Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature
thebigtech.substack.com
thebigtech.substack.com
Anything which causes Facebook to make this much noise must be good.
Now its the same stupid spammy ad on all channels because we have only two players. It's just impressions count now.
The current state of Internet ads, which is mostly just exactly the same car, consumer goods, and travel agency ads you see on TV, plus the modern version of informercial doohickey ads, is much more benign IMO.
The ad networks of today just come bundled with the same malware or spyware that yesteryear's malicious ads tried to deliver.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Whether it's Facebook, Google or someone else entirely, the web's a broken pay-to-win mess and I don't see a way back to it being any reasonable definition of open while the status quo remains.
Related, currently on HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25457440
Seriously, Wikipedia is a good cause and you can donate as little or as much as you can afford.
It’s like listen to public radio pledge drives after you’ve donated.. necessary but still slightly annoying.
Recently got my older relatives to install Brave, and although I'm not wholly supportive of its business model (which is significantly rooted in crypto and crypto advertising), I can appreciate that my older relatives have begun to see far less scammy popup ads and banners.
The ones I see tend to be triggered by moving the mouse off the page, as if that entirely meant that you were about to leave the page forever.
There is absolutely no pleasure in "surfing" the web anymore. If we still use the surfing analogy, it's like trying to surf but being swarmed by seagulls and jumping fish any time you get out into the water.
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- Slow (remember 56k modems)
- Expensive (remember when you had to pay by the minute)
- It was the early days of the browser war, which IE was winning. Remember the "best viewed" banners. It was one of the worst times for compatibility, you had plugins too: Java, Flash/Shockwave, ...
- Search engines were terrible. Now we can write whatever is on our mind in the search box, even with typos, and 95% of the time, we get exactly what we are looking for. We like to complain about the remaining 5%, but in the late 90s it was the norm.
- The web was simply smaller, there was less information. Wikipedia didn't exist for instance.
- Ads, terrible design and annoyances have always been a thing. The 90s had popups and blink, the 2000s had flash, and we now have JS.
- Tracking, privacy and security. The 90s web was insecure as hell. Remember there used to be a popup warning you that SSL was used, plain http was the norm. It was less of a concern simply because we used to do less on the web. It was a time when people were calling you crazy for buying something online.
So no, I don't miss it. It is a piece of history that would look nice in the digital equivalent of a museum, but for day to day use... no.
I feel like this part has actually gotten worse in the last few years. No matter what I search for it's very rarely the thing I'm actually looking for, at least on google. Most of the time it's SEO'ed to hell in order to sell me stuff, and google will happily cut out half of my query just in order to show me promoted results. Like, when I search for "C# programming <name of class>" why is the <name of class> cut out and the entire first page of results is just paid programming courses???? That's a lot worse than it was just 5 years ago. We're going back on usability just to extract more money.
According to Google there are no bad products, but Amazon is predominantly filled with garbage. It’s pretty depressing.
In fact, all the points I mentioned are about the late 90s to early 2000s. A lot has changed during that period, and, I think, to something better overall. But it mostly stagnated or even regressed since ~2010, at least for the desktop web, it doesn't mean tech and the internet as a whole did.
Yeah, on Google.
Other search engines will give you different results.
"This is the world wide resource for information on ERROR_42 ExampleSoft. ERROR_42 is an error that happens on ExampleSoft. In this blog, you will learn about ERROR_42 and how to fix it. First, let me say ERROR_42 ExampleSoft again. ERROR_42 is a very difficult error to fix in ExampleSoft. You first need to make sure you are getting ERROR_42 when running ExampleSoft. I know this because I am an expert in ERROR_42 ExampleSoft. This is the world wide resource for information on ERROR_42 ExampleSoft."
...and on and on and on.
Or try "Alice in Wonderland".
Search engines are too of the moment — maybe too corporate-bent? Or do we blame the users? Do most people want a bad film when they search rather than a literary classic?
I loved the smaller web, where almost everything you saw was made directly by people who cared about the specific content they were sharing. Business websites were far more humble, and simpler. Web design was super creative and sometimes silly or fun. Further, I think search engines have degraded massively. We had a sweet spot around 2005-2015 maybe? But it's been downhill since. Google Search results are utterly terrible now, regressing back to ~year-2000 quality IMO.
Popups weren't much problem because most of the time I just disabled JS anyways (especially since it slowed sites down a lot), and only turned it on when a site I was trying to use wouldn't work at all. I didn't start leaving JS enabled until it started becoming a real limitation, and probably until the browsers started interpreting JS way faster.
I still think it's crazy how much commerce is transacted online. I understand, but it still blows my mind how everyone everywhere is using this shockingly unstable, insecure network to do... everything. The recent SolarWinds hack is another example how fundamental the problem of security is across all networked digital systems. Of course it's a lot better today than it was in the 90's, but that's just one of very few things that has genuinely improved, IMO.
I would argue the analogy extends to the internet. People talk about pageload payloads of today vs 20 years ago, and somehow infer that the web fast faster back in the day. It wasn't - with the gigabit internet connections, we're easily making up for the bloat in payloads.
Also, it's never been easier to quit your 9-5 job and leverage the combination of the internet and globalism to be your own boss. Just because it's still relatively hard, it doesn't mean it's ever been easier.
Computer hardware has advanced to an amazing degree, and software has become more abstract and complex to nicely use up all that processing power -- but the core user interaction with software remains largely the same, without much actual speed increase and with a LOT more cognitive overhead (ads, animations, popovers etc.)
I'm not denying the extremely powerful nature of the services we have available to us now, but more-powerful hardware wasn't really necessary to have that. It's like the thing about technology making it so we don't have to do any work but instead we just work on different things, still for 40+ hours a week. Today, our CPUs are still saturated with work, it's just not the same things as it was back then.. for example, interpreting 5mb of JavaScript to show a chat window or a product page :)
It tends to get a lot of knee-jerk hate in HN comments, but I think it's a from first principles approach that could actually work.
At a minimum it's a pretty cool/ambitious project and it's been fun to play with.
Is it really necessary to use the word "breach" in a big yellow banner at the top?
The word "breach" is usually associated with some kind of security penetration, and might be scary to first-time users (like me).
On further reading, it seems something more akin to a "desynchronization event requiring your attention", which is far more reassuring.
It should also hopefully be the last one required with all future changes able to be OTA updates (as most updates were previously to the breach).
People love to argue about the names of things, but I don't think it really matters that much.
Thanks for the suggestion. I went and installed it and while it was booting (~10 minutes on a 2 core 4096MB VM), I poked around looking for more information and found some of the "knee-jerk hate in HN comments"[0] you mentioned, as well as a hit piece[1] on the founder/creator (whether the arguments therein are valid is something you need to decide for yourself) and a more positive take[2] on it as well.
