Facebook: Free as in Bullshit | Hacker News Reader

Facebook: Free as in Bullshit

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555 pointsthrow0101a249 comments

I fail to understand Facebook's strategy/reasoning for running this campaign against Apple. It is generating a newsworthy backlash which serves only to draw attention to FB's practice of tracking users across domains/apps, when many of said users were unaware of this, and might not be comfortable with it.

I would be really interested to hear arguments opposing my assumptions. There must be something that I am overlooking - Facebook isn't a stupid company, not by a long chalk. What is the strategy/reasoning behind this campaign?

Trying to reframe the discussion from privacy, tracking and spying to small businesses reaching customers, people finding relevant products, market efficiency, user experience and comfort and convenience, and also the price. People love zero price. The hurdle from 0 to 1 cent is enormous, so threatening with costs is also effective.

I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to push an angle that it's immoral to withhold your data, that you become a leech, a free rider, a pirate.

It’s true that the hurdle from 0 to 1 cent is much larger than 1 cent to 1 dollar - but Even though it is well known, to the point of being axiomatic for sellers, that it is not how it is perceived by buyers which often pretend it is a linear scale.

Who are these ads directed at? It’s not the general public. But is it small business owners? Politicians? Regulators? I don’t have a good answer.

It is the general public.

They have way better reach to the general public through Facebook - why NYT and WSJ?

I think it's telling that when Facebook wants to reach people in power, it takes out ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. When it wants to reach nobodies, it uses Facebook.

Who are People? I’m fine with zero-price but I would also do okay with something-price, because I managed to live just fine before all of these “you are the product” (as technologists constantly gloat) services. What would happen if we reached something-price? I think, in my case, I would just stop using a lot of the services, because (1) I won’t have the budget to pay for for all of them as subscription services, and (2) see the aforementioned point about living just fine without them before.

Because here’s the rub: it’s not like people are addicted or have to have these services—it’s more like they are addicted or have to be a part of the network effect of these services. (Oh I don’t know about that guy, Tony, he ain’t got a FB profile...) And once these services become something-price they just won’t be viable any more, because they are not really essential and paying for 8+ services (or whatever?) is not feasible.

But realistically services like FB are just stuck with their current business model; they will not pivot to something else because they know they would be screwed. But they, of course, twist that into some kind of consumer+small business sympathy spiel.

I wrote this yesterday (and slightly edited/updated it today):

I can’t help but think about the long game here. Are there complex PR strategies that could potentially be employed here by Apple and Facebook together?

I wonder if this ‘fight’ represents some sort of controlled opposition by a few Silicon Valley tech giants to win favorable regulation for the tech industry as a whole: by showing a fake rivalry Apple and Facebook (and others) can carefully control the overall narrative, and although this story focuses on a negative issue (which, let's be real, is not much worse than the average person having already soured on Facebook anyway), it could lead to incomplete, premature, pro-corporate laws, rapidly lobbied for, and passed, by mostly tech illiterate lawmakers (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 major 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/campaign is also in full motion here.

This seems like corporate-capitalist gaslighting of the working class in one of it’s most advanced forms.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stXgn2iZAAY

I consider Facebook, Google, Cloudflare, Amazon, Tencent, Tesla and Apple to be collaborators. Remember the anti-poaching agreement.

Especially Tencent, Google and Cloudflare, they do work together, and they hide it bad.

Several of Google and Tencent's moves have been anti-competitive, and they had a wink nudge.

And Google/Cloudflare, don't get me started lol. If investigators are serious, it is going to be fun.

But in seriousness, Google/Cloudflare is similar to Google/Facebook "collab", and it'll be bad when it comes out. But Cloudflare will be a trillion dollar company by then.

While anything is possible, I think when Apple found out Facebook was abusing the enterprise app distribution program to track teenagers, that was the end of any amicable relationship. Apple doesn't need Facebook, and they benefit from government regulation around privacy. If world governments start demanding basic privacy, it'll destroy the profit model of their main competitor.

Until a time that Apple's main source of income is selling your private data, I guess I'm hard pressed to believe they're trying to enable their competitors who do.

I don't know that "[Apple] benefit from government regulation around privacy." Considering they are leading the charge on commercial devices and privacy, at least among the big tech companies. It benefits them more to be the only one demonstrating this focus, some proof to support this claim, and no financial benefit to collecting/leaking customer privacy data. None of the other tech companies can claim any 2 of those 3 points.

> Apple doesn't need Facebook

I'm not sure that's true. I suspect the absence of Facebook's apps on the iPhone would be a pretty significant blow to Apple's long-term market share.

