Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
This part hits the nail on the head. Facebook is intentionally being misleading in this campaign. I’ve had the IDFA turned off on my phone for years. Now apps have to ask for it individually. If apps have to prompt to access it, and this benefits small businesses so much, wouldn’t people agree to it with the right framing? Why doesn’t Facebook provide a method in its tracking SDKs that shows an interstitial about how this is good for small business before asking users if they want to be tracked?
Of course, Facebook would never do that. That’s because “informed consent” with adware doesn’t really exist... once people actually understand the scope of ad tracking networks... they don’t want it.
I’m not even against the concept of targeted advertising. Facebook’s first party properties are fine venues for it. I’m even (generally) ok with an advertiser retargeting me based on information they have about me. I wish that Facebook was prohibited from scooping up data in every other app I use and combining it with other data that they purchase. You can have targeted advertising without a massive surveillance dragnet.
They are careful to never mention what the iOS 14 updates are actually about, but a lie by omission is still a lie.
1. It is difficult to recover from such an obviously dishonest position.
2. Users are supposed to be the customers, not small businesses. If users aren't the customers, they can't receive Facebook as a product "for free."
3. The current business model offers outsized returns because it leverages tech people don't want or don't yet know they don't want.
I don't know what the solution is, because I want to be on small businesses side.
And the issue with apple now is, I guarantee 99% of people will reject IDFA, because it is about personal data and it does sound bad. But the end result of this might not be that good for small business.
Facebook knows my demographic because I provided it to them when I signed up and the types of content I interact with in their apps, and they have both coarse and granular location (IP address and the location permission) from their first party apps. Most relevant forms of targeting seem to still work. Ads from the local florist can still be targeted.
It's credible to me that other, Facebook specific, magic such as "lookalike audience" and other behavior cohorting tools may be impacted by this change, but I don't view this narrow issue of IDFA consent to be an absolute judgment on ad targeting.
I think digital advertising does not have to be bad, but it very much is. Unfortunately it will probably get worse before it gets better.
Why should I be forced to give tracking information to allow people to 'hyper-target' me? I don't want to be hyper-targeted regardless of how small the business is.
I'm absolutely fine with making ads relevant to the content I'm looking at. If I'm reading a blog about baldness and someone advertises some sort of hair transplant on the page that's totally fine!
What I'm not cool on is an advertiser tracking this page, cataloguing me as someone that suffers from hair loss, fingerprinting my device to follow other pages I visit to further target me, then placing advertisements for herbal remedies for baldness on every single page I visit, then changing the advert based on machine learning about the most effective advert based on my other attributes (a single young male living in a city).
These two things are not the same.
There's no need to spy on users outside Facebook's app to get relevant data.
In particular, how does it compare to somewhat targeted offline ads like (local shop advertising in local newspaper) or (car stuff advertised in car enthusiast magazine)?
Also, the question is about having a level playing field. If your competition has access to highly effective advertising, you can't afford to not use it as well. So right now you need it. However, if hyper targeting were forbidden (because the spying and stalking is prohibited by law or because browsers make it infeasible) then you don't need it.
Done right, it’s worth a lot.
> https://twitter.com/DaveStangis/status/1339183289349918721
"cut of 60% per advertising dollar." So between 2 and 3. That is incredibly little for all the surveillance it brings with it. And I don't think fb would understate here.
If "hyper targeting" is that useless, why are even still discussing allowing it?
Facebook & co are just destroying all these small businesses (local newspapers, local magazines, billboard companies, local news websites, whatever).
The internet has changed how people consume and get new information forever and that won't change anytime soon.
Can you build a successful business on advertising? Yes. But I’d argue that you don’t need to. Almost every service I pay for came to me by word of mouth. That takes time and effort to cultivate, but it isn’t affected by a software update. Or me wanting to not share my personal data.
It also takes a lot of money from governments and political campaigns. The micro-level targeting allows highly specific messages to be shown to people matching a specific segment and contradictory messages to be shown to another segment. It's disingenuous of Facebook to claim this is just about small business when it's arguably about undermining the foundations of democracy.
It also favours more established businesses that are more known, making it harder for new businesses to gain any traction.