While it's certainly an interesting bit of design and coding, with a laudable goal (decentralization of human interactions online), the functional model has all the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme, with everyone lower down paying rent to those higher up.
Despite the decentralized/p2p nature of Urbit, it's inherently hierarchical and seemingly designed to extract rents from those lower down the pyramid.
And since all the higher-up slots are already occupied, this seems more like Amway than a decentralized, egalitarian network.
Perhaps I'm wrong. I hope I am. Am I?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21672481
[1] http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/
[2] https://medium.com/digital-stimulation/about-urbit-part-1-ow...
The reason for a small cost associated with permanent user IDs (planets) is to combat spam and encourage reputation building without requiring real names if users don’t want to.
It’s a clever approach to this issue. One reason for the incentive to centralize on the existing net is to combat spam (since its zero cost to spin up millions of accounts to spam with, you need clever anti-spam which tends to cause centralized services to form).
The nodes higher up just route traffic, they don’t own any user data or do anything else. Users can “escape” to any of them for a provider so the “stars” (infrastructure nodes basically) are incentivized to provide good routing service for users in order to keep them.
The top of the hierarchy “galaxies” are basically governance nodes that allow changes to network policy based on a vote. If they became a problem stars could push back or jump off the network.
If you start with trying to come up with an incentive based design for a new network model that empowers users, but can actually work I think you start to see why these ideas are interesting.
On the existing net a lot of this stuff exists in an arguably worse form with less clarity (people route traffic, they also sell your traffic information, you have little control or choice over it).
The existing net also incentivizes centralized applications that collect user data. p2p open protocols don’t solve a lot of these issues around spam or basic usability (they’re DOA if a regular user has to run their own server).
Urbit’s design allows network updates to automatically get picked up across the entire network. Users control and own all of their data. It’s p2p by default and that complexity is invisible to users. It’s backwards compatible, runs on unix in a vm, but could run on its own custom hardware in the future.
It could allow people to have their own computing environment where they can send things like photos directly to others without a middleman like FB. The design means that software that runs now should run in ten years.
I think there’s a lot of potential, the tech is real (not vaporware), it’s open source, and you can play with it/talk to the community of people on it.
I have no idea if it’ll achieve what they’re trying to do, but if anything were to succeed in this space I think it’d have to be something like Urbit.
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Re: The first article you linked, I find CY's politics/writing (from what I've read) to be contrarian and wrong in a similar to way to Peter Thiel's politics. That said, most people hold inconsistent views and people that think independently can be very wrong in one area and very correct in a different area (and people generally are wildly inconsistent in their views/accuracy about everything). Thiel is often contrarian and right about investing and building technology companies even though (I think) he's contrarian and wrong about politics.
While it can be useful to keep someone's political beliefs in mind when evaluating something just to be aware of potential motivated reasoning, I don't think that should allow you to dismiss everything else out of hand. Someone can hold both really good ideas and really bad ideas at the same time - similarly someone can hold true and false beliefs simultaneously.
When it comes to the author's example (Thiel and Palantir) - I find their framing to be misleading. If they're applying this kind of over-simplified analysis there then I expect they're applying it elsewhere. Their essay is mostly an example of their own cognitive bias - they already have a position and they are cherry picking evidence to support it. The reality is more complex and nuanced than what they suggest.
As I said, I really like the idea of decentralized network services[0].
I understand the motivation WRT a mechanism that will discourage spam and other garbage. And while I mostly focused on Urbit's similarities to a pyramid scheme, that's not really my primary concern. Rather it's the hierarchical nature of Urbit that seems more problematic to me, with the tiered rent-seeking is another, less important aspect (although still negative, despite the innocent claims of spam prevention) of it.
What's more, I'd want to use the technology for my own (admittedly narrow) purposes, without others having the power to shut me down or blackball me -- a possibility that a hierarchical model doesn't preclude.
As for the politics/philosophy of Urbit's creator, that's not so important to me as long as I can use the technology the way I wish.
That said, there are aspects which seem troubling, not least of which is that the founder, despite his apparent departure from the scene, still owns a significant portion of the hierarchy's top level, potentially giving him significant power over the governance of the Urbit universe. Which may or may not be an issue, but a flat, fully peered model avoids that issue completely.
>Urbit’s design allows network updates to automatically get picked up across the entire network. Users control and own all of their data. It’s p2p by default and that complexity is invisible to users. It’s backwards compatible, runs on unix in a vm, but could run on its own custom hardware in the future.
>It could allow people to have their own computing environment where they can send things like photos directly to others without a middleman like FB. The design means that software that runs now should run in ten years.
Aside from automatic network updates (a useful feature indeed), I wonder what value Urbit has over a platform such as Diaspora[1], which, assuming I run my own pod (a similar situation to Urbit) provides me with full control over my data, as well as federation services and strong controls over the content I allow into my environment.
The Diaspora model is completely free (both libre and gratis), doesn't have a hierarchical structure and provides a pretty good UX.
Please understand that I'm not rejecting Urbit, I just don't really see the value of it over other platforms that provide similar services without financial entanglements or potential issues with those "higher up" in a hierarchy.
As a technical person, the Urbit technology itself is pretty cool, but given its implementation and structure, it's difficult to see it gaining wide acceptance.
Whereas (using my previous example) if/when Diaspora is packaged in a way that most folks can easily install/configure it, it's likely to see much broader acceptance.
I may well play with Urbit a bit more, but AFAICT, its utility is limited using it as a "comet" rather than purchasing an ID.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270070
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
Edit: Fixed incorrect usage of it's (should be and now is, 'its').
> Whereas (using my previous example) if/when Diaspora is packaged in a way that most folks can easily install/configure it, it's likely to see much broader acceptance.
I've basically come to the conclusion that this is impossible to do successfully at scale, or at least impossible to do while keeping the original p2p intent alive on the modern stack. Attempts to do this fail either outright or by reverting back to being centralized (at best they retain a small core of highly technical users). The context that causes these attempts to fail is what Urbit is trying to fix with its design. It remains an open question whether this will work, but I think there's more of a path for it with Urbit. I think things like the ability to push updates across the fleet is one example of a critical feature that fixes a common issue with versioning in federated systems, but there are some others.
> Aside from automatic network updates (a useful feature indeed), I wonder what value Urbit has over a platform such as Diaspora[1], which, assuming I run my own pod (a similar situation to Urbit) provides me with full control over my data, as well as federation services and strong controls over the content I allow into my environment.
Urbit is more of a platform ("Overlay OS") than a more narrow open social media protocol (diaspora, mastodon, etc.) - you can build applications on top of it that take advantage of its ability to route encrypted data between users. Standardizing the stack makes it easier to reason about and easier to build/run these applications for all users that want them. You can't really do this on the modern tech stack without armies of people keeping things up to date (which creates a strong incentive to centralize). Urbit's design allows for decentralized applications (and Urbit itself) to actually work and stay working.