WhatsApp has >1.5 billion users, Messenger nearly that many.

(Would it also hurt Facebook? Absolutely.)

I actually don't think it would effect it long term, only short term. People would use something else.

I have been critical of Apple in the past, but given the choice of Apple or Facebook, I'd choose Apple.

And I don't even own an Apple device.

I guess I just believe that people still place the quality of their products over any particular service.

Zuck somehow was able to maintain total control of the company.

So like any total dictatorship, whatever the king or his minions think or emotionally react to rules the day. Facebook has a core cadre of people with... unusual beliefs as compared to most people. When they are right, it’s genius (ie the growth strategy) but tends to degrade into this type of outcome.

Sounds like many state leaders and their close company

They know it's a lost cause, but it's completely against human nature to not at least try to do something, even if you know it isn't likely to work. And their hope is to sway some old politicians into forcing Apple not to release the change - it's unlikely, but they have to at least try a Hail Mary.

Kara Swisher thinks its part of piling onto apple anti-trust by the US Government, which kinda? makes sense.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/opinion/facebook-apple-ad...

"The regulatory and legal questions around Apple’s practices are behind Facebook’s strategy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In its attack ads on Apple, Facebook added that it would help antitrust regulators and others — like the Fortnite parent company Epic Games — on the App Store issue."

......

But both companies have issues:

"But the cracks we are seeing this week are the most significant — and could spell trouble for both companies. Apple, pointing out Facebook’s data gluttony, and Facebook, in turn, noting Apple’s hegemony over mobile, make one thing clear: These tech companies have too much power. And no matter how you slice it, they are all in dire need of government regulation."

> Kara Swisher thinks its part of piling onto apple anti-trust by the US Government, which kinda? makes sense.

The issue is it's irrelevant to antitrust when they're not actually monopolizing anything in this context. Making a privacy setting default to private but still allowing the user to change it leaves the user in control. Apple isn't forcing the customer to do anything.

Facebook objects to this because nobody wants to be tracked, so nobody is going to turn it back on. But doing something by default that nearly every user wants while giving the 0.0% of users who don't want that the option to do it the other way is not monopolizing anything.

Compare this to the app store where they're actually restricting what the user can do by prohibiting competing stores.

It’s a difference in fundamental values.

As a thought experiment, ignore the moral implications of tracking and look at things in purely economic terms. From that perspective, tracking is sort of like a charge for using the Facebook app. Since Apple forbids apps from disabling functionality if the user declines tracking, they’re effectively forcing Facebook to provide their service for less compensation. If this were an actual paid service and Facebook were being forced to let the user opt out of payment, you wouldn’t just say, “Making a payment setting default to free but still allowing the user to change it leaves the user in control. Facebook objects to this because nobody wants to pay money, so nobody is going to turn it back on.”

Of course, that argument is totally invalid if you believe privacy is a right. In that case, it’s fundamentally illegitimate for Facebook to treat it as a form of payment in the first place. That’s the view espoused by the EU with the GDPR and California with the CCPA. It’s the view Apple has explicitly made into a tagline (“Privacy is a fundamental human right”). And it’s a popular view, so Facebook can’t just go out and argue they’re being short-changed. Instead, they’ve made the economic argument only in terms of indirect claims about unnamed smaller websites supposedly being unable to survive – while muddying the waters with vague warnings about “freedom” and “forced updates”, and trying to insist that tracking is actually a benefit to users. It’s a largely incoherent argument, because they can’t say what they really believe: that privacy is not a right.

yes, "hurting small businesses" is probably a/b tested as effective politician-terminology.

Sort of how a politician might speak about "creating jobs", which is not how a normal person thinks/speaks.

I think it's pretty simple: the potential revenue loss to Facebook is much larger than the expected costs of cleaning up a PR mess.

And I'm sure they're right. It's important to remember that Facebook can precisely measure the impact of news articles like this. And even without messing with the newsfeed algorithms, they have way more influence over consumer perception of Facebook than a few news articles do. For example, they could introduce some new "privacy" feature and talk it up in in-app notifications. Or they have you review your privacy settings, something most people will glance at and move on, thinking they are in control. And they can do things like this whenever consumer confidence flags.

If Facebook loses a few more users of the sort that are tech-savvy and informed enough that this pushes them over the edge, that's fine. In fact, it might be even better, as the remaining population is more easily wrangled.

And I'm sure they're right. It's important to remember that Facebook can precisely measure the impact of news articles like this.

