Facebook apologizes to users for Apple’s monstrous efforts to protect privacy
theregister.com
theregister.com
This does not kill all forms of tracking, nor does it eliminate IDFA as an an option, but it does make it more obvious to iPhone/iPad users what exactly is going on behind the curtains with this tracking tool and let them make an informed and explicit choice about whether they want any part of that.
Consent should be opt-in and granular (a user might wish to opt-in for one app but opt-out for another one) so every app should’ve already implemented their own toggle (like iOS 14 would force them to) instead of just using it in the background and pointing users to the system-wide setting if they want to opt-out (which isn’t ideal if the user wants to remain opted-in for some apps only).
Given that this feature is entirely made by Apple, that's not a reasonable conclusion.
First of all under GDPR, tracking can be for a legitimate interest, and thus it might not require opt-in. For example security, or even first-party analytics, with the purpose of optimizing the content, can be legitimate interests. However this cookie is meant for advertising, and user profiling for marketing purposes doesn't pass the test for legitimate interest.
The other problem, for Apple, might be the revised E-Privacy Directive. You can't set such tracking cookies without informing users. Such cookies must be opt-in, whether you use them or not.
AFAIK Apple is simply complying with the law, whereas Facebook is effectively arguing for unlawful tracking, because that's just who they are.
I’m sure there’s a joke in there...
All of the Apps get the same ID and that's how your "persona" graph is constructed.
Sidenote: One of the bets people are making with this change is that now free apps will start forcing you to signup (via email/mobile number) which will be used to construct this "persona" graph again because who has time to create new emails for these purposes.
You don't have to offer Sign in with Apple if you have your own login system. Ref: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#sig...
This is only applicable if the Apps provide this as an option right?
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#sig...
I wouldn’t treat it as a privacy feature, I would treat it as a convenience feature. When I needed some extra mask straps, I installed Etsy, didn’t previously have an account. So I used Sign In with Apple to register, picked out some mask straps, and Apple Pay to pay. The whole process only took as long as it took for me to make a selection and two biometric authentications, but some of my information had to be exchanged in order to make that transaction possible.
Also I can login to UPS and Etsy without a password.
If you go into Settings on iOS 13/iPadOS 13 and into the Privacy pane, all the way at the bottom you should see two tabs, one labeled “Analytics & Improvements” which is for information Apple collects for the device, Siri and iCloud, and another “Advertising”.
It’s in that second one that you can toggle “Limit Ad Tracking”, off by default today, on by default in iOS 14, at least that’s the plan and is the case in reports from people using the beta releases. Right below this toggle is a button labeled “Reset Advertising Identifier” which does exactly what it says. This is the “IDFA” that is the subject of discussion and will be the same value returned to Apps that request to use it. If you reset it, that will break continuity with your previous identifier, at least in theory.
Deary me. Reading comprehension fail.
Limiting tracking will be off by default? Are you sure you're not the one inverting things?
What mechanism remains for tracking a user across apps?
But I was thinking more about tracking within apps that isn’t concerned with tracking across apps or even tracking for advertising purposes, hence, “does not kill all forms of tracking”.
It'll be really interesting to see this play out. The experiment with the "Do Not Track"[0] header on the web failed becaused it was largely ignored by everyone. With Apple's tight control over the App Store you simply cannot ignore the rules because Apple can outright ban you for it.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/30/facebook-...
That hasn't been the case for a pretty long time. Now the permissions are quite granular and you can accept and refuse specific one at any time. It's actually quite tiresome to go through 4-5 permissions popup on some apps, but it makes sense so it's okay.
The apps is informed of that decision, so yeah it can decide to not works without it. I suggest you to not use an app that require stuff that you don't want to allow.
> That hasn't been the case for a pretty long time. Now the permissions are quite granular and you can accept and refuse specific one at any time.
This is technically a correct answer, but I've seen the bad habit of asking for many permissions (and sometimes refusing to work without) being more common on Android. An example is a bank's app that will refuse to launch (or I mean, provide any meaningful information/experience) unless location permission is given (this is when giving the permission means an "always allow") and unless it's connected to a cellular data network (not WiFi). On iOS, the app is better behaved and will work with some useful functionality when certain permissions are denied.