"The state of your Urbit OS is a pure function of its event history. It’s auditable, inspectable, repeatable. You can actually trust it. Writing decentralized apps becomes vastly simpler than in the old world, since every node computes exactly the same way. The entire Urbit OS stack, from programming language to applications, is upgradeable over the network. For ordinary users, this makes for almost no system administration."
https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-os/
Urbit's light hierarchy I think is necessary for this to work and solves most of the hard problems around decentralization in a way I think is clever and pretty light-touch. I do think they could be better about the ownership and governance transparency (how much is owned by any individual), but I think they're working towards this: https://urbit.org/blog/governance-of-urbit/
> What's more, I'd want to use the technology for my own (admittedly narrow) purposes, without others having the power to shut me down or blackball me -- a possibility that a hierarchical model doesn't preclude.
You're able to escape to different Stars if you need to so in practice this shouldn't be an issue (and Stars are incentivized to keep their users happy). It'd be more comparable to your ISP blocking access - they could do it, but they're not likely to.
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Best thing to do, is just minimize media consumption.
Content creators deserve to be compensated somehow and relying on users to voluntarily contribute a la Patreon is unrealistic given that most pieces of contents are rarely used by most users.
I don't value seeing most content at more than penny per view in general and fixed transactional costs make it impractical to send that to each creator.
I find this interesting. What about books? A quick search yields average paperback novels are 300-400 pages long and between $14-18. That's between 2.1-2.9c/page, roughly.
Many articles from quality content creators are > 1 page long. So applying the book pricing, between 5-25c per worthwhile article, give or take. Seems like a penny is pretty heavily undervaluing the product you're getting, then.
As for the impractability of actually distributing those monies to each creator, well, no argument there.
By choking off in-app ad revenue, they force developers who want to monetise towards paid and freemium apps.
That shifts revenue away from the ad networks (Facebook and Google) towards the app store, on which Apple can take their 15-30% share.
Paying for the service you are using in a transparent and predictable way vs deceptively having your personal information monetized should be the norm.
Google and Facebook have been hiding behind an army of lawyers writing opaque TOS and lobbyists defending their user hostile monopolies.
But I don't think it's that clear cut or even about that. Usually we favour open markets, where companies can compete on features and price. The App Store has a monopoly on iPhones as it's the only App Store, and the only reason the fees are that high is because Apple owns both the market and the only player, and they can set the fee to whatever they want.
If Apple wasn't the only one running the App Stores on iPhones, it's not as clear cut that they would act in the same way. But since they are, it makes sense they push people towards apps and paid apps from the App Store.
The fact that Google enforces the same fees while allowing competing app stores and varied OEMs access to that market paints a different conclusion than yours.
I agree with the "free market" point but in reality the market is just about as free as the biggest players (with the most capital, whatever that may represent) allow it to be. Sure, consumers have the same power as a whole to sway the market. Unfortunately it's fragmented among billions of people all veering in their own direction, uncoordinated. On the other side the power is concentrated with a few big players who just happen to have more or less the same goals and aim to achieve them almost single-mindedly.
And unfortunately the free market comes at a cost even when it works: a sort of dictatorship of the majority. The free market will want cheaper and will accept the compromise of paying in other ways. You don't get something for nothing and since laws aren't keeping up with this it's up to the tech giants to police themselves. You pay with money and with your data, the ratio is up to each company.
The reason this works to to the user's advantage (read: more money - less data) with Apple is because they saw the business opportunity of this policing. They wanted to compete with Google and Facebook at their own game but had to admit defeat so they realized a much better business model is to position themselves as the antithesis of those and cater to a different market Google and FB cannot target, by design.
There probably are ways in which Apple can open up the store and still retain control on what is allowed or monetize on that but make no mistake, if an app is present on Apple's (spun out?) app store for $1 but free of any shady data collection, and also present on the Apps'R'Us store for $0 but encrusted with data collection modules we all know what most users will pick.
You always pay once with your data. You might pay twice with actual cash. There's no way to prevent the former, even if the latter occurs because they aren't mutually exclusive.
Of course there is. Make invasive tracking and targeting practices illegal, and aggressively penalize violators, and the business model would change.
But wherever you may fall on the government regulation spectrum, there’s a simple response if you don’t like Apples action. Don’t use iOS. Go to Android where FB and friends are free to track and sell your data only constrained by your government policies.
Until then, Apple "regulating" it is the least of bad option.
* You pay for Windows but Microsoft still tracks you. * You pay for iPhone & Mac but Apple still tracks you. * You pay for Android phones but they still track you.
And so on..
I don't understand the shift from "usage tracking" towards "usage tracking for ads". The goal should be no tracking at all instead of "we don't track you to show ads".
But there is a huge difference between usage tracking and usage tracking for ads. Usage tracking of the kind Microsoft engages in (outside of Bing and their ad focused usage tracking that is), is largely telemetry used to change their product.
Usage tracking for ads, however, is used to change your behavior both within the product and outside the product.
Usage tracking for ads is significantly more damaging to humans as individuals as well as societies.
An exception is for testing.
I use Firefox nightly and developer edition where I can. I think by installing a pre release version of Firefox I opted into telemetry. I’m volunteering for telemetry. However, I don’t consent to opt out tracking in the production version of Firefox or running nonsense marketing-driven “experiments”.
EDIT: Corrected, thanks, colejohnson66
There’s also the fact that GDPR is a directive. Each state (nation) has to implement it in their own laws. So the EU itself can’t enforce it, only the member states.
[a]: The purpose of laws are not to be an “eye for an eye”, but to curb bad behavior (theoretically)
It's not. It's a "Regulation", a similar kind of legal act to a Directive, but comes into effect all on their own, across the whole of the EU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union)
GDPR is the best thing to happen to the web since javascript.
What you mean is they don't necessarily intend to misuse my personal information. The reality is many companies with the best intentions end up spilling that information in a variety of ways.
- They get acquired and their new parent abuses that information.
- They get breeched.
- Employees abuse the information they have access to.
- Employees leak your information to a third party.
- Government employees get access to that information and abuse it.
All of these things have happened to companies where people thought their information was being safely held. Many of these things have happened at the biggest, supposedly secure workplaces. The best way to avoid this is to not put your information out there.
You're absolutely right, non-advertising companies are a risk too. The difference is most developers who collect $2.99 for their app usually don't ask me for personal information unless they have a need which benefits me.
No, but it does mean the developer has a lot of incentive to write software for you as opposed to catering to the advertising companies who are paying their bills.
You can pay for what you use and have sound regularly bodies policing user privacy.
You are right that paying for a service doesn't guarantee you won't be tracked. What is important is that that business model makes it possible for you to not be tracked. This is critically important, because it is extremely improbable to win a fight against tracking when billions of dollars are stacked against you.