It's tempting to think of Facebook as omniscient, but I'm not sure how precisely it can be measured. Economically, yes, maybe. But morally?

Remember, the Timnit controversy ended up with letters from congress to Google's CEO. In bigcos, not everyone forecasts everything.

What makes you think that Facebook even considers the moral impact of its actions?

It's not so much that they care about the moral impact of their actions, as that society might backlash them if they're not too careful. Large != untouchable.

I wish I'd thought of a better word to use than "morally," though, since it didn't quite capture what I meant to say. I meant, people being upset about their actions is hard to quantify.

Ah, I can agree with that. Facebook probably does consider its actions from a moral standpoint if only to calculate the outrage potential.

Oh, rough! A strongly worded letter from Congress. I'll read it after I finish counting all my money.

What effect do you think those letters will have?

It's hard to say. In the worst case, it could be a prelude to regulating AI in general.

I'm legitimately concerned it might be, if you read between the lines: https://twitter.com/RepYvetteClarke/status/13392973588158341...

It can't even really be measured economically beyond how much it costs to run the ad. They will see the result of the ad, but FB will never know how it would turn out if they didn't run it.

Hum... Facebook has some large experiments on mood analysis and manipulation on their knowledge base. If anybody can measure this, it's them.

What can still happen is that the campaign backfires so quickly that hey don't have time to react. I don't know their reaction time, but they've been doing mood manipulation for long enough to think it's short.

It's true that not everybody forecasts everything, but I think it can be pretty precisely measured via things that they already track, like "how much does this person visit Facebook" and "based on engagement, what are their interests". They were very big on measuring factors related to growth; I'd be very surprised if they weren't measuring what causes people to leave.

From me they get both: I am, and will be, a revenue loss, and in addition to that got to enjoy this remarkable screenshot.

Not going to say anything positive about apple here, but also nothing negative.

> It's important to remember that Facebook can precisely measure the impact of news articles like this. And even without messing with the newsfeed algorithms, they have way more influence over consumer perception of Facebook than a few news articles do.

This is what worries me the most about this. I'm seeing full front-page ads around the "Facebook stands for small businesses" mantra in India - a country where Apple is by and large insignificant in the smartphone space. I can only assume they're confident about this PR blitz, and I hope Apple doesn't drop the IDFA changes due to this.

Apple confirmed there is absolutely no intention of dropping it. It's coming in spring. I think Apple got already way too lenient in deciding to give developers almost a year-long grace period since the announcement at WWDC 2020.

They’re pretty determined, with March being the best rumored rollout so far. Delays are around SKAdNetwork, as the change destroys traditional attribution and alters how ads are run. They gave networks and publishers more time to adapt, but there won’t be any more delays

Antitrust risk could be a factor, as the preferred treatment of ASA seems dubious - but the change seems to be coming regardless

Since the US government is not doing much on that front, we're now looking to Apple to save us...

Of course, the other half of people are running Android and I don't see Google getting on that bandwagon.

> And I'm sure they're right. It's important to remember that Facebook can precisely measure the impact of news articles like this. And even without messing with the newsfeed algorithms, they have way more influence over consumer perception of Facebook than a few news articles do.

Are we 100 percent confident that FB is doing this because the math works out and not because the pressure from the board is to 'do something about this'? We're all aware, presumably, of cases where the corporate hierarchy demands action when the data suggests acting at all is harmful. It seems silly to assume FB is the one company immune to those pressures.

> We're all aware, presumably, of cases where the corporate hierarchy demands action when the data suggests acting at all is harmful.

True in most cases - but probably not FB. According to Investopedia [0], Zuckerberg owns 57.9% of voting shares as of 2020-12-09. Board pressure has a lot less sway when the chairman & CEO holds such a majority.

[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/082216/top-9-...

EDIT: fixed date

So Zuckerberg pressured people to 'do something about this'.

> So Zuckerberg pressured people to 'do something about this'.

From which logically follows "This is something, therefore we must do it."

Yeah, the actual audience for the ad might just be "Facebook executives", and no one else, for all practical purposes.

It would be interesting to know whether any metrics (NPS, perhaps?) are even being tracked that the campaign is intended to influence, or if this marks a regression to the "half of my ad budget is wasted, I just don't know which half" days of yore.

That something, to my mind, is “brand privacy invasive tracking as bringing you free/cheap shit.”

It worked for the last decade. They’re doubling down, unaware the dotcom 2.0 bubble is not bursting but being left behind.