I'm not keen on advertising (I use adblockers on all my devices etc.), but there are definitely some (in my opinion) some compelling arguments on both sides.
Nonsense.
See, there are (were?) lots of niche specific publications and communities. They'd actually know about a subject, and provide informed and largely unbiased advice, and carry advertisement, of course. Similarly, there were regional newspapers, carrying information and advertisement of regional interest.
TV and other broad media could not steal their advertisement dollars, because that was the only way to reach the niche or region.
What Facebook is doing is to usurp all of that and monopolise advertisement, driving smaller niche and regional publishers out of business. Their hypocrisy is astounding.
> there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product
I think the trust problem has gotten much worse. As I said, there used to be niche publishers supporting communities (by interest or region) that were interested in keeping these sustainable long term, and therefore would not be interested in scamming their audience. Now, these publishers have been bled dry, and you have to find your information on the world wild web, where any scammer and fly-by-night producer can target you and link farm and buy fake reviews etc.
Perhaps I should have said "in the modern world, word of mouth doesn't work..."
Today, chances are those niche publications & communities are going to be online. And how do we determine the trustworthy ones from the ones that are just trying to exploit us? I guess we need to rely on word of mouth to determine which mouths we should listen to words from...
My point was if these communities are hard to find, targeted ads from small businesses in that niche might inform you of relevant products or services, not relevant communities.
Definitely not saying it's a perfect solution, or one that I like, just trying to point out it's not as black & white as people like to make out (especially on sites like HN)
Start from the related Reddit, and work your way out.
I also like Hackernoon as a starting point.
At least with ads (on a platform like Facebook), it's obvious they're ads and what their incentive is. With a random community, it may be unclear if people within it/the community itself is being paid by some company etc. Or if they have some other incentive to misrepresent the quality of certain products/services (e.g. recommending only what they can get affiliate links for).
Ads on the other hand you can trust to lie to you 100% of the time. Ads are never honest, their only intention is to fool you to buy something you don't need.
I legitimately don't understand how _anyone_ would think he gains any value from reading dishonest corporate propaganda, less how he would think "hey, thats nice! I'll buy that!"
Your example of rockbox forum seems disingenuous because I assume they're not recommending you buy particular products (maybe recommending some particular mp3 players that the cfw works well on, but I think they try to target a wide range of players).
> Ads on the other hand you can trust to lie to you 100% of the time.
Exactly my point. You know exactly what you're getting and what their incentive is.
Well actually, maybe not exactly my point - it's pretty clear to me that ads do not "lie to you 100% of the time". Some ads are going to exaggerate the quality of their products etc., but some ads literally just inform you "this is a thing that is available", which is typically an easily provable claim.
But the point is that yes, with ads you know that it's being paid for by the people who have a direct financial interest in you buying the thing. You can make an informed decision.
Also, we can discuss the quality of Internet communities, but I would tend to trust one of these quite a bit more than an advert, even targeted, which was where we were coming from.
As real life examples, I have got advice on stuff to buy from photography websites, modelling (railway and wargames) Facebook groups and blogs without any trouble, and I know where to find it when I need it. I know when to take a photography buff raving about a camera with a grain of salt ("but it has a better score with DXOMARK"), I have about zero confidence in adverts on the web.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
Small businesses get their sales from being highly engaged on facebook/facebook pages...not by buying ads on the platform.
Supporting small publishers is at least as important as supporting small businesses. It would be nice if your small town news site got ads for local florists, they might be able to pay for a journalist without begging for direct payments. Paying directly to read journalism is stupid and will never work - people read things they hate and do not want to support, people don't know how to value the site that they read one story a week from (or how to pay that tiny amount), forcing people to pay limits the reach of your reporting when the reason you write is to convince or inform - ideally, you'd pay people to read what you write; a coupon for a local florist or the information that a restaurant is opening in your neighborhood is a nice micro-compensation.
Advertising, patronage by the wealthy, and/or ideological propagation are the only natural models for journalism, and SV giants sucking up all the advertising is destroying that. Now we're supposed to care about their problems while they pretend to care about ours.
