent
| United857 wrote:
| Not unique to FB, these days it seems every news site has (at
| least) a nag popup if a ad blocker is detected, with many having
| a hard block on content.
| grishka wrote:
| Disabling JS for that site helps and most news websites don't
| make any good use of it anyway.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| do you use a plugin for that?
| grishka wrote:
| Yes, this one: https://github.com/mtimkovich/one-click-
| javascript-toggle
| indymike wrote:
| In the end, they will end up asking each user until they consent.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Usually Apple hates when App developers make any user prompts
| that points out changes Apple has made.
|
| I wonder if Apple will pull the Facebook app in response.
| bnj wrote:
| It's simultaneously remarkable and utterly unremarkable that
| Facebook has been dragged kicking and screaming into building a
| consent screen for this kind of tracking.
|
| Watching this tracking notification conflict unfold in the media
| has really helped me to refine where I stand on this: if a
| business depends on non-consensual tracking to be able to
| survive, then I'd prefer that the business has to fold before
| stripping users of their opportunity to understand and agree to
| the surveillance infrastructure at issue here.
| kibwen wrote:
| You're more forgiving than I am. As far as I'm concerned,
| individual-targeted advertising has such inherently perverse
| incentives that even those starting out with good intentions
| (e.g. consensual opt-in) will eventually find themselves
| engaged in unethical, privacy-eroding behavior as a matter of
| course.
|
| Consider what would happen if you outlawed individual-targeted
| advertising. Ad relevancy falls overall. What then?
|
| Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really.
| Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the
| effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by
| their competitors. Companies have to spend money on ads because
| the competition is spending money on ads. It doesn't matter how
| absolutely effective the campaign is, as long as it's
| relatively more effective than your rival's.
|
| Would consumers spend less money? No, a consumer has a budget
| that is independent of the relevancy of the ads they see.
|
| The advertising industry thrived for a long time in the absence
| of individual user tracking. It could do so again.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| If the company is public, multiply that by 10.
| sriram_sun wrote:
| Exactly! How do you grow by 25% quarter over quarter _without
| discovering new business models_? "Knowing" us even more and
| getting us to fork over 25% more! Or moving spend from a site
| outside of FB to within it.
| sanedigital wrote:
| > Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the
| effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by
| their competitors.
|
| This is absolutely not the case. Google's biggest ad clients
| achieve pretty incredible ROI (called ROAS) on each dollar
| they spend. And they track these obsessively--I supported a
| large travel client that had a small (but highly skilled)
| engineering team dedicated exclusively to their SEM bidding
| and monitoring systems.
|
| The reason digital advertising is so valuable is pretty
| exclusively related to attribution and tracking. If companies
| weren't sure they could make so much money with their spend,
| their budgets would absolutely drop.
| kibwen wrote:
| Companies obsess about these metrics because they don't
| want their ROI to be less than their competitors', because
| that would put them at a competitive disadvantage. It's not
| in doubt that individual-targeted advertising is more
| effective than than the alternatives; by eliminating user
| tracking you would be decreasing ROI across the board, but
| that's fine because, again, all that you're fighting for is
| a higher ROI than your competitors. And to reiterate, it's
| not like consumer dollars are just vanishing into the
| ether; every dollar a consumer makes either gets spent or
| saved, and regardless of the ROI of a specific ad campaign
| they've still got to buy dish soap or diapers or what have
| you. Just because advertising ROI drops does not mean that
| the company revenue/profit will drop; if it did, that
| probably means another company has better ROI (and if they
| can do so, and as long as they're not tracking users, then
| good for them!).
| kortilla wrote:
| This model is based on the assumption that ads are for
| things the consumers already know about. This is not
| correct.
|
| Example: I type "housing insurance" into Google and the
| "organic" results are dominated by the mega insurance
| companies.
|
| Without targeted advertising, the ads are also dominated
| by mega insurance companies because they have the biggest
| advertising budgets.
|
| With targeted advertising, I can see an ad from a
| provider specific to my location that I didn't know
| existed who offers way better rates because of the
| different risk pool.
|
| The same applies for thousands of other products/services
| that are localized.