Apple shipping a SOC that can do it all will trickle into Dells thinking, driven by backlash against privacy invasive grifting we can do cloud work at home.

Concerns over screen time will lead to decoupling from screens. More IOT and voice controls and other input alternatives like smart sensors.

Facebook is not a laptop, or an operating system. It’s AIM. We moved on from AIM but kept computing. The tech industry hasn’t matured. It grifted on last generations addiction to TV.

More imaginative applications are yet to come.

I'm not sure why 100% confidence matters, but yes, many explanations are possible. Even simultaneously. E.g., the initial impetus might be higher-ups pressuring for action. But then somebody runs the numbers on what the potential long-term revenue impact is and sees the number is very large, far larger than the handful of millions they spend on their usual PR disaster cleanup.

But, then, outside observers cannot distinguish which of these scenarios we are in, and we cannot conclude that FB is doing this because 'the numbers say so.'

We can't ever be sure of anything in this complex and murky world. Especially given we're trying to understand it with 3 pounds of meat. But the clock ticks on.

> I think it's pretty simple: the potential revenue loss to Facebook is much larger than the expected costs of cleaning up a PR mess.

That sounds like a quote from fight club and I guess you're right!

"It's important to remember that Facebook can precisely measure the impact of news articles like this"

What would that measurement look like? What is the control group for a news cycle? What signal would you expect to see change?

I'm sure they're already tracking things like DAU and UAM. They are well known for experimenting to maximize engagement and growth. And we know they already do topic modeling and interest tracking, as that drives ad targeting.

So in their shoes I'd be looking at newsfeed articles about Facebook, user sentiment in the post text and the comments, and subsequent impact on UAM and DAU numbers.

In their shoes, I'd also be tracking the performative departure. I've seen a number of people post about Facebook and saying they're quitting. It wouldn't be hard to look back at what they've been reading and forward at the impact on their friends who read the post.

If I needed more data, I'd tie all this in with user surveys and user studies for deeper qualitative and quantitative data. Not sure if Facebook does those, but I know other platforms do.

They are probably hoping to benefit from the recent/ongoing AppStore fiasco. Some people already think that Apple is evil for their Appstore monopoly, so maybe they could be convinced that Apple is evil for protecting it's users from Facebook's data fetish.

What if down the road advertisers discover that personalized ads is bs and standard non-personal ads work as effectively? What if FB/GOOG are just interested in supporting the hype around it for their own benefit?

It's not just about personalized ads. That's only the happy revenue stream they'll talk about. The others aren't so spinnable.

Second, s we've learned recently, they also sell your data to others for whatever they want to use it for. The third of course is government surveillance. And fourth is face recognition services: they got in trouble for having that feature on platform but who knows who they're selling it to.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/07/20/faceboo...

I think your assumptions are incorrect: individually, the people who work at facebook aren't stupid people, but indeed, the company Facebook itself, and the decisions it makes, can be described to be the actions of a stupid company.

I think it is less stupidity than the monopolists' disease. It is a combination of arrogance and paranoia that you can see appear repeatedly in monopolies.

I mean, yes, ultimately counterproductive to monopoly-preservation. But it isn't quite stupidity.

> I fail to understand Facebook's strategy/reasoning for running this campaign against Apple

Facebook and Google have aligned.[1] Google and Apple are in direct competition, and Apple is moving aggressively to the head of the pack, technologically, in the consumer space, recently starting to taunt the PC market again[2].

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tech-antitrust-google-fac...

[2]: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/apple-brings-the-pc-guy-back-f...

Considering Google pays Apple a massive tithe to be the default search engine its not 100% adversarial.

It's likely a simple case of following the money. Cost per action (CPA) ad pricing becomes a lot harder when you can't track people as easily, and that is likely a very lucrative ad format for FB.

Here's a good writup on the different types of ad pricing. There are a lot more features these days beyond clicks and impressions.

https://blog.wishpond.com/post/74072092834/facebook-advertis...

Bingo. ValueOptimized and CPA, on top of lookalikes drive huge revenue, and all become effectively useless. They retain their massive audience, but their differentiating value is severely challenged by this change

The campaign is going for “freedom loving” red state politicians with a bunch of keywords. They are trying to appeal to conservatives and turn this into a left vs right issue. Apple is projected like the controlling government.

> when many of said users were unaware of this, and might not be comfortable with it.

At this point if you are still unaware of that it's that you are either stupid or you don't use Facebook.