I don't think this works for non-hobbies like flowers, especially when I don't subscribe to or read local publications. That said I'd rather have choice to either pay for a service with my privacy or with my credit card.
The magic moment of "I get relevant advertising" never happened to me so perhaps I'm jaded. For a while Google did just keyword targeting and it worked fairly well. (Not it's gone berserk and you often don't even see the organic results without scrolling). But the closest I get to relevant targeted advertising was when I'd do a search on Amazon for circular saws and see advertising for circular saws for the next 3 weeks.
Rough location based targeting is still going to be possible because requests will still have IP addresses. Likewise, the advertiser will know what app you are using and many apps provide context just based on what the app is.
Beyond that, I'm not super worried.
What would really help small businesses is if Goohle and Facebook would share the proceeds from advertising more evenly. Right now they basically suck all of the profits out of the market.
I wish this was true but I have friends who want the perceived benefits. They firmly believe handing over that data benefits them. More relevant ads, more useful services and features, more free stuff, etc. I bring up yet another place I don't want to be tracked and they just retort they want to share as much info as possible.
I don't understand the facebook/google bashing here. It's not as you could advertise on apple for something against apple.
It should also be clear to you what game Apple is playing here. Their end game is to do the tracking themselves and then they will slowly introduce and sell ads themselves. Their marketing department will then call it "privacy ads", but it's going to be the same as todays google/fb ads.
Apple has been around an awfully long time now to assume their end game is to own ad tech...
Think of Nazis using church data to hunt Jews or the US government orchestrating drone strikes.
I am not saying things like this will happen to your Facebook data, it's just that church members in 1930 also could not foresee what would eventually be done using their data.
Data collections are inherently risky. We should just avoid them wherever we can. The world is changing, take a look at China. Just because young people in the West have only seen democracy, does not mean it will last forever.
I think they think of it like this: Why should someone else make money off of their users? Why should they help Google and Facebook anymore than they have to?
They have also positioned privacy as a premium feature. And it is a big differentiator from Google who can’t ever say that. Google’s whole business is centered on collecting data and renting it out to advertisers.
Ford doesn't try to charge every store I visit because I'm "Ford's user"
Meanwhile, the rest of the planet who are unaware they are being tracked or can't figure out how to disable it will be clear of much tracking.
Well tough. If they are going to track people so completely then they should be up front about what they're doing and it should be opt-in. I don't want to give money to businesses big or small that what to know that much data about me.
You can still sell your own soul if you want to, the option will still be there, just so long as the rest of us can say no.
It will come with some protection sounding name and in effect make it easier for companies to get users back into the reflex habit of clicking away any protections they may have had
> A company that basically profits from people being people ?
Debate on Facebook is effectively the Dunning-Kruger curve directly to your screen - not exactly that people are stupid as per se, but the level of knowledge on display is very small.
The trendsetters aren't really on Facebook anymore, too. I absolutely love memes, and there are still good, creative, meme groups on Facebook however it's literally only a matter of time before the group gets shut down because of some unexplained reason. This once again has the effect of moving anyone willing to use their brain elsewhere.
They definitely need regulating but they are also a victim of their own success.
Consider a VPN, pihole etc for extra levels of privacy.
What kind of professional integrity would allow someone to continue working on a product that doesn't even pretend to serve the best interests of its end-users?
I seriously worry about the number of technology standards boards and governance groups that purport to represent the interests of end-users but are actually made up of (and lobbied by) people with this kind of "integrity".
Doing so probably harmed small Mom & Pop tobaconist's bottom line too.
This update seems to have touched a nerve for FB, and that to me means it's a good thing. I'm not a fan of Apple's restrictive ecosystem, but things like this that act in favor of user privacy deserve praise.
> They’re not playing by their own rules. Apple’s own personalized ad platform isn't subject to the new iOS 14 policy.
Is this true?
Has someone here worked in marketing/PR? How can people write stuff like that and not feel incredibly dirty? This is a mostly honest question.
Every time some super big company starts some campaign feigning compassion or act the victim I just want to barf.
