Facebook says Apple’s iOS 14 changes could hurt its ad targeting
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> privacy nightmares and ethical issues like allowing targeting alcoholics with alcohol ads
These two statements are diametrically opposing each other. Either targeted advertising works or it doesn't. You can't say that it isn't valuable and then raise concerns about how it causes privacy nightmares and alcoholics to buy more alcohol.
Alcoholics will buy more alcohol either ways. Targeting makes no difference to their behavior really. But your argument holds no ground because alcohol ads are highly regulated. You can read more about why here: [1]. More often than not advertising companies reject alcohol ads as it hurts their business more than it helps (due to stringent regulations in most parts of the World). It is not as easy as you make it out to be. Else your social media pages should be inundated with alcohol ads. It is not.
I strongly believe that there should be regulations on the content of the ads that are pushed out (just like the alcohol ads). There should be regulation on how often an ad can be retargeted and to ensure that the placements don't hamper user productivity. Blanket bans on advertising methods just for sake of privacy is going to do more harm than good. There has to be some sort of a balance. For people who want privacy they can opt for privacy focused social networks. But if entire platforms move towards privacy then the advertising industry will collapse completely. Targeted advertising is the cheapest way for small and medium businesses to get new customers. It levels the playing field with corporations with big pockets. If you move towards privacy as a focus point with no proper alternatives to advertising it will cause a major shakeup. Many businesses will shutdown. You'll have more consolidation and less competition. Only those with big pockets can advertise their products/services. And in the post-Corona World, this is a lifeline to many small businesses.
[1]: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6012382?hl=en
However, I think people should try turning off Personalized Ads on Youtube and watching a few videos (without adblock!). IMO it's fucking awful, even compared to regular targeted ads. You'll get the same crappy Trump "socialism survey" 6 times in a row because there's no tracking of ad viewer fatigue.
Instagram does a great job of personalizing ads to both products and the type of companies I like. I don't mind seeing these kinds of ads at all. I'm happy (in this case) for them to track me because it's much much, better than the alternative.
You're acting like there is only one alternative, but what about blocking ads? That's win-win for everyone but the advertiser. And really that makes it win-win-win, unless you work in advertising or for Facebook/Google.
Win-win for who? If everyone uses adblockers you will have major unemployment. All small and medium businesses will shutdown as advertising is the cheapest mechanism to reach customers. Without advertising these businesses will have to rely on billboard advertising and TV ads. Both are extremely expensive in comparison to internet advertising. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. As simple as that!
What a load of beans. However did the world survive until these selfless internet advertisers came along to save small and medium business?
I don't understand this attitude. Do you like being advertised to? I don't. I find advertising repugnant, and I'd much rather see ads that are irrelevant to me because they're easier to ignore and I'm less likely to be affected by them.
With targeted ads I'm at risk of being influenced. I don't want to be influenced by ads.
You can't do business without advertising. Are you for shutting down small and medium businesses? If you are employed find out how your company gets clients and acquires customers. It is mostly through advertising. And if they don't, the clients they depend on for orders do. It is a chain and if that chain gets disrupted everyone suffers. I don't understand why anyone would find the concept of advertising repugnant! Sure there are horrible ads and then there are scammy ways of advertising. Those should be regulated. But to put the entire advertising landscape under the bus is totally not acceptable!
> I'd much rather see ads that are irrelevant to me because they're easier to ignore and I'm less likely to be affected by them
I bet majority of the people find ads that are not relevant repugnant. I hate it when I am recommended an ad that I have no interest in, over and over again. To the point where I turn off whatever I am reading/watching. Why would I sit through watching an ad for 15 seconds that is irrelevant to me?
> I don't want to be influenced by ads.
Use adblock.
I foolishly believed that. I gave Google every chance under the sun: clicked not interested, verified my ad preferences, waited another month etc.
For over 10 years they have showed me ads for scammy dating sites!
Someone will typically come to their defense and say basically: Google know what they are doing.
They do not!
They refuse to understand that a father of more than three kids - all with the same mother - isn't interested in scammy dating sites.
Well, maybe on average it works?
Well maybe on average I get so fed up I start to inform scammy dating sites that they are getting ripped off. The volume seems to have decreased lately, but I mostly use an adblocker so what do I know ;-)
So for anyone who pays Google for views: be aware that their targetting is painfully bad, their feedback systems so broken that they seemingly cannot take a clue if it came gift wrapped and so big it needs a truck for delivery. Keep an eye on the metrics guys and gals.
It still makes sense economically for many companies but be very critical, because Google is not.