Don't forget that most people even think that Facebook is recording their voice full time to serve them targeted ads

If you go read the original press release, they use the word "small business" 5 times in 3 paragraphs. The strategy is to spin ad-tech as necessary for the free services that we all enjoy on the internet, and using "the little guy" as the justification. It's pretty much the Trump playbook of leveraging widespread frustration of economic decline across middle-America to win the battle for public opinion. In other words, the elite of the elite claiming their actions will help the common man while being blatantly self-serving.

Will this strategy work? I'm not sure, but it's worth a try because putting the cat back in the bag around data tracking isn't happening. I'd guess there probably is a growing contingent of people who balk at the price of an iPhone and see Apple as representative of "coastal elites", which could play right into the hand of Google/Facebook.

I agree, it really is puzzling. I think a lot of the campaigns against Apple these days are trying to attack the one thing that Apple holds precious: it's Brand. I know it isn't working but thats the idea. Apple is not a company that likes to conduct the business in public. The brand is for consumers and they spent a lot of money on that. This could just be away of trying to attack Apple using something they care about. Fortnite I think is similar. It sort of worked. We now have a big thread on HN about Apple fighting. Apple doesn't want this, even if they look like the winner.

My hypothesis is they're most worried about people figuring out the CTR on their ads doesn't go down by much when the personal data spigot gets cut off.

We'll see what happens.

Might is right applies to those who aren’t at the top few percent of the bell curve; when you’re on the lower minority side measured by socioeconomic statistics, majority is always literally more correct than you or some complicated opinions from any minority groups relatable to you and you’ll used to biasing validity by size of backgrounds associated to a text than elements in it.

So the mass would believe the bullshit ad over this rant, for no reasons other than that Facebook is a multinational mega corporation and the author is an individual.

The campaign is not targeted at users, it's targeted at congressional policymakers. The kind of people who read the paper edition of the NYT.

Facebook has no real competitors, the only genuine threat to their business is government regulation. I think most of their activity only makes sense in this context.

“Facebook’s argument is along the lines of arguing that the police shouldn’t crack down on burglaries because doing so might hurt pawn shops that have been thriving during a years-long crime spree.”

Excellent comparison to put the point across.

> No fair! claims the company objecting to blinds being installed on windows it had long peered through unhindered.

The linked tweeted image [0] at the end of the article is incredible. I haven't used Facebook in a few years and haven't used their app for longer so it's astounding to me how much variety of data Facebook tries to get at.

The social media I do use (basically just Twitter) I use on my phone through Chrome, not through their app. But the NYT app is more convenient than their site, as is Spotify and Youtube. Perhaps these apps are as invasive as Facebook and I did not realize.

[0] https://twitter.com/_inside/status/1339689228549181440

> Spotify and Youtube

Spotify contains the Facebook SDK which is basically spyware and pings Facebook with your device fingerprint and a unique ID generated on first run every time you open the app.

YouTube comes from an advertising company so it's safe to assume they've got their own equivalent of the above that's equally malicious.

According to the permissions page in Android settings I have no permissions granted to Spotify or Youtube.

You don't need any specific permissions to collect a near-unique device fingerprint. iOS is even more restrictive when it comes to that and yet fingerprinting devices is very easy if you collect the data over time and correlate with other data (from other apps or websites).

You need zero permissions to get a list of all apps you have installed, your unique advertising ID and a common things like sensors and WiFi names. Plus full unrestricted internet access.

PrivacyBreacher (showcase privacy issues in Android) - https://f-droid.org/packages/io.nandandesai.privacybreacher proves the point

I think you mean you need zero revocable permissions. The permissions still need to be declared in the manifest, and can be viewed in app info. This is how it works on Android, anyways. I've used both root access and repackers that modify the manifest to remove offending permissions on the past (occasionally it works, but more often it results in the app crashing, especially when the permission is for network access)

You don't need to declare the apps access and advertising ID in the manifest.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2695746/how-to-get-a-lis...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25846108/how-to-get-adve...

Facebook is the most unconscionably bad company in tech, and it's a shame Zuck and friends try to pretend they are on this grand mission to make the world better. Come on, just admit it's all about the money and we'd have a little more respect for you. All FB does is lead to time-wasting, fake news, bigotry, envy etc. I'm glad I've signed out from desktop

I wonder if Zuckerberg or the Facebook leadership really believes they're doing something good for the world and that the current problems caused by it are only a result of Facebook either not having enough data or not being present enough in our daily lives.