I personally don't see any ads on FB for mass market products, like on TV (cards, detergent, back pain medicine etc). I see gadgets that are cool, clothes from small producers that are actually kind fo cool.
They do actually help small businesses. As much evil as they do, you can't take this way from them.
They help small businesses that make products...
by killing all the small businesses that used to help these businesses sell their products (local newspapers, local magazines, local websites, local forums, and in general local advertising companies).
This won't affect Facebook itself much at all, it's going to hit smaller apps who use Facebook's advertising in app.
Haven't used Facebook in some time personally, but I can't recall much about advertising aside from the fact that it never interested me enough to actually click on it.
Duck Duck Go clearly think there is profit in contextual ads - and I would love to find out if there is any hard evidence out there either way?
(other than the obvious Google and FB do personalised because it is more profitable. I know that and at FB scale a 1% profit improvement is worthwhile pursuit - but from society's POV that 1% diff may as well be irrelevant- it won't improve the mom and pop store bottom line enough for the damage it does.
I doubt its 1%. In fact I think its more like 2-3-4x revenue from personalised ads. Just a hunch.
(side question - how do you do context ads for FB news feed? Because I can see it working well for youtube, if you know the topic of the video. Or google search, where you know the search. But I don't see how you can't NOT use personal ads in a newsfeed, whether on FB or twitter. There is no real context in a stream of random information)
I don't feel like it's reasonable to expect that Facebook should have access to the history of all the websites I've visited, and data on the content of those websites, so it doesn't seem reasonable that they should be using that data to target ads at me.
Similarly for Google, targeting ads based on things I've searched for on Google is entirely reasonable. Targeting them based on the fact Google Maps has picked up a BLE beacon saying I was in a particular shop seems a lot less reasonable - Google frankly have no business knowing that I was in that shop, especially given there's unlikely to be any signs up notifying me that my visit to that store is being tracked.
I guess my underlying issue isn't in companies doing personalised ad targeting, its in the massive pools of seemingly unrelated data they're collecting to do that targeting. I've been immersed in the world of technology and aware of privacy issues around it for decades, and even I'm surprised by some of the things that are being correlated for the sake of a 0.25% increase in conversion rate. The average person doesn't have a hope of keeping track of what's being done, and changes like bringing that data collection front and centre when installed apps is a really positive move.
I.e. cheaper, less relevant, less likely to convert.
IMO this is fundamentally what's wrong with the entire concept of personalized advertising. Fundamentally the system is advertised as being designed to show you relevant advertising. The reality is the system is designed to allow advertisers super-precise targets to send their advertising to.
You don't get advertising relevant to you. You get advertising from the people most interested in targeting you. This is often not what you want to see and is often not in your best interest.
I can see it either way - perhaps having vast costly adverts / PR pieces is ruining the media landscape - I mean how many column inches cover films, Tesla vs GM. Would we be better off as a society if we paid for journalism and just accepted there would be a banner ad at the top that only middle aged men with bad backs like me see?
Facebook 2020: oh, we monetize everyone’s private stuff because ... we’re a champion of small business.
Facebook 2025: look, a bird!
What these changes in iOS affect is their ability to track me across my apps via the advertiser ID when I explicitly take steps to avoid being tracked (alternate email addresses, not entering my phone number).
How can anyone defend Facebook's need to know everything I do on my phone despite me taking reasonable* steps to hide that information?
* I feel the need to point out that my "reasonable" steps are for a moderately savvy user of technology. I'd guess that the vast majority of internet users aren't aware that Facebook knows everything you on almost any site you sign into with the same email address.
Full-page issue messaging ads are about reaching very specific demographics
in a conspicuous way. But in today’s world, it’s kind of transparent whom
Facebook is targeting here: old white politicians.
See also: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/facebook/id284882215 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s12onXfbFTs
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/25/instagram-unexpectedly-...
WhatsApp was also randomly accessing photos.
If you chose to only give an app access to some specific photos instead of all, it caused iOS 14 to ask you if you want to revise your selection every time the app accessed photos. This was happening at random times while using WhatsApp, even when you did not choose to send any photos to anybody at all.
Also from Reddit:
> Remember when Facebook was playing a silent audio file so it would continue running in the background and not get preempted by the OS?