|
| Similarly, the ads for someone interested in DIY vs
| someone who is happy to pay for skilled labor are
| drastically different when you search "drywall repair".
| somedude895 wrote:
| > Without targeted advertising, the ads are also
| dominated by mega insurance companies because they have
| the biggest advertising budgets. > With targeted
| advertising, I can see an ad from a provider specific to
| my location that I didn't know existed who offers way
| better rates because of the different risk pool. The same
| applies for thousands of other products/services that are
| localized.
|
| You're talking about geo targeting here, which imo should
| still be possible. That's an in-the-moment targeting akin
| to an advertiser choosing to show their ad on a local
| news site. This doesn't require extensive tracking and
| profiling of users.
| biztos wrote:
| I don't think these examples require individual targeting
| at all, but I agree with your point.
|
| When you are looking for housing insurance and Facebook
| shows you divorce attorneys, because they know you're
| gonna need one pretty soon, _that_ is a spend that would
| be affected.
| olex wrote:
| On both examples, the user can trivially reach the
| desired search outcome by manually adding their location
| or "diy"/"for hire" to the search query, without the
| search engine needing to know a single thing about them.
| majormajor wrote:
| You aren't necessarily disagreeing - their ROI would be
| even better if their competitors were spending less.
|
| Or, flipping it: if some advertisers are extremely
| effective, that pushes up the price for the ones that
| aren't.
| betenoire wrote:
| Advertising has existed without this feature in other
| mediums forever
| fingerlocks wrote:
| At least someone in this thread gets it. Ad tracking really
| is about attribution, personalized ads are secondary nice-
| to-have.
|
| This is how small businesses figure out their advertising
| budget. Where are our customers coming from, or more
| importantly, where are they _not_ coming from, so we know
| where to spend or not spend our limited resources?
|
| But I'm not surprised this isn't pointed out more often.
| The hardcore privacy zealots really blow up when you try to
| explain that it's mostly innocuous.
| josephg wrote:
| It can be mostly innocuous. And I feel no sympathy for
| facebook's business model here. I don't want my attention
| to be bought and sold like a horse between faceless
| companies. I'd much rather pay $1/year to WhatsApp than
| have the content of my personal life analysed by the
| world's marketing teams. I want to be the customer, not
| the product. I want the software I use to be primarily
| designed around my needs - not the needs of advertisers.
| Closi wrote:
| So you mean their REAL purpose is attribution, but they
| just chose to build giant databases covering peoples
| locations, friend groups, hobbies, desires, careers, sex,
| sexual preferences, relationship statuses, political
| alignment, voting probability, race and more in order to
| implement a 'secondary nice-to-have'?
|
| And that's better?
|
| As a side point, I don't see why attribution tracking
| requires any form of cross-site tracking or
| fingerprinting. It seems like it would be pretty trivial
| to implement this without all the privacy issues (i.e.
| just direct the ad to domain.com/ad123 and track the user
| on-site from there).
| fingerlocks wrote:
| None of that has anything to do with this topic. This is
| about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA. There are no
| web URLs involved[0] when you click an ad on instagram
| and it launches another app on your phone. These are
| separate issues, and I don't entire disagree with the
| others you brought up.
|
| [0] Before someone comes in to correct me, I know I'm
| handwaving here. The point stands.
| danShumway wrote:
| The apps on your phone would not have the ability to suck
| up isolated pieces of data about your usage and combine
| them into a single profile with your age/gender/etc... if
| they didn't have a set of shared identifiers that they
| could use to associate that data across multiple sources.
|
| It seems very relevant to me. The larger privacy problems
| wouldn't be quite as bad if there was no way to tell what
| device an app was running on or who was using it. That
| seems like it would limit data collection in a pretty
| significant way.
| bordercases wrote:
| The tracking technology itself has a much wider scope of
| application than "small businesses focusing their
| development budget". Ads are used as a commercial
| justification for broadening the larger ability to
| surveil.
| danShumway wrote:
| Because (all other concerns and objections aside) the
| intent doesn't matter.
