Facebook Ads Are All-Knowing, Unblockable, and in Everyone’s Phone
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I remember reading somewhere that there is a (underground?) group within Google dissatisfied with the dominance of advertising at the company, both in business and product decisions.
(If all ads were like Google ads, I wouldn't have bothered installing an ad-blocker in the first place.)
> I remember reading somewhere that there is a (underground?) group within Google dissatisfied with the dominance of advertising at the company, both in business and product decisions.
We have very vocal employees. You can find people complaining about everything. (Including the lack of M&Ms in some micro kitchens.) I am sure there are also people dissatisfied with ads.
If you want to hear me complain, ask me about the choice of programming languages we are using. Or about open plan offices.
Still the best run company I've worked for.
I fully expect that every time I get into one it will be analyzing my eye and iris movement to derive my subconscious emotional responses to the businesses the car drives past or some similar creepy shit.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3008436/takeaway/why-data-god-jef...
As to minds, he may be exaggerating, but not as much as you think. Try a less literal read:
For example, Google makes all its revenue from ads. It invests in Android as a way to maintain the reach of its ads in the face of mass migration from desktops to mobile devices. So by that measure, it's not just Google's adtech engineers (which I'd bet is what some if not most of their smartest mathematicians work on. I know, as regrettably I was once in the business), but also Google's Android engineer that are "thinking about how to make people click ads." Just today: Google Targets Intent With Email, YouTube And Search Matching And Universal App Campaigns.[1]
For another example read Dalton Caldwell's story about working for SourceForge, and how it compares to GitHub[2]:
> The problem was, SourceForge was an ad-ridden, user-hostile piece of crap. Getting anything done required several extraneous pageviews & clicks. The site was designed to squeeze every last advertising penny out of you. I can’t blame management for trying to generate more revenue…. two months into my job there, 25% of the company was laid off.
> There was much public hand-wringing over the crappiness of the SourceForge user experience. There were two camps in these debates: those that wanted to build an open source, decentralized version of SourceForge (which someone did), and those that pointed out it was a free service, and how dare anyone complain about the user & developer-hostile aspects of the experience. Tolerating the bad behavior of SourceForge “is a necessary evil”, the apologists would say, “otherwise the service we all depend on might go away.” Does any of this sound familiar?
Compared to GitHub:
> Github has become a much-loved brand and service, and many would agree that it is a key piece of infrastructure in the technical renaissance we are currently experiencing. Github is apparently profitable, and it sounds like the people that work there spend their time trying to make the best service possible, as opposed to spending their time trying to extract additional pennies out of their users.
Full circle: Caldwell plugs the same Jeffrey Hammerbacher quote as jordigh. I also use that quote, as well as this one:[3]
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair
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[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/27/google-targets-intent-with-...
I think it's reasonable to think that someone who pays money not to see ads would be willing to leave FB if their app fails to respect that wish, and FB might well allow blocking to avoid any sort of cascading network effect a core group of users leaving might have.
In any case, the same dynamic applies as on the web: people aren't very motivated by privacy when installing ad-blockers, but visual intrusiveness, annoyingness, offence and exploitativeness will push people over the edge into looking for a solution.
The other big difference is that we give a lot of targeting information to FB voluntarily that otherwise needs to be inferred by web ad networks through the use of tracking. I've told Facebook that I'm a 30 year old male with X, Y, & Z interests, so they don't need a super-cookie tracking me across the web to infer that information based on my browsing history (FB does track users across the web AFAIK, but I think they could do just fine without having to do so).
At the same time the data that you voluntarily give to Facebook, while certainly useful for look-a-like campaigns and such, is not exactly that predictive when talking about DR campaigns for which you need to establish an imminent intent of buying something. Using their various tracking pixels, that ad networks cookie match with, they start to collect also that dataset. At the moment they also have 3 different ways to cookie match with partners, all 3 basically required, this also contributes to added latency when loading pages, would be better to have 1.