I just wish people understood how much they’re being manipulated by Apple’s marketing here. Credit to them: they’re the best in the world —- if Tim Cook decided to sell cigarettes, he’d have most of us on two packs a day and believing it’s good for us by Christmas.
Apple is a giant corporation, they’re not your friend. They can be total jerks when it suits them. They happen to have failed at their own advertising network and had the brilliant idea to spin this as if they “care” about your “privacy”. It is a convenience of the moment to sell more devices like the iPad Pro I’m typing this on.
The level of rhetoric has reached foaming-at-the-mouth proportions, and we can no longer have a rational discussion that acknowledges the nuances. Even the word “tracking” is so loaded with evil connotations and indistinguishable in most people’s minds from the ever-cited, rarely existent “selling my personal information” that few can see beyond the word to make a conscious choice about what level of tracking is acceptable. (NONE! I can already hear the shouting.)
IDFA is a random identifier that’s been used for attribution and audience targeting (for which Apple provided it). Digital advertising has a fairly unique property, which is that it’s possible (at least sometimes) to connect the dots between “I paid for an ad for my product” and “someone bought the product”. If you’re spending money on advertising and offered the choice between casting it into the void and hoping your sales pick up, versus only paying for successful “conversions”, that second option is going to be pretty attractive.
I saw an ad on Facebook for a food delivery service. I signed up and have been enjoying their products and benefitting from fewer grocery trips. I’m ok with that. And I’m ok if there was a little anonymous tag that allowed Facebook to get paid for the service they provided to the company. I’m less ok if they collect information on how much red meat I’m buying and sell it to my insurance company, but that’s not what we’re talking about here and I pretty wound up when people assume that all “tracking” is the same.
1) Marketing alone is not why you have an iPad Pro. All other tablets kinda suck compared to it. It's at least 5 years ahead of anything else in hardware and the software is probably further than that.
2) Facebook also not your friend. Corporations can't be friends.
3) Why would anyone _want_ to be tracked if they can avoid it?
4) From a business' POV, sure tracking is useful, but as a consumer, I don't care. I would rather not be tracked - in this instance I think it's nearly even possible to say Apple are being my friend, working for my interests. Also IDFA was introduced as a more private device ID, I doubt they expected it to be exploited this way and are now fixing it.
5) The reason FB cares about this tracking isn't for tracking installs of other apps, it's about their ability (or not) to build up a comprehensive identity of who you, what you do, where you go and what you like, from all the apps and websites you've ever visited.
People get value in return. Free to use product and ads about stuff they’re interested in. For some it’s not enough of value proposition, but for others consider it fair value exchange.
I'd also say that's a better argument for google, where them knowing some stuff about me probably does give better search results - but facebook just want to give me better adverts, which is of marginal (approaching zero) benefit to me.
People that see it that way can choose option 1 when presented with the choice.
In other words: if your demand is legitimate, you have no reason to whine about opt in.
I have no romantic attachments to Apple in particular, after all they were the SOBs that provided IDFAs and set the initial policy, which is why this was a “friendly reminder” on what this policy going forward is and what it isn’t. What appears to you to be a “scary dialogue box” appears to me to be an adequate and accurate description of what IDFAs are used for and why Apple provided IDFAs in the first place. Tracking users and across apps and websites from different companies is IDFAs working as intended.
Now you can be as cynical or romantic about why Apple is doing this now as you want, to me it’s a half-step towards correcting a mistake they initially made, and to others it is clearly something else, but let’s not kid ourselves into believing that just because Apple stripped the paint off of an advertiser’s favorite toy that this is somehow going to be the death knell of user tracking and the app-based advertising industry is doomed on iPhones and iPads. Facebook and Google are big boys, they may not like this new change, but they’ll learn to adapt around it because adapting to new situations and facts on the ground is just another cost of doing business. Business plans aren’t set in stone since time immemorial, sometimes they need alterations to remain relevant and operable.
Mind I wouldn’t care if I could install apps (native, not PWAs) through Safari distributed through a means that cuts Apple out of the loop and download them right to my home screen, or in future versions, my App Library.
This is such a hoary old argument usually made by those who believe a product value is only measured by the cost of the hardware components comprising it, not how it was packaged or how it works or the experience it’s custom software enables.
Of course in this case, if your job is selling snake oil, you think everyone’s job is selling snake oil.