|
| Apologies for the crude analogy, but if I install a
| camera in your bathroom and say, "okay, technically I
| _could_ watch you poop, but the only reason I 'm actually
| doing this is to figure out when you're out of toilet
| paper", that explanation won't leave you satisfied.
|
| Similarly, if someone is tracking me across the web and
| trying to link my identity across multiple sites/devices,
| I don't really care whether or not they're worried about
| attribution. The concerns about attribution are secondary
| to the fact that they're still watching everything I do
| online.
| fingerlocks wrote:
| Filming me defecating in the privacy of my home is not
| comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value traveling
| from my computer to another.
|
| Also, please remember that this conversation is very
| specifically about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA,
| not about general web tracking or other data vacuuming
| issues. The fact that these two separate issues get
| conflated is part of the problem.
| danShumway wrote:
| > about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA
|
| Which is used to uniquely identify me across apps, a
| totally equivalent level of tracking as identifying me
| across websites. It is the same result, just on a
| different platform.
|
| And all of this data gets combined and utilized with the
| "other data vacuuming issues" you're talking about. You
| can't treat those like isolated issues, the unique
| identifiers across websites/apps _enable_ the data
| vacuuming.
|
| You're arguing that these identifiers aren't primarily
| being used to build profiles, that they're mostly
| innocuous, and then you're saying that the fact that
| profiles are being built and data vacuuming is happening
| is a separate issue that's not relevant to the current
| conversation? No, the data vacuuming wouldn't be possible
| to nearly the same degree without persistent identifiers.
| That makes it relevant.
|
| > is not comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value
| traveling from my computer to another.
|
| You're arguing about a matter of degree. The point I'm
| making is that violating my privacy doesn't become
| automatically OK just because the advertising industry
| promises me they won't look at the extra data they're
| getting. And I think the reasoning behind why it's not OK
| is the same in both scenarios -- because in both
| scenarios, it's not reasonable to trust the person
| gathering that data to keep it secure or to never misuse
| it.
|
| People bring up "quasi-anonymous" as if it's some kind of
| perfect defense that puts these identifiers into a
| separate category of information, but it's not. If it was
| actually anonymous, you wouldn't need to put the "quasi"
| in front of it. But if it makes you feel better, I'll put
| a camera in your bathroom and then disassociate the video
| stream from your home address or name, and then I'll blur
| your face with an AI. Then the video stream will be
| quasi-anonymous too. I promise I won't ever try to link
| it to a real identity, you can trust me.
|
| The point is, it is a violation of my privacy to track
| every website I visit and every app I use. The reason why
| a company is doing that _doesn 't matter._
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You're too generous. I disagree with the parent that the
| intent is innocuous.
|
| The intent is almost always to convince people to
| purchase something where they otherwise wouldn't purchase
| it - by a mix of catching them in a vulnerable moment,
| and brainwashing them with repeated exposure over time.
| It's malicious.
| squeezingswirls wrote:
| 'When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing
| Happened. Why?'
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-
| bi...
| fingerlocks wrote:
| What happens when small brands don't spend on digital
| ads? _Nothing Happening_ is the worst possible outcome.
| sriram_sun wrote:
| Exactly! How do you grow by 25% quarter over quarter _without
| discovering new business models_? "Knowing" us even more and
| getting us to fork over 25% more! Or moving spend from a site
| outside of FB to within it.
|
| What could be the end result? I give the algorithms my bank
| account and they are responsible for restocking my fridge,
| refilling prescriptions to purchasing books and investing in
| my stocks?
|
| Some aspiring product manager (of course another algorithm in
| training) is furiously jotting down all of the above...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| What bank account? With everything-as-a-Service, minimalism
| being trendy (a form of consumerism as a lifestyle), ever
| shrinking buffers in supply chains, ever shrinking
| apartments - soon we won't be collecting money on accounts,
| we'll be paid in and paying with _securities_. Your
| position at ACME will entitle you to 100 units of payment,
| which you 'll allocate to different services...