For example, disallowed/undesirable content on Facebook wouldn't be an issue if Facebook knew everyone's thoughts and prevented them from posting even before they wrote a single word. Ad fraud wouldn't be an issue if the only money that mattered was a Facebook coin (Libra?) and can be recalled or made invalid remotely. Election interference wouldn't be an issue if the only government you can elect is a Facebook-sponsored one. Etc.

It's an insane idea, but maybe not that insane if you look at it from the aforementioned sociopaths' points of view?

Psychology has found almost everyone has rationalized their beliefs & behaviors in some form or another, even if it's fairly transparent such as "The best thing for everyone is if I'm in charge"

Watched Star Wars 3 yesterday and it's exactly this. I wasn't convinced anyone would ever act like this though, seemed too fake to me (maybe the acting was the issue?).

Which company ISN'T performing a greedy money grab? Certainly not Google, or Apple or Microsoft.

The difference is the tenets the companies adhere to in their quests for profits.

Values matter.

Values are quite often a consequence of profits, in that companies develop values that align with how they make profits. Ben Thompson once coined this "strategy credit".

Show me a company which has values contrary to its profitability and then I'll be impressed (because that company will be at a competitive disadvantage).

Not necessarily. Amazon's Leadership Principles, and the tenets of all the startups I worked at (e.g. Karma/Drive/Tribe/Focus at Segment), were developed long before any of them made any profits.

Such as?

> Certainly not Google, or Apple or Microsoft.

I hope this is sarcasm.

It's not, it's double negative. "Which company is performing...certainly google..."

Or that's how I see grandparent statement. Also can be interpreted as sarcasm if you want. I find English weird in that.

I was going to type the sentence differently, but then had a brain fart. Sorry about that :)

Google is well on its way in its mission of installing toll booths on the internet, and shredding any notion of privacy we had on the internet. Apple's busy robbing 30% of sales of small businesses via its App Store, and robbing you via the extended warranty program while choking the repair industry. Microsoft is continuing to further lock you into their eco-system and keeping you running on their subscription treadmill.

> All FB does is lead to time-wasting, fake news, bigotry, envy etc. I'm glad I've signed out from desktop

This was good for a chuckle.

If you believe those things, why do you still have an account?

Facebook also serves as a birthday reminder service

I love privacy policies that say stuff like

"We collect your date of birth, for example to remind you of your birthday!"

(also to murder you Logan, when you turn 25)

If it wasn't really exhausting to argue about FB on HN I would put a long post here. But in short, FB ads are a net good for society.

1) They replace worse and spammy ads.

2) The tracking is really mild. If a big bad government or hacker wants to get dirt on you, they don't dig into FBs tracking algos, they go straight to the ISP or they hack the website you visited. FB also doesn't sell your data.

3) People genuinely find products they like all the time through ads.

4) Whole categories of businesses get a chance for customers to discover their products. Almost every new Shopify store selling cool new products relies on FB ads to get in front of customers. Many really cool useful b2b tech products rely on FB to be discovered.

Advertising isn't magic. It's not mind control. 90% of it is clearly showing a product to the market and you pray you find product market fit.

And targeted political ads? What about those?

Honestly both sides suck at using them and they have little impact on the national elections as is. But both sides want them to continue existing. They make it possible for challenger politicians in small races to get their names known.

How do you know that they have little impact? That's just pure speculation on your part.

> How do you know that they have little impact?

There's no research proving or denying this claim, but as anecdotal evidence: Mike Bloomberg spent more on advertising than any candidate in history for his primary election campaign (~$500 million), which he lost spectacularly.

People often credit Facebook Ads for Trump's 2016 victory, and it's an interesting claim considering that he spent substantially less than Bloomberg on the platform (~$40 million).

Disclaimer: This user is in clear conflict of interests here

From his profile - "I co-founded Right Percent to help b2b businesses scale with Facebook and AdWords ads."

Does that change anything in my argument? Who else but someone who's seen it work could tell you about the other side of it?

Some bias is shown through:

#2 hackers and big bad government aren't the only reason for being leery about 'big tracking'

#3 People also buy damaging(mlm) products and products they genuinely hate from these same ads

but I agree with your other points.

It is useful to hear your perspective. It is also useful to know that perspective is informed by self-interest.

Conflict of interest? Lol. It sounds like he or she has relevant expertise in the matter being discussed. Rare for Hacker News commenters.

Only people engaged in a field are prone to have a conflict of interest. Not only aren't those two things mutually exclusive, they are highly correlated.

I think this experience makes their opinion more valuable actually. Maybe they should have put in a disclaimer, but I always assume posters on HN have distinct insight based on relevant experience in the topic. At least this person provides a nice counter-argument to the general trend in these comments. I appreciate it even if I disagree.