If you can't compete gtfo.
http://www.techsnackbar.com/2016/06/11/apple-abandons-iad-un...
Now days, they still sell ads on the App Store, but don’t place ads in third-party apps.
This is in a nutshell exactly what Apple's changes do. They preserve ad supported options and increase transparency.
And tracking for the most part, has been a manner of "Do you want to allow tracking? Default:OFF" (thinking of Debian Popcorn)
I don't think this precludes free software at all.
Free software has always co-existed with paid commercial software. I suspect it always will. There are always going to be corners of the software market OSS developer aren't interested in pursuing. I doubt there are a lot of developers interested in building garbage collection routing software in their spare time. There are however plenty of developers who want to pay their rent who will.
> Both Apple and Facebook are evil corporations that only care about profits, but Apple’s priorities benefit me and my desire for privacy while Facebook’s absolutely do not. I hope Apple’s new privacy controls are so effective that they put Facebook out of business. Fuck Facebook.
How did we let the world get this bad where we associate asking for consent as the same as "choking off" in-app ad revenue?
[This narrative subsidized by FaceBook Likes(tm)]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...
Amusingly, and much to Google's dismay I am sure, they have created an OS where you can make sure absolutely nobody ever gets payed.
That option is still available, developers just have to tell people what they're doing up front and allow opt-in control of tracking.
So if you want to give informed consent for targeted in-app advertising you still can.
As an Apple customer I pay Apple to provide that, altruism has nothing to do with it.
Facebook won't do it on their own because they don't want users to have the choice.
App’s don’t get pulled for significant upgrades.
It would definitely be nice if Apple allowed developers more flexibility in terms of pricing models.
(I suspect you know this, just wanted to touch all the bases)
However the line I quoted was complete and utter bullshit. Apple does pull apps for very questionable reasons, but this is definitely not one of them.
The original comment was so oddly worded, I'd assumed the other poster had mis-spoke.
The safest thing we can do as consumers it not give any one company all the marbles.
This presumes that everyone who is currently using add supported apps will start paying for apps which is unlikely.
There will continue to be ad supported software, it will just be less profitable. Likely at least some developers will shift to paid, but not nearly all.
I am much happier that they’re motivations aren’t altruistic. Absent appropriate regulation — I want to be able to support privacy with my consumer dollars and support a sustainable business model with them, I don’t want to rely on the altruistic grace of a company.
Back in the days, Microsoft was evil, and FOSS was good. That's what sprouted Facebook and Google. They contribute to FOSS, as does Microsoft. They have proprietary applications (including web applications), as does Microsoft. They're into advertising and profiling, as does Microsoft. Microsoft's software stack is partly FOSS (e.g. Edge), just like Google's (Chrome, Android, ...). I still prefer Unix/Linux over Windows but other than that its more of the same these days.
I was one of these people who was happy with Windows 10 free upgrade. But thinking back of it, perhaps I'd rather pay and then keep my privacy (without hassle).
The danger is that the poor are indirectly paying for devices and services with their privacy while those who are wealthy are able to afford privacy-friendly Apple. Its already more or less like that. The cost of privacy when it boils to Android devices, and how much profit it yields, isn't transparent.
If you write software that is supported by advertising, you are selling your software to the advertisers. If you aren't paying for software, it's not written for your benefit. If you enjoy ad-driven software, it is, at best a happy coincidence or altruism on the part of the developer.
What ad driven software has done is rob developers of good quality paid apps of the ability to charge a reasonable price for their goods. So we have a market place filled with mediocre to terrible ad supported apps. The few developers who do spend the time and effort make good quality software get constant complaints about pricing and charge more than $0.99 for software that actually does what people want.
well obviously. who is going to expend the resources and headache to fight the powerful evil wraths of Google and Facebook on such a notion as altruism
With third-party tracking and retargeting that same advertiser just buys access to the same user via an agency which would pester the user with retargeted ads throughout their network in hopes that at some point, after X amount of views, the user will feel inclined to perform the monetizeable action (e.g. finally click on that abandoned cart and purchase the bike helmet).
In this system each property on the network is relegated to showing as many ads as possible, since each ad is essentially a lottery ticket. You might resurrect the cart and finally buy that bike helmet on nytimes, instagram, Angry Birds - whoever commands your attention at that moment.
Companies who complaint about Apple tend to hold a vast amount of such lottery tickets. Companies that do not, tend to have access to specific monetizeable audiences they can sell access to.
We could see Apple become as crazy as Google on advertising business, yet they turned it down.
I like how they're "Kill the evil" than the well known "Don't be evil" from Google. Apparently, that's one giant step ahead of them.
At that point, it matters very little what Apple's motives are, and it matters little what this change means for any business.
What matters is that Apple is implementing a change that represents a technical necessity for consumer rights.
All current measures do not work. These opt-out websites largely do not work and, besides, the law in most places legislates opt-in and not opt-out. Apps continue to ignore any privacy setting, including facebook.
It is sad that we need to rely on Apple to make that change, but I am happy for any incentive Apple has to do so. I am sure it will take quite some time before we see something comparable on Android, if ever.
Again: Our rights as consumers are blatantly ignored. All current methods that are supposed to implement these rights are useless and largely ineffective.
Devices need to ensure that no one can grab data without consent. Apple does this. It is good.
RSS readers still exist, but Reader's ubiquity and its social features are really what seemed to tie the web together into a cultural force. At least among my circle of people.
Take that source of money away and it's not clear if you have fewer tech jobs overall. But, while there are other large tech employers who pay at the top tier in this world, I'm guessing there are a lot fewer jobs at that comp level and a lot fewer opportunities for rich startup exits if that particular money faucet were much reduced.
https://www.facebook.com/policy.php
As you can see, personalized ads is only one of many things facebook does with your data.
In a discussion once about viral diseases there was a discussion about RNA versus DNA viruses, so I searched up various viruses included HIV and Herpes, reading about how DNA viruses hide in the body. Now on Facebook my ads are 50% HIV/AIDS medications.
I bought a soundbar at Best Buy, so the other 50% of the ads are bizarre Best Buy soundbars, primarily the exactly model I already bought. To make it doubly detrimental for Best Buy, I occasionally click the ad to see if the price has changed.
The myth about the useful, relevant ads seems like it doesn't share a lot with reality. While my example is an anecdote, can anyone seriously saying that ads have actually been useful or relevant? When I'm not blocking them they seem to overwhelmingly be things I've already bought and services I already use.
The ad industry seems to be overwhelmingly a lie that we've all bought into. The personalized ad industry seems like a grotesque abuse under a promise that it never actually delivers.
That is not what is happening. Apple is making tracking opt-in and per app instead of having a global opt-out on an obscure settings page.
In theory—if you want to be tracked, the option is still there. If you want one particular app to get a little more money from you using it, that is an option too.