Holy mackerel, compared to this, the folks at Fox and MSNBC are paragons of neutrality. This may be the worst example of journalism I've ever seen. I'm looking all over for something that says "opinion" or "editorial", but no...
Take this job listing for example: https://www.theregister.com/Page/devoops.html
1. DevOops.html
2. Titled: "Vultures seeking penguin-tamer"
This article communicated multiple facts/relevant quotes to me that I was not aware of before (eg iOS14 changing a default setting to improve user privacy, and the extremely revealing quotes from the FB Audience Network bloc [0]) and put them in a context relevant to the audience that values privacy. I don't see how this is an example of bad journalism.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/news-and-insights/p...
Translation: "At least we have these guys house trained, so it's not a total loss."
Now, it should not come as an enormous surprise that most of the W3C's corporate members do not have your individual interests close to their hearts. And so you can't really expect them to consistently vote for things that help you and hurt them.
If you would like to work on technology standardisation but you aren't a corporation find an IETF Working Group that's doing something interesting to you and pitch in. Unlike the W3C the IETF isn't a membership organisation. Indeed it arguably isn't an organisation at all which makes it pretty unique among Standards Development Organisations...
To be fair though, don't you remember how the DNT header worked really well for everybody involved, and how all these advertisers today universally respect it, and how they totally didn't abandon the entire concept as soon as it started seeing mainstream use and platforms started turning it on by default?
What could go wrong if we give them another spot at the table?
I mean, PRAM has already released so many good plans, like... a mission statement. But that counts! I mean, come on, it has 'Responsible' right in its name!
Then again, I'm sure very few people are like "Sure do track me pls". I know Microsoft tries to package and word it nicely in their Windows setup (then ignores it at a next update).
Would you like advertisers to be able to track you (Yes) (No)
Of course advertisers know full well people will press No, and that will harm their income.
Another consideration is your point that preventing ads will harm advertisers’ income. In some cases, hurting income is an acceptable loss, but in others where the service is sustained by advertising, less so.
Perhaps another compromise could be to allow apps that do not accept the tracking prompt to only access basic functionality, with an explanation that the tracking supports their premium service. That’s a very different world for Facebook and others.
On this particular issue, I’ve pretty much decided for myself that individually tailored advertising, net-wide implicit tracking and surveillance capitalism in general need to be banned, or owned by the commons and walled with fine grained permissions. I’m waiting for the tech world to catch up.
[1] Ok, not "have no problem", it's a lot of technical work that is not "feature" and they need to pay for. But again, rules are the same for everyone, and "full GDPR support" can be sold as a feature, so they're largely fine with it. There's also slightly inconsistent interpretation of the law, depending on company. That's also to be expected, some niche players will push the boundaries of the law hoping to get market share, while the larger ones/that have more to lose will remain somewhat conservative and just tell their clients "our interpretation is correct, if you want to go with the niche players suit yourselves, your risk". In time, as courts set legal precedents for the interpretation, this will smooth out.
Eg:
Are you okay with contractors at the following companies:
[list of 54,683 companies no one outside the industry has ever heard of, with addresses in 162 different countries]
Having access to:
-every item you've ever purchased at Amazon, eBay, footlocker, hot topic, CVS, [your local sex shop], best buy, target, wall Mart, etc. Including your prescriptions.
-every picture you've ever uploaded to the internet, including ones you've never shared publicly
-your current location and your location whenever you ever use the app, as accurate as a few inches
-every single file on your device
- all of you emails
-recordings of your phone calls, video chats, and messages
-...
Sure, tracking may not be at this level yet. But has anyone actually seen the God mode panels at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and shared the hard details of what is there?
This is a disingenuous argument for that company to make; it's totally reasonable for some browsers (particularly privacy-focused browsers) to have privacy respecting defaults. Microsoft didn't make the change because they wanted to hurt advertisers, they made the change because they had good reason to believe that's the default that the majority of their users wanted.
My take is that if consumers are informed enough that not opting out can be seen as as conscious consent to be tracked, then they're also informed enough that not opting in can be seen as conscious dissent to be tracked. We don't get to selectively decide that users are only stupid in one direction.
On a more cynical level, I've commented to the same effect elsewhere, but I do not believe advertisers when they say that browser defaults were the reason DNT failed. It failed because it was going to see adoption.