Yea, it’s funny how a community that started based on tech startups now advocates totally burning down businesses that rely on advertising for revenue or customer growth. I don’t love the optics of this FB ad, but it is a fact that it’s going to:

1. Make targeted advertising significantly more expensive, which affects small businesses

2. Potentially cause those businesses to advertise less, which hurts apps that rely on that ad revenue

3. Give users more privacy control over cross-app tracking

All the coverage of this is 100% focused on #3 while assuming 1 and 2 are free or worth burning to the ground.

Facebook sells us adspace. If we as a community are against personalized ads it gives two things:

1. Cheaper facebook ads as people pull out from advertising on Facebook since they see less effective targetting

2. An opportunity to do better optimization on our end, which currently Facebook offers to everyone including our competitors.

From a cynical point of view, the average HN-user at a VC-run startup could benefit from this.

The hurt given to regular small businesses is irrelevant because we aren't Mom & Pop firms. It isn't in the nature of business people to care about all businesses anywhere. Rather you care about your business, and aim to bury your competition.

Additionally the people who run ad-supported sites outside of Facebook will welcome this change, since it reduces the effectiveness of Facebook's competition.

Well, perhaps we are reacting to having been inundated with 1 & 2 for decades now and we loathe it, have found no benefit worth sacrificing our privacy for.

Burn (1) and (2) to the ground. Is this an attention economy? If so great, get rid of those two things and I will have more time for myself and my kids!

Agreed. They provide value to the consumer. They also are good for small businesses. People will scoff, but it's true. Compare them to other companies like Amazon or Uber who's model is to drive small businesses to extinction.

That may be true if your conception of people is limited to their role as consumers. But people are more than consumers. They are also citizens, moral agents, members of families, workers, conscious and experiencing subjectivities, biological entities with evolved neurophysiologies and psychologies, and so on. What is good for people as consumers may not be good for them considered from a different perspective.

And who's job is it to decide what's best for the people?

> They provide value to the consumer. They also are good for small businesses.

Apparently you believe that you should decide that. Which argument are you making? "Facebooks Ads are good" or "Even if they aren't good people should decide for themselves"?

Facebook decides that Ads are good for its users every time they show one. Either that or they know Ads are harmful but show them anyway.

It is perfectly easy to go through life without a Facebook account. Yet people choose to use it. This suggests to me that they feel they are getting some utility out of it.

People do all sorts of things that are bad for them. Sometimes by choice and sometimes because they don’t recognise the potential downsides.

Which part of user choice do you not understand?

I don’t think you know anything about the ad business other than being an end user. “They replace worse and spammy ads”? What does that even mean? Your post is a spam.

For me:

1) not true. (I am currently happy to get ads for condos in St. Petersburg and banks in Cyprus, as I hope it shows Google has very little idea of who I really am, or at least just that I'm an unsought demographic?)

2) not true at all, compared to the tracking available from broadcast and free periodical advertising, which was how local businesses used to do it: in local media.

3) People genuinely find products they like all the time without ads, also.

4) Whole categories of businesses were introduced before FB ads as well. I know someone who got rich on selling copycat Uzi sealing rings as a teen fad, and that was before AOL and Google, let alone FB.

You probably don't care about convincing me, but if you wished to, you'd have to somehow demonstrate that FB provides a great deal of additional value in return for all the additional information they collect.

If all this is true, what's the problem with Apple's change? Won't people opt in to maintain all these benefits?

99% of people don't change the default, same reason why people don't opt out. It's not really an argument in either direction.

I understand the default though on iOS is to have tracking enabled — but present the user with an alert to allow them to turn it off.

Right, but with this change there is no default. iOS asks you, for every app, whether or not you want to allow tracking, as opposed to just silently defaulting to "allow".

This is a funny way to frame it and puts it all in perspective, exactly right.

If just telling people what is happening causes this reaction, it certainly makes you think.

Yeah, if this is as good as it sounds for users Facebook should have taken out full page ads explaining why they should just tap "Allow" instead of "Ask App not to track"

Really you'd think Facebook would be happy about this change, because it gives extra visibility to all the hard work Facebook engineers are doing to deliver you quality ads. Many users might not know about these efforts right now, since it all happens invisibly in the background.

None of these conclusions are based on any sort of evidence.

Pdf warning.

https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/...

Targeted advertising is a net boom for ad networks but not for the actual publishers of content.

It's definitely not good for publishers (newspapers, etc). Because fb ads work so much better than newspaper ads.

