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Comment by firloop | Hacker News Reader

Parts of this fall flat as the author doesn’t grasp what they’re satirizing.

>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.

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So, by this logic Facebook is the good guy, because it is receiving less money by helping 3rd parties without its capabilities also invade users privacy, while taking a cut of the profits?

The argument made by advertisers and Facebook is that this is anonymized data which helps in making advertisements more relevant to people.

What’s wrong with showing ads simply based on content a person is looking at?

That's called contextual targeting: " If iOS 14 users opt out, they will still be shown ads, but they’ll be based on other methods like contextual targeting rather than based on their IDFA. " https://clearcode.cc/blog/apple-idfa/#apple-skadnetwork

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...

Does it work too poorly on its own, or too poorly compared to tracking ads? Perhaps their value will go up with less presence of the latter.

The issue is not effectiveness as much as measurement. Advertisers value the insight obtained by tracking user response to ads. That is something they are willing to pay premium for. Without the ability to do measurements, Facebook does not provide as much value.

Ad with id X was shown, Ad with id X was clicked, Ad with id X led to a purchase. Is it that important to know more than that?

Sometimes I don't understand what advertisers mean when they keep reassuring that all the data they suck is totally anonymized with the objective of delivering more personalized and relevant ads. How can it be personalized if you can't pick me out of the anonymized lot? If you can, then what good is the anonymity? Probably its me who just doesn't get it.

I know your HN username is "noisy_boy", I can track your HN posts/comments but I have no idea who you are, where you live, etc.

That's how anonymized data _can_ work. Of course it's also easy to mess that up and leak data about the underlying person.

Bingo. Exactly what I thought.

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