Why should platform makers consult the advertising industry? It's not like the advertising industry consulted anybody before they started collecting every bit of data they could.
Is there no case of FB screwing over its partners? Like locking or limiting an API that they had offered in the past, etc.
One thing that comes to mind immediately is that Facebook Messenger used to be accessible through XMPP and then they blocked that.
So yes, it's funny to me that Facebook is calling out Apple for changing their platform when Facebook does it all the time.
Eventually Facebook closed all that access down and basically deprecated the concept of FB as an app platform entirely. That is a way more dramatic change than what Apple is doing to Facebook here.
Also facebook killed this long before the Cambridge Analytics scandal broke. It also enabled some really cool features like their graph search where you could run queries like "people in X town that like football", but it also let you run very creepy queries to stalk people, which is why it got canned.
FB never built technical countermeasures, merely asked app devs to pinky-swear not to siphon user data.
If you give dangerous tools to users, you will have a few cool things and lots of tech-illiterate users screwed over.
Privacy advocates often preach solutions like the fediverse, without understanding that the fediverse is a privacy disaster for the tech illiterate. Cambridge Analytica wouldn't even be preventable on Mastodon, and it would have far worse consequences. Nevermind admins snooping on messages of their users, for i.e. romantic or financial reasons and poor people having to pay for their own services instead of seeing ads.
Yes, Facebook is horrible, but all currently known cures are worse than the disease.
I was able to download tons of user data. I think the guide was to only take what you need and you were not supposed to store it longer than 48 hours.
But that was def an honor system thing and I’d be surprised if people were purging data back then. It was (still is?) the Wild West with consumer tracking.
I would say maybe you could take comfort in knowing that you essentially sponsored someone who wanted to help produce a world of clean, adaptable code, but the truth is I’m just another mid-rate dev producing immense value to an ironically named faceless org.
Anyway, no thanks for ads and surveillance tech but at the same time thanks for keeping me employed and thanks for keeping the viability of these pursuits going I think?
One day, Facebook just killed that endpoint for "privacy reasons". Anyone can still open a web browser and visit the event page, but accessing the data programmatically is now gone.
I guess they wanted to be the only event viewer, and since everyone only adds their events to Facebook and nowhere else, there is now no way to get event info.
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/oembed-legacy
This is what Mark Zuckerberg says at government hearings.
Any given platform succeeds or dies based on its applications.
In the case of mobile, many of those applications survive based on advertising.
However when app developers include libraries from foursquare or facebook, what they are doing is violating the users' privacy and selling their information to third party aggregators who will apply data analytics to build a full predictive model of your behavior and then they will sell it to anybody who wants to spy on you. Do you remember Cambridge Analytica ?
There is a danger of FB manipulating things on its own but they didn't sell the data to any third party including Cambridge Analytica, it was harvested because of poor API policy(your friend auth giving access to some of your details) which was fixed in the future. The behavioral profiles were built by Cambridge Analytica on its own by the data it stole.
Why would FB in any instance even sell your data? I would argue it is in FB's interest to keep the data for itself, not letting anyone have it and be the gatekeeper.
The right thing to argue is, whether you want FB/Tiktok itself to have the treasure trove of data or not, and whether you want to allow them to use that to do precise targeting.
Is there any evidence that it was actually fixed?
[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/
But if you believe they don't still provide access via substantially similar APIs to "trusted partners", I have a bridge that may interest you...
Sure, it's not a selling of the raw data record but with advertising and targeting an advertiser can get pretty close.
I just have an issue with hyperboles like "sold individual user's behavioral profile to Cambridge Analytica" being thrown around in articles related to tech when in HN of all places, you can argue without resorting to that.
As it is, the efficacy of targeted advertising is a myth. Google claimed in a blog post that their own internal study showed over a 50% benefit in targeted advertising for publishers... but an independent, academic study showed a difference of about 4%.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/disabling_third-pa...
(Google has suggested, of course, that their wildly different outcomes are because you know, Google has data nobody else has, and obviously Google would never manipulate it's exclusive access to all that data to make studies look like what is best for their business.)
Adtech giants need advertisers to believe they need targeted advertising, because targeted advertising relies on mass data collection only they are capable of getting. If people realized the necessity of using Google and Facebook's mass user data was... a complete lie... any old ad firm could compete with their businesses.
You're thinking too small. Targeted advertising deserves to die in a grease fire, but a proper solution is to universally make an individual's personal data their property and require companies to cough up compensation every time it is used in commercial form. Any attempt to sidestep the compensation must account as fraud.
Holding on to user data needs to be a painful liability. The cost of such micro-accounting alone should incentivise companies to keep hold of as little information as possible, so as not to incur excess processing costs. The aggregated cost of payment processing on top of that will provide a secondary cost vector and further discourage using such data. Combine with GDPR and CCPA like power to demand companies to divulge their full accounting details of your data, and all of a sudden the pain becomes real. Not to mention very expensive.
Targeted advertising is as old as advertising. Why do you have cloud companies advertising on the billboards in San Francisco, but not in Beatty, Nevada? Why do you have coupons? Why Cosmopolitan has different ads than Linux Format? Why NBA games have different ads than The Bachelor?