Facebook believes that most users will not opt into tracking. They are probably right, because most people think it's creepy as hell.
So you tell me. What is wrong with giving people the choice up front over whether they should be tracked across apps or not?
Facebook doesn't need to know everything I do or look at to serve ads.
But it could also be because Facebook and Google were first to build products the mainstream users loved so much! Or maybe they were just lucky they launched at the right time.
But they definitely were not there first to do this(abuse advertising), they just happened to join a game and they excelled at it.
Here is a quote from How the Internet Happened
“The first genuine advertisement on the World Wide Web was published by Global Network Navigator, which, in 1993, sold an ad to a Silicon Valley law firm, Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe. It was text only, a glorified classified listing. Later, GNN sold the first sponsored hyperlink, pointing to a children’s catalog retailer called Hand in Hand. Clicking sent a user to the company’s rudimentary web page to learn more about Hand in Hand’s strollers and cribs.16 But those experiments were simply one-off, cash-for-placement deals. The HotWired team was attempting something more ambitious, both technically and aesthetically. Two advertising advertising and digital design firms, Modem Media and Organic, were brought on board and tasked with designing and selling something that felt closer to a magazine-style ad. Big. Colorful. Eye-catching. These would be the very first banner ads. Joe McCambley was a creative executive at Modem Media. “I remember having a big debate—and we probably argued for an hour or so—about whether or not it should even be a color ad,” McCambley says. “We knew we could make it smaller [in terms of bytes] if it were black and white. We knew there was a large percentage of people out there that only had black and white monitors anyway.” “At that time, you couldn’t actually even center a banner,” remembers Organic’s Jonathan Nelson. “Everything was flush left. You would make the banners only two or three different colors. And you couldn’t have complex graphics in them because everybody was on modems at the time. Bandwidth was extremely limited.” If a graphical ad took two minutes to download onscreen, no one would read the article, much less see the banner ad.”
This article is on Substack which has been exploding lately, not to mention Medium and other platforms... almost a Renaissance of 2006 era blogging.
Unfortunately centralized unlike the RSS years but no one has figured out the economic and UX incentive model to bring decentralization back.
This seems to be the architectural challenge of our time: the interop of the “read” side of the web - HTTP GET - allowed Google to build its empire.
evolving the “write” side of the web - HTTP POST and data - was supposed to be the Semantic Web’s job, which it failed at in terms of adoption and comprehension if not the actual tech. We need a replacement or reinvestment.
The incentive for a generic data interop framework with logical and cryptographic proof (which was the intent of the semantic web) would be arguably high enough that adoption would be universal (similar to HTML). Alas that too hadn’t been true, yet.
Go back 20 years, consumers had limited choices on clothing/shoes, razors, diapers, glasses, and even mattresses.
Because of FB and Google, we have more choice as a consumer. As an entrepreneur, it is the best time to launch a company because of targeting that google and FB offer. You can efficiently grow the business.
If you want Facebook knowing when you sleep, when and where you take the kids to the pool—Awesome. I don't, a lot of people don't. Having the option up front to choose if you are tracked in clear shouldn't bother anyone.
That is exactly what this does. Nothing more, nothing less.
This affects all startups in the consumer fintech space. Robinhood,Chime, Acorns etc have relied on digital marketing to acquire customers for a fraction of the price of traditional marketing. Average cost to acquire a financial with traditional marketing is over $1000. The cost to acquire an app install based customer is $30 to $50.
What you are asking is that pretty much everyone sacrifice their privacy so some businesses can shave a few dollars off customer acquisition costs. I don't accept that that is an ethical or just trade-off.
Advertising costs aren't resetting to pre-internet days, this is one channel. Search based advertising is still there, likewise, if you can advertise on a financial podcast or a dozen other ways.
I believe the basic reason Apple delayed implemening the proposed iOS 14 IDFA policy change is that Apple has their own ads business for promotion of app store installs which was using a device identifier in exactly the the same way as other publishers for conversion attribution. However permissioning for this sharing with Apple is controlled under a different "default on" setting under Settings > Privacy > Apple Advertising than the one proposed for IDFA which is case by case permissions request. From what i am given to understand, due to this dichotomy, ad networks threatend Apple with anti-trust lawsuits if they went ahead as a classic argument of using an advantage in one market (device and OS they control) to unfairly shut out competition in another (ads) could be made.
Now Apple will probably disable or remove this dichotomy in some way before they roll out the policy change but they probably will still have other problems. For instance their skadnetwork API [1] which they use for their app installs ads business and recommend to other ad networks supports only app installs conversion on their own app store and not other forms of conversion (eg. buying in e-commerce etc). But if they now restrict other forms of conversion attribution that used to be possible previously, could an argument again be made that they are using their dominance in one field to unfairly kill competition in another.
I think the only way Apple can implement this policy change without wading into an antitrust minefield is to completely give up their own ads business. But i suspect it's quite lucrative, otherwise why wouldn't they already have shut it down?
This is by no means a done deal. Let's get out the pop corn and watch the fun.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skadnetwo...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skadnetwo...
I strongly agree with you:
Apple should stay away from ads business, not only for the antitrust, but to preserve dignity towards its customers and everybody else.
Apple isn't altruistic, they simply found a slightly different equation for maximizing revenue than Facebook or Google. But don't confuse that with them being fundamentally different from their competitors.
Is the market for advertising apps in the App Store the same market for advertising Facebook depends on?
How big is the share of share of ads shown on Facebook targeting people to install iOS apps compared with the rest of Facebook’s ad business?
Does Apple’s ad business for App Store installs follow customers around the web and collect data on them as a means to more effectively advertise iOS Apps?
Does Apple collect and use personal data on its users with the express intent to combine it in ways app marketers can leverage to more effectively target App Store advertisements?
Is there a dichotomy between these businesses if neither the market scope nor methods of personal data gathering and application match up?
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, does Apple design the device and OS to trigger customers into increasing their engagement with Apple products in order to create more opportunities to show customers personalized advertisements?
> Is the market for advertising apps in the App Store the same market for advertising Facebook depends on?
As I said, pop corn time... Pretty sure these cases will go all the way up to the US Supreme court :-)
>Apple does not access or use the IDFA on a user’s device for any purpose.
The IDFA was only ever used by developers. This change (when users refuse to opt-in) effectively brings everyone up to their level.
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/485006035/Apple-Privacy-Lett...
If they change the rules for others but not themselves, they'll face anti trust cases in the courts.
This is a pretty dicey strategy from an antitrust perspective, but the separation of the opt-in for tracking, and the focus on growing service revenue, suggests to me it’s the direction Apple is going
The flow of information from Facebook to iPhone app install needs some kind of per-user unique identifier. That’s unique ID is what Apple wants to remove, which breaks the advertising model in entirety. It also hurts small businesses that want to advertise on Facebook.