If it had remained off by default, but effective promotion campaigns and public education meant 90% of users went and turned it on anyway, advertisers would have come up with another excuse to stop respecting the header. Advertisers weren't ever interested in responsible user consent, they were interested in having some kind of meaningless gesture they could point to when other privacy-respecting solutions got proposed. As soon as that gesture had teeth and was being used by a significant number of people, then it was no longer serving its original purpose. The unspoken terms of the deal were, "most people won't have this header set."
Case in point, the iOS changes that Facebook is going crazy over aren't opt-in or opt-out. They force the user to make a choice, so it's exactly as easy to opt into tracking as it is to opt out of tracking. This seems like an extremely reasonable compromise -- there is no default behavior, the user gets to choose what they want. How can anyone complain about that?
And yet, Facebook is still mad, not because the new dialog is a dark pattern or because it's not capturing users' real preferences, but because Facebook knows that a substantial portion of their users are going to opt out.
Absolutely, but "browser defaults" were an easy excuse. I was not really defending advertisers here; though I do believe they'd have had a harder time finding justifications if the feature actually had organic adoption. It was a failed and poorly-thought marketing gesture from Microsoft, that only backfired on the end-users.
> Microsoft didn't make the change because they wanted to hurt advertisers, they made the change because they had good reason to believe that's the default that the majority of their users wanted.
I strongly disagree here. Microsoft did not make the change out of the goodness of their hearts - not any more than advertisers ignored DNT because they were convinced "it's not the user's real option". This was all marketing speak/ internal&external justification for their actions.
>Facebook actually gave some of the money it made from running those ads through its system to the business that paid for those ads. Which doesn’t make any sense but shut up, Facebook is the good guy, ok? And Apple is wrong to be doing this.
Facebook Audience Network, affected by these changes, includes display ads running in 3rd-party (read: not Facebook) apps. App makers showing ads receive a split of the ad revenue in those cases.
That works so poorly Facebook doesn't even bid on showing ads for those users currently: " And Facebook doesn’t even bid on iOS users that have Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) enabled " https://www.adexchanger.com/data-exchanges/what-do-apples-pr...
That's how anonymized data _can_ work. Of course it's also easy to mess that up and leak data about the underlying person.
Apple no longer has an ad network which means it can't take it's cut from ad revenue. By reducing the effectiveness of ads on the platform it pushes more people to in app purchases which it receives a heft chunk of.
I mean Google (the ad company) spent a lot of R&D money into making browsers and the internet faster. For me it means the internet is faster, for them they get more ad impressions and goodwill. Win-win, although they ballsed up the goodwill part.
Overall the Web is in much worse place, with decentralized hyperdocuments replaced with centralized application server model. FB and Google turned internet into AOL.
Apple isn't blocking ads per se. They're reducing effectiveness of ads that don't respect user's privacy. The other kind of ads (e.g. sponsored videos, privacy friendly ads, etc) could still work.
I don't think ads that don't respect user's privacy are a necessary evil.
Out of curiosity, can you give examples of privacy friendly ads that indie devs can use?
https://www.wired.com/story/can-killing-cookies-save-journal...
If you write a game that the streamer/producer really enjoys, they might even continue to play your game after the sponsorship ends. This is the dream scenario because it’s free advertising that can sustain your game long term. These content creators can also provide a lot of valuable feedback because they tend to become experts at your game over a long period of time.
I'd say that I'm cautiously optimistic about this, especially if it's self-interested. They're less likely to change their mind later if they actually benefit from it vs. empty posturing.
See Google's "Do No Evil" for a counter-example.
If we undo the damage caused by FB and Google we can go back to a healthy market where people pay for things with money instead of their privacy.
Hotmail started the war on people paying for email clients long before gmail
Really? I see far more paywalls now than I did 5-10y ago
You think advertising is 'evil'?
How far do you take that? For example does a listing in a local newspaper advertising a law cutting service count as evil? Is any form of telling people that you off a product or service really an act of evil?
Maybe they do, but using the idiom “necessary evil” doesn’t make it certain that they do. Probably nearly nothing colloquially described as a “necessary evil” is actually “evil”. It can be only a pain or an annoyance, but required.