Edit: to rub it in: Facebook manages to personalize ads! Again and again I get ads that are relevant and interesting. I've even bought through Instagram ads. Which is a shame since I dislike Facebook even more intensely than Google and only keep an Instagram profile to keep my lovely wife happy. I deliberately keep my contact with Facebook small and yet they seem to know exactly what I am interested in and what not.
I notice I got carried away yesterday:
I did not inform them one by one, but rather by publically writing about it, at least here on HN.
There are some products and services that absolutely require targeting by preferences to maximize profit.
I'm running such a campaign now and getting wildly high ROI's in the 14X range.
If I couldn't target by audience interest, I'd be happy to get an ROI that is a tenth of that.
Are you able to prove they wouldn't have bought anyway?
As a normal person who just wants to use his phone without creepy crap going on, I don't care—and see zero benefit if your profits are maximized.
Your profit seeking wishes are not my concern.
Send your complaints to politicians, not ad buyers.
(Disclaimer: I've spent millions - not my own money - on ads in my career. I'd support better privacy regulations to prevent some of the targeting I've been able to use.)
The same for Microsoft with O365 and subscriptions streaming services.
Facebook didn't have to turn into a global ad platform that does tricky shit like spy on users with blue thumbs up buttons or weird hacks into webrtc to fingerprint users. They could have done the work to provide more direct value and charged for it, like Apple did or did something completely different like building something like Shopify that was still open to the internet but had first class support in Facebook. But they didn't and my hope is that their business model will wash away as security and privacy tighten up on our devices and through our democracies.
Just imagine if Apple had taken a different approach and basically said "we're going to make phones that we monetize by tracking our users" instead. The institutional focus would have been warped and—eventually—someone would have come out with high quality phones and computers that don't track you and they would have lost in the long run.
Google is doing exactly that and seems to have a market share of 75% vs Apple's 25% [1]. What am I missing?
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
The question is, given a choice between a privacy-respecting smartphone and a privacy-violating one, will consumers choose the former?
Market share directly and completely answers that question. Profit share doesn't seem to have anything to do with it whatsoever?
The proliferation of Android’s market share here doesn’t resolve the question you have. We don’t know why people have Android phones. A better question and what’s better to look at is actually installation of Google apps across devices. I see this mistake a lot in Android vs iOS. Google makes money and all the privacy stuff comes into play with their software, not Android OS.
To make the OP’s point for them, the metrics are even more in favor of Google when you use the right ones -> look at Gmail installs across iOS and Android to see how they are winning.
Some Android phones are dirt cheap. If they’re the same price and functionality and you have no cost of switching due to platform lock in, most everyone probably will take the privacy respecting option. Some people care first and foremost about price (whether by choice or not). Evidence from the growth due to the reintroduction of the iPhone SE seems to corroborate this.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
I was one of those other people, then I just decided I want something that works and bought an iPhone. It was worth it.
I was an ardent Android user until 2014/2015 (can't remember the exact year). Things like "I have to be able to replace my battery" and "a phone without an SD card slot is pointless" and "hah, my regular USB cords just work."
But finally, after a year or so of every time my phone spontaneously rebooted (a circumstance that, looking back, I'm surprised I put up with for so long) there was a ~20% chance that it would come back up completely wiped. My employer required that phones accessing work e-mail be encrypted and every so often, a reboot would simply lose the user data volume encryption key.
The last time it happened, I permanently lost two pictures that were valuable to me (yes, I know, backups) and it happened while I was sitting in front of a T-Mobile store and around the corner from an Apple store. I went into T-Mobile, got a SIM that would fit an iPhone, then went to the Apple store and loaded up a credit card with a new iPhone 6(?) and all the trimmings and have never looked back.
I do still have the screenshot of my first text with my wife after I switched. "So...I did something...expensive." "What did you do? WAIT, this bubble is BLUE"
I switched to iPhone with the 5s and have’t looked back. I like not being able to break my phone because of my poor decision making skills. I do my hacking on my computer where the consequences are lower and its easier to fix.
What a fortuitous coincidence, because once the pandemic started I've been using the phone once a week or less. If I'd paid $500-1000, I'd be pretty unhappy with myself right about now.
6 months later I had already switched. It was supposed to be a highly polished Google phone, and yet it had very weird bugs. As an example, I remember hearing a weird tone from the phone every once in a while, even with the phone silenced, but there was never a single notification about what was happening. At some point I discovered that the phone was automatically trying to read my contactless card, and there was simply no way of turning it off, I was forced to avoid placing my wallet anywhere near my phone, which I found ridiculous
It's easy to have a big market share if you go for market share. Heck, if I start selling dollars for 50 cents I can probably get 100% of the global money market...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
It’s also reported that Google pays Apple $8 billion a year to be the default search engine. In other words, Apple makes more on mobile from Google than Google makes from Android.