Does that help understand the situation?
Yet, when I open a paper or turn on the TV, there are plenty of paid advertisements. Why would the web need to be any different ?
Don't charge for clicks, just charge for showing the ad. Don't target ads based on personal data collected from users, target them based on the content of the page they're shown on. You know, just like TV and print ads have always done.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-advertisers-convi...
"The social media giant rolled out full-page ads across popular publishing houses such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and more..."
There seems to be a certain irony in this.
If you put an ad on TV, the cable company is wasting valuable time showing your ad to a ton of people who will never purchase your product (I wonder how many hours of my childhood was spent in front of things like diabetes ads, funeral home ads, depression medication ads). Same goes for newspapers.
If they could somehow target ads based on who's watching, the ads would be massively more effective and they could charge a lot more for showing ads.
By targeting ads and charging so much more for ad time, some companies can even afford to offer their services for free, which massively increases the audience, which brings in more money, which gives them the budget to build a bigger, better service, which increases their audience, which brings them more money, etc etc
And that's how you end up with Facebook and Google.
Obviously the problem is that this isn't transparent. Many people don't know why they get all of this complex technology for free. It's not explained when you sign up for a new account.
They already can, and do. They know what the audience of their shows is and schedule the ads accordingly. Don’t show ads for funeral homes during Saturday morning cartoons. Hell, this is how we got the whole concept of a soap opera: soap ads during shows targeted specifically at housewives.
You advertise cars during car shows, tools during DIY shows, toys during cartoons, etc.
i don't think that's what you're describing here.
> It’s important to know if someone clicks an ad and downloads your app. That’s called a Conversion. It’s used to measure the effectiveness of the ad campaign and the value you gain from spending money on an ad.
i think you've conflated A/B testing with user-profiling. you will obviously know if a campaign has been "effective", if sales increase. you absolutely do not need to uniquely identify a user to do this (which is what happens today).
> That’s unique ID is what Apple wants to remove,
as stated, apple don't want to remove it, merely make it opt-in. and if the end user isn't opting in, they probably don't want it.
This is simplifying marketing too much. You’re likely to run concurrent campaigns on different platform, Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, Twitter, etc.
Marketers would like to understand what campaigns and what medium helps drive sales/installs. No need to waste money on Twitter ads if it turns out no one actually ends up buying.
Also, Facebook doesn't only use these identifiers for conversion tracking, it uses them to create a persistent profile of a person that often ends up containing a ton of sensitive information. Believe it or not, a lot can be inferred about you from your app downloads and website visits. As of now FB was mostly able to perform this kind of tracking without the user really knowing, the only thing Apple does here is drag this practice into the open and give users a real choice.
In my opinion a privacy-first OS should inhibit any kind of cross-app / cross-device personal tracking, I predict this will happen in the next 5-10 years, for now it seems to be too extreme still.
While in practice some user data is used to make a hash to increase the conversion accuracy, it’s by no means necessary.
That literally is what we're talking about
You say that like it's a bad thing.
[1]: https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-chan...
[2]: https://service-design.co/95-of-the-people-stick-to-the-defa...
That's OP's point. Facebook's concern is nothing to do with "protecting the poor little businesses". It's everything to do with protecting their own business. Because they know that opt-in will drastically reduce their ability to track.
But they can't say that. They can't put out an ad that says: "hey. We've been sucking up your data for years, without your informed consent. And we've made a ton of money from it. Now Apple wants to stop us doing that unless you're OK with it".
So instead they're pulling every lever they can to make Apple look like the bad guy while avoiding the truth. Hypocracy, exactly as OP says.
That they're stooping to these levels just emphasises how much they think the change is going to hurt them.
I think opt-out tracking (if opt-out is even offered) with personally identifiable information is probably not even permitted under the GDPR, especially the broad, unnecessary cross-app tracking.
Apple is actually doing app developers a favor by improving compliance with the GDPR.
IME for most users the default action for any popup falls into two categories - (a) Quickly close it without reading, (b) Accept it blindly without reading. The ratio changes, but I think its about even.
Huh? Perhaps I'm missing something, why would Google do the same? Seems out of their interests ...
> Is there any reason to think users care about it enough to switch based solely on this feature?
People buying flagship android phones definitely. They cost as much as iphones. Others, I am not sure.
I don't believe this is true or even a consideration for the majority of users.
Proof of that, specifically.
In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs. Lock-in costs that create barriers to market entry may result in antitrust action against a monopoly.
It’s of marginal importance to me, but the ability to install virtually anything on the App Store reasonably confident it’s not going to break my primary communication device or exfiltrate my data (without my permission) etc etc is of far more importance.
I rely on my phone very heavily and the fact that it reliably Just Fucking Works is much much more important than being able to — for example — run Firefox on it
I can stop programs from running on startup and can force them to be killed instantly when they are closed so they aren't running in the background.
I can also write and run my own programs without having to own Apple hardware and can distribute them without paying $99.
For me, it really is a question of privacy vs walled garden and I choose to give up some privacy.
> Walled garden is just an anti-marketing term
Which is what I was arguing with. For me, it's a big anti feature, big enough to always choose Android over iOS. I won an iPhone at a company xmas raffle and gave it to my mother rather than keeping it. She also doesn't care about those things, so it's much better fit for her.
> you just fight with your phone’s bad habits.
No, I make my phone do what I want it to do. You accept that your phone does what Apple wants it to do. I don't like being forced to change my habits based on some 3rd parties whim.
My issue isn't that you prefer not dealing with these things, it's that you entirely dimiss the notion that someone does and that a "walled garden is just an anti-marketing term".
But you're right, the cost is the ultimate factor for most people, especially in developing countries. I guess Apple doesn't care about complete market share, but if they did, they could just release an "iPhone Lite" for 150$ and good bye to Android market share. Imagine having 90%+ mobile phone market share - Apple could destroy the Google ad business.
Those of us using Android who care that much about the privacy aspect have ways to implement it (a little more Heath Robinson like, but still...) using a VPN and alternative browsers. Many in the Andoid camp are likely to see this are preferable to switching platforms and paying more for their devices (unless they run with expansive flagship android units in which case cost is less of an issue in the switch). Those that don't care that much, don't care enough to make a difference.
On the other hand Apple providing extra privacy protection is a significant extra bit of friction that would stop people moving away from iDevices onto Android ones, even amongst people who don't care enough to make any effort beyond not switching and/or don't really understand the issue much if at all.
Google used to be really hands off with chrome and android but that stopped some time ago. Now both of them have captured markets and google is slowly making both worse for users and privacy. Saying this after having worked on and loved both products and teams.
Google needs subscribers so it can go to these unscrupulous actors and show then the middle finger.
It is very interesting to see Google reaction to being forced to share even more information with advertisers. I am completely with Google. Why should advertisers on Google properties know more about Google business than Google knows itself?