Why do companies spend more and more money with companies that do provide better targeted advertising? Do you really believe that P&G spends billions of dollars on advertising, without understanding which forms of it are effective?
There's a valid discussion to be had about scope, allowed sophistication of targeted advertising that should be allowed, and regulations about it, but claiming it doesn't work just shows lack understanding of the topic.
To be fair, I think I should specify "user-targeted" advertising. Targeting by content/placement location isn't privacy-invading by nature. :)
Is privacy invading targeted advertising a concern and something that needs more debate? Yes. Can it be creepy and cause harm in some cases? Yes. Should world be driven by advertisers ROI? No. Are user-targeted ads ineffective? Hell no.
But also, just because something is concerning and bad for some aspects of the life (like privacy), it doesn't mean it should be wiped out of the floor, as cheaper and effective advertising does help to grow any capitalist economy. Trade-offs are needed (same as we don't ban oil, even tho it's bad for environment), and it'll become more regulated (either self-regulated by industry, or by governments), but it's not going to disappear.
Thanks, but no. As an end user, my preference goes as:
no advertising >>>>> targeted advertising >> untargeted advertising
And I am not just speaking hypothetically. Google has a switch in your account settings where you can flip a toggle to turn off all targeted Google advertising and make it un-targeted. I couldn't last more than a day with this and flipped the toggle back on.
While with targeted advertising, most ads were useless, they at least were somewhat relevant, and a few even piqued my interest. With untargeted advertising, I was getting absolute trash that was actively annoying me.
It's my phone, not the developers, not the advertisers, mine.
If you want a device which is subsidized by and encourages advertising and tracking, you have Android or Amazon's devices.
Are you willing to extend this argument to Apple as well? Do you also think that it is not Apple's phone, and that you should be able to do what you want with it, if you choose to?
Because right now Apple does not really agree with your opinion that it is your phone, that you can do what you want with.
Because it really is not "your phone", because of Apple's actions.
Either you think it is your phone or you don't.
The idea that privacy needs to be conceded in order for a healthy ad market to exist is false.
High-value advertising revenue generally comes from very specific brands targeting very specific users.
Of course you can do certain kinds of targeted advertising without user profiles, but I don't see how that would work on Facebook.
Facebook has a pretty good idea where I am by looking at the data associated with my connection. I know they have that, but if I don't want them to use that for advertising, they shouldn't.
Maybe the problem with online ads isn't the targeting or lack thereof but that the well has been poisoned by allowing even the worst possible scum and the users reached their breaking point and learned to ignore them, while the higher quality in real-world advertising is enough to even keep people paying for advertising (in the form of buying magazines)?
Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world", just like some brands might maintain unprofitable flagship stores.
Another reason is "because they have to charge that much". Which means that if fewer companies are willing to pay that much, more classic media outlets go out of business, as they can not lower prices further.
Lastly, you can't accurately measure how inefficient these forms of advertising are, whereas online advertising makes it easy to see whether ads are a net loss or not.
Doesn't that show a problem with online advertising if it's considered so bad that companies are willing to pay huge premiums to show up somewhere else instead?
On top of that, extremely course information can be gathered without tracking users. For example, you can probably get a country level location and maybe even language from the request the browser sends.
However, if you sell, say, artisanal hot sauce, you'd pay more to target an affluent person that likes spicy food, rather than some random person that may be just be googling how to make macaroni and cheese.
ads == worse quality
I agree with "fewer" and strongly disagree with "worse quality."
Anyway, I don’t begrudge anyone who has worked in the ad business, but I do wonder if folks might be happier optimizing for something of real lasting value in comparison to the gambling business.
Classified ads were the difference between profit and loss for a lot of local newspapers. Craigslist devastated that market in a matter of years.
Commercial ads were doing fine, and I bet there are a lot of local businesses who wish there was still a local newspaper they could advertise in. But it wasn't enough.
You can't in practice verify that clicks or impressions are real, as opposed to initiated by bots, without correlating them with real human behavior.
If you have an idea for how to verify a click or impression was real without also gathering some kind of data, go make ten billion dollars selling that technology.
I fully understand why advertising companies would be opposed to this, it's in direct opposition to their value prop. As a consumer, though, I don't want anyone who is not the entity I'm interacting with to know anything about me.
I think you give too little credit to the intelligence of ad buyers. They can figure out if a web ad is working the same way they can figure out if a billboard ad is working.
I think super-precise attribution would actually kill the advertising industry. The uncertainty is what allows ad-buyers to purchase spots well below their value. The uncertainty is what leads to money being spread around and supporting the most things.
It's a little like insurance. If insurance companies could precisely target rates, you would end up paying basically exactly what your health care costs are and maybe a little more. Insurance works because of uncertainty and large pools of customers.
Track purchases coming from ads?
There are Android phones sold in the developing world at low price points where ads appear on home screen, notification bar etc. with tracking deep within OS.
Then, there are phones like Pixel where with recent versions you have control of what is shared and you need to authorize access(single/multiple use) for things like location. Like iOS, not much can be collected unless you give Google/app permission to.
I probably shouldn't have mentioned Android at all because it's not about phone brand so much as it is my right to tell advertisers no.