>[…] the use of the term "evil" in the phrase does not necessarily indicate that the thing being characterized as a "necessary evil" is something that is generally considered an "evil" in the sense of being immoral or the enemy of the good.
I'm not saying that all advertising is bad either, it's the specific case of B2C online advertising that compromises privacy and massively reduces the signal:noise ratio of the platform you're using. Sales and marketing aren't inherently bad in themselves, obviously.
There isn't really an alternative here. People won't pay for apps.
Also - ads not 'evil' - or rather, it's what people generally chose over paying 50 cents a month, and it's absolutely a choice on our (ie consumer) part.
The problem ironically has to do with relevance. People don't mind relevant ads, but in order to have relevant ads, networks need a lot of personal information. Ugly paradox.
And yes, spammy web pages/apps full of terrible, spammy ads - this is really of no benefit to anyone.
It would be nice if they worked towards fixing that.
For example, did you know that 80% of people who purchased Product X saw a Product X advertisement through our network?
Sure, that was achieved by showing a Product X advertisement to people who'd just bought Product X (reversing cause and effect) but are you sure your marketing people would realise that and not be excited about how powerful this network is?
You can't make these targeting claims for an untargeted advertisement, and so idiots will believe they work regardless and there is a lot of idiot marketing budget.
Conventional adverts will have to be cheaper to compete, which means they earn less money for the host, which means that - for the intended audience of this Facebook message - those conventional adverts are definitively worse.
I don't run an ad blocker, although I do happily pay people who offer to give me a service without adverts for money.
A principled stance would just flip the default to OFF for both Apple and everyone else. With the strange treatment of developers on AppStore, I'm afraid they'll start abusing this to give edge to their own advertising on AppStore and elsewhere.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/22/apple-ios-14-ad-tracking/
If you have to rely on companies’ good conscience long term you will be lost and abandoned. As such individual acts of ethical behavior are maybe nice but not really very important or meaningful.
It’s much better if companies are structured in such a way that their own self-interest aligns closely with the self-interest of society at large.
Such a match will never be perfect, but if it works it’s quite nice.
I would argue that Apple is at least in some ways structured so that its own self-interest regarding privacy results in positive privacy conscious outcomes for everyone.
It’s of course good to know that generally speaking companies will always act in self-interest but if self-interest leads to positive outcomes then that’s much more stable and longer-lasting than some CEO acting out of the goodness of their heart. That’s fickle and can just disappear any second.
Apple has two sets of customers. They architected the worlds greatest casino through the AppStore, and the developers who make the machines are just as morally pure as Facebooks customers.
Look at the Epic controversy, which boils down to who should get the biggest cut of real money from selling bullshit virtual funny money.
I'm saying people shouldn't look at this decision as "Apple has our interests in mind" but rather "in this particular case Apple's self interested is aligned with our own because of their business model".
Is it though? I thought they still had an ad network so I searched a bit to find it and how it was itself impacted by this button to find this:
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202074
So they only got ads on their store, perfectly fine, and it seems to be impacted as the button does say All advertisers. It even seems to show what information they use on the store, seriously that's well beyond what I was expecting A+.
And then I saw "Turn off location-based ads". Weird the first screenshot didn't have that checkbox... It's hidden in System Service, who really go there to set Advertising setting? Even more so while you got the perfect place already on the perfectly logical "Settings > Privacy > Advertising".
Their self-interest regarding privacy aren't aligned at all with yours. They are just trying to make the most buck out of you and they found one more profitable than ads. For location based ads, it seems like they still believe it will bring them more cash.
That means that the day ads will be back as the most profitable way for them, you'll be back to square one ;) with just much less competition. Good luck!
Apple offers paid app discovery, and they want to increase that revenue. Facebook has historically been the paid channel for paid discovery. By limiting its effectiveness, Apple can grab that revenue.
Stratechery dug into this recently (see the "The Apple Vulnerability" section about 80% of the way down):
If there was even a single other large consumer company with a slightly better record on privacy than Apple, your view would be more understandable. As it is, at every turn industry after industry is getting infected with the "extract value through users' data" disease. Apple seems to be resisting that trend at least for now.
Aside from how remarkably consistent HN is at reproducing this, the funniest part to me is the sheer volume of things it has been said about (and then voted to the top of HN threads).