Now the question for everyone else is: why should Google (or Facebook) know more about your business than you know yourself? I actively discourage against using Facebook JavaScript SDK in any web project I’m involved in because most of the time all small companies really need is a sharer.php link. It is mind boggling how little people think about “let’s use their SDK”.
Really? I don't see this at all. Sure they are dipping their toes, but some extremely high percentage of the revenue is still coming from ads.
With Apple doing it first and them simply going along with where the mobile operating system ecosystem has moved, it won’t be.
They’ve already taken similar stems with Chrome too.
They key thing to remember is that the platform creator doesn’t play by the same rules as other participants. Chrome blocks particular kinds of tracking for third parties, while still enabling Google to track its users.
What reason is there to believe that Google will not continue to track users on Android after making it harder for others to do so, just like it has with Chrome, now that Apple has given them the perfect excuse?
It's interesting that Apple and Microsoft are the original PC gang and they seem to be making a resurgence (just missing IBM) against the web upstarts.
I don't think anyone has any illusions about their motives being pure, but there is something more clear cut about "sell me useful hardware and software, I give you money in return" as at least a part of the relationship, compared with Facebook/Google where the value exchanged is my attention/eyeballs to advertisers..
And brave was the most private browser out of the box.
You can run the first run test yourself and get the same results.
As a consumer I'm thrilled at possibly getting some control back and I will likely switch back to iOS. I am conflicted.
There are many other methods marketing that do not use personalized "adtech." "Adtech" is a very small fraction of ways to engage you audience. To top that off, "adtech" is inaccurate, ineffective, and overpriced. Just think about all of the lies people put into their profiles, and all the ad blockers people have installed.
We shouldn't accept that "adtech" is cheaper and more effective on face value, and we certainly shouldn't accept that the only alternative is to do mass "brute force advertising."
e.g. look at what Tesla has done without spending any money on ads, they used Musk's twitter reputation to amasse great publicity. This method, among others thanks to the open internet, is available to all creative marketers.
Hypothetical scenario, imagine you want to sell "overpriced" bike jackets, auto targeting will give you women/men whose spouse has bike but they don't own bike, on xmas time. Cause they are buying as gift, and have no idea what actually it costs, they will have very good ROI for your ads.
Also this is only for their ad network parts, (basically ads you see on other applications), on facebook or google properties you still have same kind of targeting (as they are first party)
On overall this is very pro-consumer.
Does your advertising NEED to target individuals? What if you instead targeted Facebook groups for new parents, Youtube videos titled "How to Potty Train", Instagram posts with relevant hashtags.
There is a big lie that Facebook and Google keep selling people. Advertisements do not need to be targeted at individuals, they need to be targeted to content. You don't need to advertise to 20-30 y/o female college graduates. You just need to target content that new parents would look for.
Facebook should lean into app tracking transparency because it will hurt smaller ad tech companies more than it will hurt Facebook. They can garner some goodwill in the press, instead of their sad display about “protecting small businesses”.
Note their competition: it’s Google. Google does the thing where they try to track everything and if Facebook doesn’t do the same their platform loses value. And so the arms race continues.
Alternative take: consumers care about privacy and so the market is providing alternatives.
If this isn't anti competition I don't know what is.
So still facebook can track you in facebook apps.
1. Data sharing on app store downloads is now opt in. 2. Apple apps are exempt because they are managed by different settings. You cannot opt out. 3. FB and Apple both plan to use this data to target their ad networks.
2. Apple apps are not exempt. (Even weather app is asking for location permission after permission change about location, this is no different)
3. Yeah apple and google are after data from other applications, applications you installed, how much you are using, basically everything. Amount of idfa provides is unbelievable.
> It’s a no brainer that the search engine giant will be compelled to bring a similar anti-ad tracking feature on Android to keep the mobile ecosystem in sync.
Google is an ad company, just like Facebook.
Facebook has -- by far -- the greatest audience reach of any media (except perhaps Google, depending on how you slice the data). Why would they put out ads in newspapers?
Is this part of a play to deflect antitrust attention?
Is it because newspaper reach to lawmakers is better than Facebooks?
Is it because, per dollar spent, a newspaper is more effective at gaining mindshare?
THe mind boggles. Regardless, FB's last quarterly filing indicated that the main business to get hurt from Apple's changes is ... FB, so these ads are obviously post-event rationalization about why it's bad for others as well (and it might be a bit, but ... I think it's good for society on average, with Apple being the big winner, FB being the big loser, some businesses being small losers and users being small winners)
Is this a no-brainer? I don't know the intricacies of the industry well enough, but seems this is a clincher...
The ones with adverts which are pushed were available for next day deliver. The ones with no adverts which I wanted weren’t available for months.
In the end I didn’t buy a kindle. What is it with companies that want to splat adverts everywhere.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Each individual online across all devices is worth about $200/year in advertising revenue ($200bn in global revenue over about a billion individuals). Take a share of that every year and you end up making more than you would have made on the device sale without that.
This is only likely to make it slightly harder to track the small fraction of users already taking strong measures to prevent being tracked.
The first party tracking enablement was given to Facebook for free since the beginning. Now it's being taken back. Now they need to pay ISPs and invest more strongly in fingerprinting efforts.
I'm all for the move - it is a step in the right direction. But in isolation, it doesn't change much for end users - they are still being tracked at a similar level. Facebook is trying to spin it as an end to personalized ads as a whole, which it definitely isn't.
This statement isn't correct. That small fraction of the user would've already turned off IDFA tracking. With this move Apple is merely prompting the user before turning the tracking on. I'd say FB is worried about the larger fraction of the users who aren't privacy conscious.
Other features that are still relevant: the marketplace, events, and pages from businesses where complaining can actually lead to an answer. This year I was waiting for refunds from some sport events, and the only way for me to get some updates or at least know if other customers were happy with a 30% refund (!) was to check the Facebook page of the business. Businesses have a bigger pressure to answer since it's public: no answer to a lot of angry comments is bad for them.
I don't understand naivete like this. Businesses are there to provide a product and in return, make money. They are entities that don't "care" about anything -- good or bad.
OF COURSE they care about maintaining their competitive advantage. Which business doesn't? Why is that cause for outrage?
It's like saying: "Monkeys are only interested in picking out lice and eating bananas. Shame on them."
The personification of companies and the outrage over that personification just seems misinformed.
Eventually, it is the same user who gave away his data for free that pays too. Double taxation.
Programmatic advertising has so many negative externalities that we should all cheer the diminution of this industry. Breitbart and Infowars and a million other toxic cesspools pandering to all manner of human weakness wouldn't exist without programmatic, the means by which these sites both grow audiences and monetize themselves.
this part is to be seen, to be honest my guess is it will stay around the same range (if google would join I would even guess that it would go up after this change).