Apple also didn’t introduce the iPad as a moat around their computer business. The iPad and the Mac are both successful product lines.
How long can Google keep playing defense? Apple,Microsoft and Amazon have created new lines of business in the past two decades.
Google’s revenue was down last quarter - the only one that reporter less revenue out of the big 5. Maybe depending solely on advertising isn’t a good idea?
Yeah, on the other hand if the house-upon-sound has already made you one of the top-5 billionaires on Earth before it got washed away, I guess that's OK too...
2. I think what is lost is that FB was blindsided by the transition to mobile, at first. They didn't (and probably couldn't) have had the foresight to know to build a mobile phone, when they were hardly focusing on mobile in the first place. They made a huge turn around to focus on mobile then FB exploded.
3. There is no way in hell FB could have built their own phone. Apple didn't wake up one day and decide to build the iPhone, it was step 100 in a very long staircase, that started with the original iPhone.
4. Google tried to build their own Phone, and is failing it at it. Again, I can't imagine a world where FB succeeds at making their own phone, better than the iPhone (while also supporting the iPhone), that isn't a money pit, like it is for everyone who isn't named Apple/Samsung.
Seems to me like all these companies with huge cash flow and cash piles like MS/FB/Google/Samsung don’t want to invest in creating a high quality device people can trust, they don’t want to create a network of retail stores people can go to get help. They have their easy money collecting rent on software (Microsoft) or advertising. So be it if they don’t want to risk their cash.
> Our view is that Facebook and targeted ads are a lifeline for small businesses, especially in the time of Covid, and we are concerned that aggressive platform policies will cut at that lifeline at a time when it is so essential to small business growth and recovery," Wehner said.
"We need to trample privacy to save small businesses because covid!" is a take I did not expect to read today. Also Facebook acting like it's altruistically helping those poor little businesses - how terrible that Apple is making it harder for them to give Facebook money!
Disclaimer: Worked on a successful ad-tech company for ~2.5 years.
Do you honestly believe that is a fair summary of their words?
If companies could properly secure your data and only collect what is needed, Apple wouldn't feel the need to take matters into their own hand.
The subtext here is that they know it’s not and many users will opt out.
A company can convince users to opt-in, but it will lose quite a lot of people, even those who don't really care if they are tracked or not. Simple because users want to use the service, not become legal and technical experts. Understanding how all of it works is really hard.
Their ads product is indeed beneficial to users: users get relevant personalized localized ads (instead of boring ads which can still be seen on TV or paper magazines) and they get better service because the company gets it's revenue from ads.
But most users don't want to know that. They simply want to use the service. (And I suspect vast majority of users would not really care if they are tracked or not if they really knew how tracking and how ads personalization works; I mean really knew technical details, not boogey man explainations from tabloids).
- For instance, if you are a decision maker in a company, buying targeted ads across platforms is an amazingly effective way of changing your opinion. Seeing helpful articles in LinkedIn or in that specialized site for professionals? You might be The target of a salesman, or worse, a competitor trying to slow you down (I’ve seen this last one happening).
- Targeted malware distribution is also a thing.
- Try checking something weird online and see how much the ads everywhere change. That’s a self-forming bubble around you. Start thinking about how all of that works and you will start to doubt which ideas and desires are yours and which were decided for you.
- This has side-effects, Internet profiling is reducing diversity, since ads are shown on a profile basis, there’s a silo-ing of interests.
- The insights that can be gained from profiling can be of a very sensitive nature, and can be inferred by third parties. Let’s say I’m a backwards boss who has ill-formed opinions about homosexuality. It’s trivial and quite cheap for me to use targeted ads with my employees emails (and some fake emails if I need some extra) to send you ads on things like gay dating platforms. If the click-through of the ads goes up, I know I have some pruning to do.
The options are pretty much limitless
Average damage per user is several orders of magnitude smaller than the average benefit of targeted advertising: for the company, for businesses and even for users of the platform.
The similar arguments can be applied to convince people that cars are harmful: * cars kill quite a lot of people * if you drink and drive, you can get to jail * gazoline is expensive * cars pollute the air * cars produce noise which reduces quality of life
A hundred years ago one could convince a lot of people that cars need to be prohibited. And they were quite successful:
> The most draconian restrictions and speed limits were imposed by the 1865 act (the "Red Flag Act"), which required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city, as well as requiring a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of road vehicles hauling multiple wagons.
The arguments you are suggesting, all of them are true. Companies need to be more transparent about tracking, perform external audit etc., stricter laws regulating personal data is needed to make sure data is not misused, strict laws regulating what can be advertized.
But killing all of tracking would be similar to restricting speed limit to 3 mph. Well, it will definitely be safer.