I also think 30% is too high across the board, but my point is simply that an incentive to employ inherently anti-privacy ad SDKs is unfortunate.
And I know it doesn't block what could be an ads business for Apple but if we need to hand off our data to Big Tech, I'd rather have Apple get my data than Facebook.
#ChooseYourOwnEvil
You can nitpick on "need". Such typical HN response to focus on 1 word just to pick on something rather than the understand the whole message.
It's not entirely out of the ad business. See: https://searchads.apple.com/
[1]: https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-en... [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...
Maybe a search engine is in the works already (or a deal to buy Duck Duck Go).
But, it's still a good move for users, and it's still better than no change at all. Privacy advocates can't afford to only accept help from ideologically pure sources. We need allies. I'm not going to bash Apple over a change that will be mostly positive for end-users, just because Apple might have a few non-altruistic reasons for doing it. The privacy benefits from this change greatly outweigh any anticompetitive risks.
Ironically, I've commented this to the same effect in regards to Epic, but I think the advice applies to Apple critics as well: if you're too picky about who is and isn't allowed to advocate for you, eventually normal people and institutions will just stop advocating for you altogether.
Apple no longer has an ad network because advertisers were unhappy that it was not willing share user data.
>Apple knows names and addresses, geographic locations and app and music-purchase histories, and can show ad buyers that a group with specific characteristics also likes certain types of apps or music. However, its user tracking and ad targeting are not cookie-based, meaning agencies can't do automated buys via their cookie-centric trading desks, which allow them to mesh lots of data from different sources. Instead, they have to go to Apple, ask to reach a given audience and, well, trust Apple that it will deliver it.
One person familiar with the situation exec said Apple's refusal to share data makes it the best-looking girl at the party, forced to wear a bag over her head.
https://adage.com/article/digital/amazon-apple-catch-a-break...
Apple wanted an ad network that would allow developers to monetize free apps while still respecting end user privacy.
That's not what the people buying ads want.
Am I a product of the Oracle DBs behind the websites I use for free?
How about credit cards? Isn't the merchant and issuing bank the customer there? As long as I pay off my monthly balance, it's free for me.
My Facebook data is worthless. ONLY in aggregate is FB data valuable, and only if it is kept mostly secret from their customers (advertisers).
The more FB data you're using, the less you know about me.
So it appears the author has no idea what a mobile advertising network is/does...
FB aren’t wrong to highlight that this will have a detrimental impact for many thousands of publishers who offer content for free, due to the fact they run an ad supported model.
Let’s see how it plays out...
Those apps will still show adverts, publishers will still get paid, and advertisers will still pay to show ads. The only thing that needs to change is the way Facebook choose which adverts to show. Instead of an algorithm based on huge swathes of personal data that they've tracked it'll need to be a simpler "what categories of ads should we show in this app?" form. Adverts will be a bit less effective, which could drive revenues down a bit, but the sky is not falling on the ad model.
The real thing that Facebook are sad about is the fact that they will no longer be able to sell access to the tracking data. That's a lucrative business, and it's one that only really benefits Facebook and data brokers. Cutting off their supply of tracking data isn't a bad thing.
File this under actions by a megacorp that increase the power of them and other megacorps.
In the short term I expect companies like Liveramp (which acts as DMP (Data Management Platform)) to get more business because one theory here is all free apps will start to force users to login (using email/mobile number) which effectively becomes another ID you can track folks with across-apps over time.
I don't want to be stalked online, and I'll raise a glass over their bankruptcy notices.
Also, forcing users to login may also be in breach of GDPR, if you don't have a good reason to need a login, you're unnecessarily collecting personal information.
One obvious example of this is NVidia, you've paid for the card, yet they force you to login to use their apps.
One thing I am curious to see (how it pans out) is if device fingerprinting (IP + Device+ Some other attributes etc. to map you) evolves to solve this problem.
In my experience, it is pretty bad (at best 30% compared to IDFA/Device Id solutions) but I see few companies pitching this as an alternative.
Nail. Head. You hit it.
Of course publishers will still show adverts...but if your main source of revenue drops 50% overnight - that's going to be a huge problem for a number of content creators...which is what Facebook are warning against.
