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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

That's... The idea, yes.

> 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!

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Their complaint isn't that it won't be possible to track you. It's that it won't be possible to track you without your permission.

Exactly! If they really believe that their ads product is in the best interest of their users, they can convince them to opt in.

The subtext here is that they know it’s not and many users will opt out.

Each 100ms delay, each form, each extra page makes service lose percents of users (any service, Google, Netflix, Amazon).

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).

Pretty much everyone that told me “I don’t care” changed their opinion when they saw the kind of tricks it allows knowledgeable people to do to them.

Tell me about these tricks, and maybe I'll change my opinion too.

Targeted ads don’t only serve you with useful information, they serve you targeted anything.

- 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

These and other examples you mentioned are improbable and low harm possibilities.

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.

I didn’t say you need to ban all tracking, in fact I’d love that Apple is doing this without regulators having to intervene.

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.

I am surprised that they didn't turn it into a think of the children thing instead.

"If you take our ads away only the criminals will run ads!"

One could argue that this is exactly what is happening already. Except that what FB does is still considered "legal".

Will somebody please think of the children errrr no i mean small businesses!!

How will the children buy ice cream if we don't tell them where their local ice cream shop is!

That wouldn't be as brazenly Orwellian. They have appearances to maintain.

Small business are run by people with small children.

That's somewhat true. The advent of targeted ads allowed lots of niche companies to thrive and compete with the established behemoths that have an oligopoly on shelf space. Internet advertising essentially launched the direct-to-consumer model that's so threatening to the P&Gs and Unilevers out there.

The big companies also use targeted ads, but with orders of magnitude bigger budgets. It's the big companies who have forced the small business to spend on targeted ads or die.

Disclaimer: Worked on a successful ad-tech company for ~2.5 years.

Love it when big companies spend money on targeting ads towards users searching for their smaller competitors and those competitors now have to spend money to get their own search results back. I'm sure there's a Facebook equivalent of this bullshit.

It's also a lie, because Facebook forces these companies to buy ads by not showing their posts to followers.

Slowly killing off organic reach on business pages was a dirty move, but still, Facebook's not "forcing" them to do anything.

Well, if a company wants to reach its own followers on Facebook, it is forced to pay for that.

Real online communities like specialty webs or youtube channels are a WAY better value compared to running fb ads

The idea that Facebook is acting out of genuine concern for small businesses is just laughable. At least come up with a plausible lie.

They are not optimizing for plausibility, but for “think of the children!!”

If Facebook is that upset they could just pull their apps from Apples app store and let the user decide which they’d miss the most, the iPhone or Facebook and Instagram.

I mean, both positions have merit. I don't see targeted advertising as this evil notion that it seems a lot of people do. For small businesses, being able to get your message to the right people for as cheap as possible can be make-or-break.

I know, this is tangentially related to the article and discussion at hand, because small business have little control over this, but I think we're at this point now because along with targeted ads come privacy issues. The ad targeting industry has earned the distrust of people via countless hacks of databases housing personal data that didn't need to be there. Facebook, specifically, is no saint in this regard with its shadow profiles and so on.

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.

You will have the option to enable tracking. We won't all have to see it the same way now. Those of us who don't see it your way will no longer be tracked involuntarily.

So the ends justify the means, whatever that may be?

> So the ends justify the means, whatever that may be?

Do you honestly believe that is a fair summary of their words?

Yes; the claim was that targeted ads are important because they let small businesses survive. That seems exactly like arguing that the ends (help small businesses) justifies the means (targeted ads, with the prerequisite tracking).

You left out the "whatever it may be" part.

What ever fingerprinting, dark pattern, technical trick, lie, etc

Please, so Covid-19 will become the next excuse in the spirit of “but think of the children!”

It’s already a crossover episode. In today’s congressional testimony on COVID, the ranking member’s go to reason for reopening schools was to “stop child abuse”.

I assume Facebook is leading the way by slashing ad and promotion fees for small businesses.

Plus a lot of the effectiveness of small business advertising on Facebook is zero sum between the competing small businesses. So the more effective it is relative to how well newspaper advertising, etc. worked in the past, the bigger a cut Facebook can extract from them. Which starts sounding more like a big business profit story, not small business.

Of course it doesn't hurt -Apple's- ad targeting within its store apps.

Yes it does.

They have such a perverted sense of purpose.

I'm sure the Facebook paid some random guy to say these words.

It's not some random guy. It's their CFO.

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