Google is mainly contextual ads, with some personalisation mixed in I'd assume. If you're already on Facebooks platforms they know who you are, they have access to all the personal information that can be extracted from your Facebook account and activity. Shouldn't that be enough?
What I read this as, is that Facebooks own data isn't actually that good, and they need data from source that aren't Facebook in order to provide value to their ads platform. It's the same issue every time Facebook complains about regulation or increased desire for privacy, they always end up in a situation where they devalue their own products and technology.
Because they’re all knuckle-dragging racists and completely identical in their thinking, amiright? Obviously politicians of every other race are free of bias or prejudice but the old white ones, well, you know what’s in their hearts. And it’s all bad intentions. Because they’re old and white, you see.
Even if Facebook had facts on their side, this is a bad idea. Intentionally misleading ads against one of the world's richest, most capable, most arrogant company with an insanely good marketing machine and legal team - what exactly is Facebook attempting to achieve here? I don't understand this at all. They are picking a fight that doesn't make sense
If you know any - tell them what you feel and don't be shy. They should know.
Facebook has done nothing good for society, Nothing good for the internet, nothing good for the truth, facts. And Nothing good for San Francisco or the ecosystem.
As soon as developers had something going - Facebook killed it. Go ask around.
Not politically correct? GO ahead down vote - as if make believe karma on HN is worth more than open opinions.
There are many like me and many here that I know feel the same about this company. It lost its soul and became twisted along the way. May God have Mercy on them.
This is why I love reading Gruber
I wonder if this ‘fight’ represents some sort of controlled opposition by Silicon Valley to win favorable regulation for the tech industry as a whole. By showing fake hostility/rivalry between Apple and Facebook, they can carefully control the overall narrative, and although this story focuses on a negative issue (which, let's be real, is not that much worse than the average person having already soured on Facebook), it could lead to premature, pro-corporate laws, rapidly lobbied for, and passed, through mostly tech illiterate senators (just look at all the senate hearings the past few years) [1].
To the average citizen, these new laws will seem like a transparent and proper attempt to address the problems in the tech/adtech space, but in reality they are psuedo-solutions, as they do not tackle the underlying root causes. In the end it allows the tech corps to slightly adjust their products (small concessions in the short term), after which they will slowly repurpose the old mechanisms into new shells, and continue with business as usual.
I think a Prop22-inspired PR playbook is also in full motion here.
This is corporate gaslighting of citizens in it’s most advanced form.
@ Most of the folks affected by these actions of Apple and FB don't read the physical paper; I sub to NYT online so never saw the ads. (But of course, it's not aimed at the people who might be impacted but the legislators who still love paper.)
@ The newspaper sub is tied to my postal address. The ads are literally linked with pii... Which is the very thing the argument is about. (Well, I exaggerate, paper isn't tracking my actions, but still... ironic)
I would think when a user visits a web page, that page can deliver an insane amount of fingerprinting data along with the IP to FB. So it is easy for FB to correlate it with the users accounts which are phoning home on the same IP.
Other apps can send even more data to FB then a website. Seems hard to imagine FB can not figure out it is coming from the same phone.
I look at it this way - if this cross-app tracking BS wasn’t so important to FB, they wouldn’t have their panties so wadded up about it.
Before fb/google small business seems to serve local demographies (mostly?), not sure how much they really benefitted by going/selling online. Eyeball-to-real-cash. Or may be they are just brain washed into online advertising benefits when there aren't any.
They could also sponsor courses in how to safely use social networking platforms.
All apple is doing is giving users a choice and Facebook is twisting it to make Apple look bad as it effects there business, they are trying to paint Apple as the big corporate evil overlord by playing the small business card.
Apple should grow some balls and double down.
Why doesn't Facebook care about younger or non-white politicians? Are they already anti-tracking? Or hopelessly pro-Facebook? Seems pretty racist to ignore them.
But either way, why say "old white" when the point is that they are old enough to read print media. They are targeted because they are old, not because of their color. Why bring race into it, except for virtue signalling?
Besides, doesn't the ad appear on-line as well?