If they are really interested in privacy then they should be doing for all the applications including their own.
This is an honest question! I have not yet seen any hint for this, but that does not mean they dont do it.
People like to claim that Apple gets a free pass here but they legitimately do seem to build their apps more or less silo'd, as they should be.
If you want the soundbite: if Apple tracked you across apps, their recommendation systems (be it app store or whatever) wouldn't royally suck. But they do. ;P
It’s honestly a breath of fresh air. There’s no sleazy salesman vibe that comes with a lot of overly personalized recommendations.
can you point me to some links which tells that it will be same for the Apple.
If you value your freedom and liberty, this is hypocritical. Apple benefits from their revenue stream not being dependent on advertising, but they're just as unjust in locking down their devices and preventing competition and open computing.
At the end of the day, I think lack of freedom is worse than eroded privacy. They're both bad, but freedom is essential.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/25/instagram-unexpectedly-...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/kenyhx/in_light_of_f...
Today, they're expecting those small businesses and consumers to rile up against Apple. Their whole marketing stunt is laughable!
Targeted ads do help small business - they let anyone advertise their business cheaply because the ads are getting to those that may be interested. Otherwise you have to advertise so widely only large companies can afford it and we'll be seeing wall to wall coca cola adverts.
Maybe there is a chance that dentists advertising to just people who brush their teeth is missing a large part of their potential market?
What a horrible company, run by horrible humans.
And there is no evidence to support the idea that targeted advertising is actually more effective.
[1] https://privacyinternational.org/blog/2758/appdata-update
If facebook made it mandatory tomorrow that you must opt-in or you won't be able to use their services, almost everyone will opt-in. Its simple as that.
Safari ad blockers are severely crippled and you won't have any choice in browsers. Ublock origin is available on android with firefox which is something to consider if you browse on your phone often.
All of the core browser bits including adblocking are safari still in every iOS browser on the app store.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
(i.e. ~safari webview)
I don't claim that it's broken, but the ability to switch browsers (finally!) doesn't seem terribly relevant given that they're all required to essentially be safari skins.
You’re mixing up Safari and WebKit. This gives a misleading impression. Safari is Apple’s web browser. WebKit is Apple’s rendering engine. There’s much more to a browser than its rendering engine. Apple requires browsers to use WebKit, not Safari. Everything else – add-ons, syncing, UI, homepage, etc. – can be completely custom.
I’d be pretty pissed off if I were a developer working on a browser for iOS and everybody treated all of my hard work as if it were nothing. Alternative browsers aren’t just reskinned Safari. They are entire applications of their own.
It's true that safari and webkit are not the same, this comment is imprecise. But switching browsers won't net you different adblocking capability due to the restriction to use apples webkit core.
Edit: that is "safari core" is a very lazy shorthand for the webkit framework here. The impact to the user is pretty much the same in this context.
That depends on what you mean by “different adblocking capability”. It’s absolutely possible for alternative browsers to block different things to Safari. I can think of three ways to do it off the top of my head: add a content rule list; inject JavaScript to remove elements from the DOM; inject CSS to hide elements.
In practice on iOS nothing seems better than safari + the content rules for adblocking, but I admittedly didn't try every app
Shipping your own content lists seems like a tricky way to differentiate since users could install similar lists without using your browser.
aside: It also appears to just inject CSS you have to inject it via javscript now which feels a bit gross but certainly doable.
Edit: most -> many
1. Not all apps will use the default browser.
2. You can't uninstall Safari
3. Safari's content blocking framework doesn't work for third-party browsers. This means no adblocker.
4. iOS has a great time-tracking feature that lets you block websites beyond certain usage. Once again, only works on Safari.
Not to mention that we still don't have extensions in Firefox.
It's really easy to do this on Android—Firefox with uBlock Origin is brilliant.
Pixel 5 has 2GB more ram, 50% more battery, wireless charging, 90hz display and waterproofing. Now that may or may not be features you need, both they're both great deals.
There were a few strange stand out benchmarks, though to me they seemed more like bugs than a pattern. I haven't had any performance issues in every day usage.
> I thought they cared about small size
That's fair, I assumed they were just avoiding premium prices. Still, some people really care about wireless charging and waterproofing and if so, I think P5 is a great option.
Is 50,000 rules enough to provide adequate ad blocking?
If not, it's a problem. If 50k rules is more than enough, it's not accurate to suggest that the limit is an issue we should care about.
This limitation prevent the model with traditional adblocker where extension and block lists are independently maintained by different parties (e.g. uBlock Origin/ABP + EasyList) so you're stuck with relying on extension maintainer to update their list or download another blocker app when the blocker become unmaintained (where in traditional model you could just subscribe to another list)
Plus a Pixel integrates a lot better with non-Apple operating systems, both MS Windows and GNU/Linux. MS's "Your Phone" and KDE Connect are both great.
The original iPhone SE and iPhone 6s are both on their sixth year of support.
The iPhone 5s got a security update a couple of days ago, after it's own six years of support had ended.
It’s clear that making tracking opt in instead of opt out will make most users chose to not enable tracking leading to lesser personalized ads, which would affect the ability of smaller businesses to reach a targeted audience that they care about without needing to spend more than necessary. That’s the point being made by Facebook and I do see the logic there. I expected a better rebuttal to Facebooks argument.
Facebook does not care about small businesses - so instead of responding to the thin veil of "but think of the small businesses!", people are responding to the underlying concern that Facebook really has - their own welfare (which .. they have described in their quarterly filing to the SEC with estimated loss of revenue)
The only reasonable way, in the long term, is to ignore the specifics and address the essence. Some of us have been observing this behavior (with many companies and politicians) for decades, and choose bot to play the game dictated by the other side.
Support local artists, give out free stuff to local revievers, join local hobby groups, community groups where a customer is supposed to be and take it from there. Facebook doesn't want a small business to do that, instead dial in a few parameters and call it a day. I would rather do business with a seller who is genuinely interested in selling a good product, provide service, handle issues, instead of the other "hey... you bought a rice cooker yesterday, would you like a juicer? ".
Facebook has backed us into this situation where we need to decide between privacy and profits for Facebook. Local businesses rely on Facebook for advertising.
Small businesses are negatively affected by all sorts good things: food safety laws, truth in advertising laws, employee protection laws, needing to pay taxes, etc. Something being bad for the profitability of small businesses isn't a strong argument by itself.
If there are constraints in supply (ie, not many places to show ads) then I'd be wrong and the price would go up. Maybe someone on HN who knows more than me can project this.
But in any case it certainly isn't entirely obvious to me that "small business" will necessarily suffer. It's not like ads can no longer be targeted; they just can't be _microtargeted_, meaning the very big spenders (like political parties) are going to spend less. But I struggle to see how this will significantly impact traditional, product based advertising.