| imheretolearn wrote:
| >> Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the
| effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by
| their competitors
|
| I would like to know how this conclusion was reached. By that
| logic, the advertising industry would not really need
| individual targeting at all
| kibwen wrote:
| _> By that logic, the advertising industry would not really
| need individual targeting at all_
|
| You're right, they don't. But the point is not to argue
| that ad relevancy itself is bad. In a vacuum, improved ad
| relevancy is good! However, the improved relevancy of
| individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the
| social detriment of user tracking.
|
| To use an example, on a Facebook group for gamers, it would
| be fine and dandy for Facebook to establish a market where
| PC hardware and video game companies bid to show ads to
| users browsing the group page. Note that this doesn't have
| to involve advertisers receiving any identifiable data
| about _who_ the ad was shown to, and nor does it have to
| involve Facebook tracking your behavior online in order to
| show ads based on _other_ sites you 've visited, e.g.
| gaming communities on Reddit. The targeting is as simple as
| "show the game ads to the people in the game group"; it's
| extremely coarse demographic-based targeting that doesn't
| require any sort of persistent user profiling. It's no more
| of a privacy issue than back in the old-timey days when a
| company would buy an ad in an enthusiast magazine.
| imheretolearn wrote:
| >> But the point is not to argue that ad relevancy itself
| is bad. In a vacuum, improved ad relevancy is good!
| However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted
| advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of
| user tracking
|
| Agreed, this is where the incentives of the users are
| misaligned with the incentives of the ad tracking
| companies. But users don't have a choice, hence
| individual ad tracking.
| panta wrote:
| Individual ad targeting is needed only as soon as someone
| does it. It is not "needed" per se.
| bluesign wrote:
| For sure there are some advertisers, they would not be
| able to advertise if there is no individual targeting.
| Problem is for one of those honest businesses, there are
| 10 dishonest ones abusing the individual targeting.
| panta wrote:
| If it is targeted without explicit direct consent of the
| targeted individual, it is not honest, at least from my
| personal point of view. If it was for me, targeted
| advertising would illegal.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Have you ever spent time around advertising people? This is
| exactly how they talk to each other. An agency shooting a
| commercial for a hospital in Houston, TX shot in Amsterdam
| because the director wanted to. Another agency person
| bragged to a person in another agency about how much they
| spent. It's a game to these people. Once you become a
| brand, it is less about advertising a product/lifestyle as
| much as it is to keep the name prevelant in people's mind.
| prostoalex wrote:
| This would just return to 2000-esque state of affairs,
| where the ad model was based on selling page views, clicks
| or actions.
|
| That model favors small publishers (as niche advertisers
| flock to niche publications) and disadvantages large
| generic publishers (social networks, email clients,
| portals).
| AlphaSite wrote:
| I'm not entirely convinced this is true, but equally if
| it is I see it as an absolute win.
| somedude895 wrote:
| > That model favors small publishers (as niche
| advertisers flock to niche publications) and
| disadvantages large generic publishers (social networks,
| email clients, portals).
|
| I agree. Advertisers would have to go back to contextual
| targeting, identifying websites that are likely to appeal
| the target audience, rather than simply buying the
| audience programmatically on Google's ad network
| liaukovv wrote:
| Which in turn would create an incentive to actually
| create websites attracting different audiences?
| mc32 wrote:
| >" Would consumers spend less money? No..."
|
| I'm not sure about that. A lot of advertising is about
| appearances and superficial things. Example. Do we need cars
| in the US to get from place to place (NYC, etc excepted) Yes!
| Does it have to have bells and whistles? No. Can an entry
| level car do the job in the great majority of cases? Does it
| have to be a "luxury" brand? Or an upscale model?
|
| Spending would go down. Good, bad? That's another discussion.
| fuster wrote:
| I think there is the question of what people would do with
| the money they save by buying only the entry-level car.
| Would everyone really just save the money? I expect people
| would just spend it on something else (that maybe has more
| effective advertising, even if via word-of-mouth or
| something else). So spending would remain roughly the same.
| I don't have any hard research I can personally point to
| though.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Given how many people seem to find themselves with
| crippling debt, or unable to save enough of a buffer to
| handle unexpected (but not especially unusual) expenses,
| I'd be inclined to say "good".