I doubt that a full-page broadsheet add carries the same impact online. It's very clear that the target demographic is older white men.
I'm guessing it's similar to the reason pharmaceutical companies use TV ads to reach doctors.
This is fair enough as it goes but remember it's coming from one of the biggest cheerleaders of a company that became the richest in the world while taking away user freedoms we used to take for granted on general purpose computing devices.
I'd love to see Facebook taken down several pegs but I think the rest of FAANG is overdue for some medicine too.
The only thing I use any form of social media for is signing up to Twitter to tag Royal Mail or Hermes delivery in complaints about twice a year because they actually listen if you shitpost in public.
I see society functioning exactly how it did before if in 30 seconds time social media disappeared off the face of the planet.
OTOH I dumped Facebook years ago and haven’t missed it for a second. WhatsApp has proven a lot harder to wean off of since my friends refuse to switch.
Some examples: find accounts on the device, view WiFi connections, retrieve running apps, use biometric hardware.
"Find accounts on the device" is possibly required to connect to your account in order to get your contact list. "View WiFi connections" is possibly needed for getting internet connection.
I can't really see any possible use for the other two though.
I've only looked extremely shallowly at Android development, but I am aware that quite often you need to ask for some particular permission to get access to something that's not particularly obvious from the permission name.
Not trying to give Facebook a free ride here, I am well aware that there is a very high chance they want some of the permissions for "nefarious" purposes. I think companies should have some transparent way of publishing why they want a particular set of permissions.
I have seen companies showing a message along the lines of "we will be asking for <permission> we need to ask this for <reason>" and I do think more companies should do this.
If you are in a group with a lot of Facebook users that have elementary school kids but are otherwise unrelated, chances are you have one too. Facebook might even infer who you are, and your kids, even if you don’t have an account
Guess I'm banking on people finally realizing how creepy Facebook is. But since some of my friends have abandoned Facebook in favor of Instagram, of all places... guess I'm playing the long game.
The only Apple app I use is the default Books apps and that is it, and I couldn't be happier.
Using an Apple device without having to deal with Apple's ecosystem is amazing, I only wish they would let Chrome be Chrome, not a reskin of Safari...
I uninstalled WhatsApp two years back and just told everyone I use Signal. No big lecture on Facebook is evil, why you have to use Signal etc etc.
Most people are busy being told what apps to install every 2 hours by some one or the other so they are already conditioned to being told what to do. Many just installed without even a question, cause they get tired of using sms or email with me for everything.
You might be surprised that a few people in your contact list might already have signal.
Signal has (or will very soon have, depending on when you update) group calls! This is very exciting I think. Together with the new and improved group chat, now is the perfect time to get started with Signal if you aren’t here already.
You might have more pull than you think. I was able to get my mum on signal on her iPhone. You don’t need everyone you know to be on signal. Let’s start with just the ones you talk to the most.
I think hunan's just aren't very good at responding to threats that are somewhat vague and in the future.
In my experience, it's relatively straightforward to get people to switch off WhatsApp/Messenger to Signal/Telegram, since it's just another app. It'd be more difficult if it held a privileged position in the OS.
On the other hand, it is crystal clear that a non-million-pound-gorilla entity simply has no chance in protecting consumers from advanced surveillance capitalism.
Is the word "white" here really that important. Is is true that within this issue there is an adversarial relationship between races and people of different skin color?
The author wants to emphasize that the target audience of the ad is very narrow. In the authors view, Facebook is not trying to target younger, more diverse politicians, but rather older, conservative politicians, who happen to be mostly white.
And in my opinion, the author is right and race is an important factor in this issue: There have been many reports that advertisers use Facebook to discriminate according to race, and minorities have rightfully complained loudly about that.
It's definitely telling that Facebook targets what we assume to be a very conservative, narrow audience, rather than using their own platforms to spread the message: if they showed the ad on Facebook itself, or on Instagram, it would reach a much wider and more diverse audience. But that's not what they are doing.
With Facebook's very 'old and white' American userbase and lack of people of colour in leadership I think there actually is somewhat of an adversarial relationship. Was also visible in the behaviour of Facebook towards the outgoing administration.