The dangers of cars are pretty obvious, the dangers of tracking are not.
And I disagree that these are “low harm”, being forcefully outed is no joke in certain communities. The only thing that is protecting a lot of people right now is a correlation between certain ideologies and low technological know-how.
The only reason anyone is using CNAMEs is because pihole and NextDNS are of negligible adoption, and adding a CNAME is super easy to do. Once CNAME blocking is more prevalent, it will become mainstream to proxy tracking requests as well.
example: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
/s
LOLOLOL - I service only small businesses (hundreds of them) and 90% of them could give 0 fucks if Facebook disappeared from this planet tomorrow.
The whole "targeted advertising" pipe dream sold to small businesses is tiring. Highly targeted Facebook ads work for a small percentage of business models - if you don't fit one of these models it's a giant waste of money or at least on par with print/radio/tv/un-targeted digital ads.
The same could be said about SEO/Google Ads. Google is essentially a paid search engine now so while SEO will work for some sectors, for most they will never be #1 because the top 3-4 results are ads disguised as organic results (hence why I say Google is a paid search engine)
That convinced me that Facebook won’t give business pages the traffic they’ve earned unless that business pays Facebook to let that page’s followers see that page’s posts. It’s a racket and you have to pay to play.
Facebook made a "charitable" act to make it zero-rated that people's access to the internet is only thru Facebook.
We have laws against that in the US, but in practice they are very very slow to enforce them.
Like the opening line of a racketeer trying to extract protection money.
I hope Facebook’s relentless and shameless intrusions get more beatings that it truly deserves.
In all seriousness, good. Facebook is creepy enough as it is, and this kind of protest is disingenious at best.
That's exactly the right way to put it.
I'm not cheering because it's FB, I'm cheering because it strikes at targeted advertising. If you're a small company out tracking people to try to sell them an Oklahoma City Thunder dart board, I'm gonna cheer just as loudly when Apple sticks it to you.
On the other hand, when Apple implements policies that prevent companies of any size from building valuable things (see for example the outrage over 30%) then I've have a different sentiment.
Moreover, if it's a startup with the same ethics as Facebook, it will likely be applauded as preventing the next Facebook.
You seem to think context doesn't matter. If a startup makes a privacy invasive product and "Apple/Google/etc" put protections in place that harm that product then they've done a service to their customers. This is not a problem.
We can judge their other actions as necessary and in context.
The privacy angle is completely justified, but I think Apple is underestimating the second order effects here. Significantly fewer apps will be installed, harming both the developer ecosystem and Apple's App Store profits.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/24/apple-j...
Surely an app containing fewer ads would make people _more_ likely to install them, not less?
IDFA trades privacy for market efficiency. It's used by ad networks to allow me to optimize for either the cheapest or most valuable installs, and validate that my marketing spend is actually driving these behaviors with an acceptable ROI.
Without it, ad networks will be much less effective and it will cost developers at least 2x to drive the same number of installs.
IDFA has obvious privacy flaws, but Apple is making a mistake by crippling it without offering a privacy-safe alternative (and several of those have been proposed by the industry).
Sounds like a win-win.
The company that we were sold to by our parent company did the same thing on a regular basis and kept their main app in the top 5 for years. Not sure if they do it today (this was 6+ years ago).
I wish Apple would find a way to stop these artificial App Store hacks (maybe they have I no longer pay much attention since our app's downloads do not affect our business).
Do you have any examples/links? genuinely curious
I am not concerned in the least, in fact, it will like drive quality up.
Specifically, this would have crushed rising giants like TikTok and Wish who each have spent over a billion on app install ads before they reached escape velocity.
There are thousands of medium sized apps that try every day to reach to new users, and now it will be more expensive (potentially prohibitively expensive) to do so.
The reason we don’t have as many of these as we otherwise could is precisely because of the incentives of this ad-driven merry-to-round.
Would the world be worse off without TikTok?
Yes. Clearly you are currently aware of every good quality software product in existence, and all their creators are all comfortably rolling in money.
I'm getting so tired of the bullshit coming out of tech companies. Listening to these tech CEOs lie and give non-answers to every question asked by Congress this week was disgusting.
Would any user EVER want apps to be able to track them across the web and within other apps? Why would this not be off by default?
I used Android for years until enough was enough with the blatant theft of my data by Google. So I opened up my wallet even wider to go with Apple, as I thought they took users' privacy seriously.
Apparently not.
[…]
Why would this not be off by default?”
How does that _not_ describe “off by default”? Even if that doesn’t, FTA: “In iOS 14, each app that wants to use these identifiers will ask users to opt-in to tracking when the app is first launched.”