|
| Much of the advertising industry isn't about getting you to
| choose Company A's product rather than Company B's, or to
| choose the deluxe version rather than the entry-level one;
| it's about getting you to buy things you would never even
| have considered otherwise, and certainly have no "need"
| for.
| EGreg wrote:
| _Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really.
| Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the
| effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by
| their competitors_
|
| This premise seems wrong to me. It assumes that advertising
| is always a net positive, regardless of how targeted it is.
|
| As someone who runs a company that built apps and have spent
| ZERO on advertising and PR, I can tell you that is _usually_
| not the case.
|
| In fact, the biggest component of user acquisition cost is
| the untargeted advertising. Much better to reduce that cost
| to zero by increasing the viral k-factor and user retention.
| Those two metrics matter way more than advertising. If you
| can reduce the ad spend per user, or per customer, you are
| BETTER off, not worse.
|
| For example, Google adwords nor any other advert network
| offers NO WAY of targeting MacOS, only iOS and Android, so we
| couldn't make any money advertising our Calendars for Mac
| app.
|
| And trust me we experimented with all kinds of monetization
| in that app:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-43386918
|
| Original article was im ArsTechnica:
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2018/03/there...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=qbix+mining&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-.
| ..
| acchow wrote:
| > Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really.
|
| I disagree. Currently, targeted advertising is able to hold a
| premium over non-targeted advertising. The more targeted, the
| higher the premium. Facebook wants to keep up in the arms
| race with Google (and others) in how targeted it can be.
| hctaw wrote:
| > if a business depends on non-consensual tracking to be able
| to survive, then I'd prefer that the business has to fold
| before stripping users of their opportunity to understand and
| agree to the surveillance infrastructure at issue here.
|
| Up there with "we can't afford to pay our workers a living
| wage." Businesses do not have an unalienable right to exist.
| ROARosen wrote:
| From Facebook's consent screen: "This doesn't give us access to
| _new types of information_ " [emphasis mine]
|
| I don't know whether to laugh out loud or to cry. It literally
| shows the consumer that - at least according to Apple - the
| data Facebook was collecting up until now is detailed enough to
| require an extra prompt.
|
| How exactly is that supposed to reassure someone who would
| supposedly deny them tracking once the prompt shows?!
| rationalfaith wrote:
| Apple is doing a great service for the industry. Google should
| follow very promptly but then again, Google's business model is
| on tracking users :p
| ryanisnan wrote:
| "This won't allow us to collect new types of information..."
|
| Yeah, just information you've already been shadily collecting.
| hourislate wrote:
| Do people who use facebook actually care about privacy?
|
| I can't understand why any user would want to be targeted by
| tailored ads or any ads for that matter? It's psychological
| warfare with the goal of separating you from your money. Stop
| spending, you'll realize you don't need all that shit they try to
| peddle.
|
| Less is more...
| judge2020 wrote:
| The difference is that this will show up for every app that
| uses FB's audience network to show and make money from ads, so
| many mobile games will have this show after install.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I think most people prefer ads to paying for something. The ads
| are only a means to what they care about.
| jraph wrote:
| > Do people who use facebook actually care about privacy?
|
| Many people probably both use Facebook and care about privacy.
| Many probably would rather quit Facebook but think they can't
| because a part of their social life they think important is
| there. Or even a part of their education is (many students have
| a Facebook group for their class).
|
| I sympathize with you but it would help to try and understand
| people who care about privacy but still use Facebook if the
| goal is to solve this problem.
|
| I've had luck so far I haven't got trapped in Facebook though.
| kin wrote:
| Call me weird but if I had ads at all, I prefer that they be
| relevant. I hate being shown something that I have zero
| interest for. I actually really enjoy when a targeted ad is
| spot on at showing me something that I would want. I can
| sympathize with the idea that it is psychological warfare and I
| think I'd rather pay for an ad-free experience over seeing
| irrelevant ads.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I wish we had consent forms like this in regards to medical data.
|
| There is so much to be learned and gained if people were more
| sharing of aggregate data in this area.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-01 23:01 UTC)