The ad tech market is fairly complex and unfortunately often people make assumptions about datasets, their predictive power or reasons behind why the situation is the way it is without necessarily having done the research about it.
Your customers must first explicitly agree to such a thing before you should be able to enforce it. You don't get to make all the decisions for both parties. That's obviously exploitative.
Why not? Kicking someone out of your restaurant is exactly what you should do if you can't come to an agreement.
So in our restaurant analogy, it would be like if you had an agreement with your food supplier that they will provide you with cheap food if you make customers eat it off the floor, and now you're complaining that customers are not fulfilling their end of this deal. The customers don't have a deal with you. You just offer them free food, and they are taking it and trying not to eat off the floor. It's not their fault you offer free food. Don't do that.
If a customer walks into your free-food restaurant and finds the conditions unsuitable to them, they should leave. If they refuse, you should kick them out.
Ads and tracking aside, it's worth it even if just for the lowered system resource usage (my battery life improved by a decent margin even though I still check out Facebook every 1-3 days on my phone).
Breaking news! Ad-powered app shows ads in its app!
Does anyone know whether Facebook also tracks you into and out of WhatsApp, by the way?
It most certainly does. I have contacts in WhatsApp that I have no other contact with (nor do they with me, dont know my name etc.), yet after the first time I chat with them on WhatsApp, they are in my recommended friends on facebook. Pretty infuriating.
Honest question, I don't use either app, so no idea. Just thought this could be a possible that WA had created a contact in the system-wide address book and FB saw it.
On this topic, what are the latest alternatives available for routers/proxy servers that are as good as uBlock Origin (or ABE) on the desktop (sharing the same popular block lists)?
No FB app, adaway + ublock + pale moon.
It usually shows me what's happening last week instead of the latest posts
Having it installed also kills your battery life. Probably a knock-on effect from the privacy invasion (but at least I have a reason not to use facebook that doesn't weird out normies).
According to FB, users just desparately want those ads to be highly targeted and relevant. And, that's awesome, because it just happens to correspond exactly with what advertisers want.
Most amazing is that advertisers continue to believe it. Testament to the power of desparation and wishful thinking.
I remember I had a talk with a coworker once and we talked about if the ad was good enough to give you what you really wanted to buy when you searched and he thought it should be the first result, which I don't agree with because of course what is most helpful to me at some point might not be what I want to buy in relation to the search but something else. But definitely the thing I want to buy should be presented to me when I want to buy it so that I can buy it with the least amount of fuss.
But unfortunately that is not what I get.
I would suggest that you simply appreciate the occasional ad that happens to be relevant, especially given that most aren't (as you noted). But that is a far cry from really wanting to be inundated with or demanding ads, relevant or not.
As an example I recently bought a rabbit for my daughter, there's a bunch of relevant information on rabbits I need to know about, as well as things it would be useful for me to buy. In order for me to determine what I need to buy I need to do research to determine what is the best solution for my needs at the moment. Really relevant ads would give me a very close match to what I need, and explain to me why I needed it. Trusting the relevant ad vendor I would not have to spend time on research and could go directly to purchase. This is of the course the dream, a dream unavailable with today's technology but inching closer. I would like it if it were here. Of course the problem is this kind of relevance would carry with it side effects that I might not like so much.
Retargeting is a perfect example of how a relevance beatdown can occur. Yes, I put those shoes in my cart because I was genuinely interested in them. But, I don't need to see them popping up on every site I visit thereafter for a week. Neither do I need to keep seeing the Softlayer Cloud ads, etc. It's a turnoff to be hounded like this, and even distasteful at a certain point.
To your point, though, perhaps part of the problem is the current ad formats.
But, of course, that doesn't mean they want ads. The reality is that they want neither.
Your comment points to exactly the fallacy I referenced: this idea they peddle to advertisers that people want relevant ads. No, they will stomach ads if they must, because it's the lesser of evils.