Most of FB's revenue is direct inventory sold - so this won't be too much of an impact on their owned and operated inventory - but as I say, it's publishers who rely on Facebook's targeting to generate high eCPMs to efficiently monetize their audience that will suffer most.
I agree that it sucks for ad-supported sites to lose out. An ad model that doesn't require user tracking would be beneficial for these sites and their users.
1. People are tracked in ways they don't understand without their knowledge or consent.
2. Apple requires that in-app purchases go through the App Store.
3. Apple does not allow 3rd-party app stores.
These can all be independently tackled and it would be a shame to gate solutions for one problem on solving the others first or at the same time. For now, apps can change their business models to ensure profits. Later, when the other issues are taken care of, they can take advantage of that as well.
Facebook's traffic clocks in at 5.22GB on the network (from the beginning of time for the controller). To give context, my wife and I don't use our Facebook accounts at all. She hasn't logged in in 3 years and I log in maybe once a month to once every two months. Surprised by how many apps in our household use the Facebook SDK and pipe data to them.
Additional context, I don't even have "fun" apps. Just food delivery, Office suite (outlook, word, etc), streaming services, etc.
LinkedIn makes sense, we've both been looking for jobs and use it on a daily (if not hourly) basis but seeing Facebook APIs on the same level as LinkedIn is astonishing.
Can I assume you aren't using either of these tools?
Fantastic irony. As much as I dislike The Register, this sentence made me smile.
As a result, I noticed errors like the statements that Facebook can no longer sell user data. Actually, FB does not sell data. FB sells ad placement based on user data. Still bad, but much less so.
If the Reg got that fundamental fact wrong, what else did they get wrong?
Citation badly needed, especially considering microtargeting.
In my view, it’s in no way the same information.
It's laughable at best that anyone would believe Apple isn't continuing to make use of their massive personal information collection to appease their partners, "official" and "unofficial".
They don't, they sell expensive devices, successfully because they don't need your data.
I’m not saying that Apple occupies any kind of absolute moral high-ground, but their business model lets them safely and publicly take this kind of posture on privacy.
Some numbers: Estimated revenue loss of 50% from audience networks [2]
[1] https://totally80s.com/article/march-1982-i-want-my-mtv-camp...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/26/facebook-apple-ios-14-could-...
Yessss. Hopefully this is just step one in the collapse of Facebook but I’m not that hopeful yet.
"Bad guy vs bad guy Privacy-invading ad giant flummoxed by developer-gouging overpriced hardware slinger.
A plague on both their houses."
I don't use either one, & never will.
Basically Apple is going to force apps to request permission to track users outside of the app they're currently in, which at the moment they can do by default. Facebook just happens to do this a LOT, so this will sting them particularly badly.
So it won't affect all networks equally - it continues tracking users for Apple's own network and other uses.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/22/apple-ios-14-ad-tracking/
They made tracking so harmful with no respect to users privacy that everyone hates it now. It used to be that at least half of the users would prefer to see relevant ads until tracking become the evil thing that is right now.
Follow the money. Apple gets its money from consumers buying devices. Amazon from selling stuff to consumers. FB and Google just feed on people's data.
[0] FAANG = Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix (big tobacco)[1] and Alphabet (Google)
But I can't help but feel that the anti-FB sentiment on HN goes too far when parody articles with no substantial points made shoot to the top of HN within minutes.
I don’t think HN is immune to that.
Personally, I found this article super useful. We've had long discussions at my company about what Facebook's announcement about not supporting IDFA opt-in means: https://twitter.com/rjonesy/status/1298662658934222848
This article made it much more clear. It's one of the only ones that addressed why Facebook says advertisers have to create a separate advertising account for iOS 14 ads, for example.
What Facebook tells you: " To help preserve the fidelity of app install campaign measurement, we will require the creation and usage of a dedicated iOS 14 ad account "
What the article explains: " Unfortunately, however, it will require them to set up a completely new advertising account to run campaigns for iOS users, because it’s not going to apply Apple’s new privacy protection measures any further than it has to "
Makes sense. Facebook's recommendation to apps showing ads is to implement Facebook login or uploading hashed user information (Advanced Matching). Apple is already cracking down on those approaches, like saying any app that has social login must also support Apple login.
That said, they deliberately take the role of British “Red Top” tabloids, which are known to be quite “cheeky.”