Why do Facebook ads appear in the newspapers and not on Facebook then?

They are trying to generate earned media from the press, and it worked.

But why not let users turn off tracking if they choose to?

You never addressed that.

I think this viewpoint doesn't get enough credence on HN.

As a consumer, I started doing ~all searches and browsing in Firefox with uBlock, and I never log in to FB on Firefox. The ads I've gotten have, indeed, become a lot less relevant. Honestly, it's not great! Lowest-common-denominator ads feel really gross.

As an entrepreneur selling a consumer product I created on Shopify, access to well-targeted ads would make a huge difference to my business. (I can't use FB to advertise since I sell a pandemic-related product, long story).

It's a niche product, so non-targeted ads like "local newspaper ads" would probably perform far too poorly to justify their expense.

People who buy my product tend to be very grateful for it, but not many know it exists! It's crazy how much your perspective on personalized ads change once you're on the other side – I really wish I could use them!

For those of us who don’t want the ads at all, oh well. When I want ads I can go to Amazon.

It seems like this is yet another problem caused by Facebook's dominance. You should be able to target ads without using ubiquitous tracking, by looking for forums, newsletters, podcasts, shows, meetups, etc. related to your target audience or product area. But if everybody uses Facebook for everything, you can't do any targeting, you have to just describe your audience to Facebook and ask them to please find people for you.

The internet should have made targeted marketing easier, because people would effectively target themselves by visiting sites devoted to topics and communities they care about, instead of everyone watching the same four TV channels. But Facebook wants to become the only "internet channel", monopolizing the ability to target and forcing you to go through them.

Maybe... but I'm not sure that's right.

My impression from talking to people who run ads for a living is that FB's ML-driven targeting is just orders of magnitude more effective than traditional "put an ad in a relevant forum" kind of thing. I don't have personal insight into how true that is.

As an individual, I really don't like having monopolies in ads, especially ones that _also_ have monopolies on personal data (FB and Google know everyone I talk to, everywhere I go, etc - yikes). But as a business, I really like the idea of having one platform to buy ads that can put them everywhere, and do a good job deciding where to show them.

I don't know what the solution is but I don't think I've seen it proposed anywhere yet. It's hard.

Your point on FBs targeting is correct. I've extensively tested ads in forums and the reach, targeting and click quality are much lower than FB, esp at any scale.

Oh obviously it's more effective, but as we're seeing, that efficiency requires a tradeoff that many people are not willing to make. And in the long run, it's not more effective if it drives everyone to ad blockers and privacy-oriented operating systems. It's like saying dictatorships are more effective than democracies, which is true until people decide they want to get rid of the dictator. My point was that this doesn't have to be a choice between ultra-targeted Facebook ads and non-targeted billboards. We can imagine a compromise with semi-targeted ads that most consumers can tolerate and most marketers can live with, but it just isn't viable if Facebook maintains its dominance.

The solution I'm suggesting is to either break up Facebook or legislate away their business model. I know that would make your life as a business owner more difficult, but wouldn't you also feel a little bit better knowing your business couldn't be wiped out by a broken algorithm disabling your ad account?

My business already can't run fb ads because of a broken algorithm ;)

Yeah, I definitely agree with your main thrust that a different business model, probably spurred by legislation, is needed. I just don't know what that business model (or the legislation) should be exactly - and I think the obvious things will have bad unintended consequences.

Who wants to see ads? The fact that people buy on impulse shouldn't be the defining reason for trashing privacy. Like someone else said, we're not only consumers and the tracking goes beyond the boundaries of commerce.

Just like carpeting a hillside with billboards would be? Ads are hardly a net benefit. Other ways of getting the word out to people who actually want the thing will be available.

Yeah, I can imagine that defending marketing+advertisement companies can be exhausting.

That's not the point.

Those personalized ads may be very useful, but they require extremely invasive tracking that the user does not necessarily consent to. On desktop I can use uBlock Origin and Firefox to block as much tracking as possibile, on mobile the Facebook SDK is embedded everywhere and it's very difficult to escape from it.

If there was a way to opt out of tracking I would have no problems with Facebook, I don't even use it. I hope this iOS change will come to Android too.

>There’s nothing “forced” about the software update Facebook is talking about either, which, I think, is going to be iOS 14.4. It’s actually quite interesting that Apple does not force software updates, or perform them in a hard-to-disable-or-detect manner

This part is bogus, and Gruber knows it. The update might not be "forced" in its installation, but it's forced in many other ways (Apple stops signing old versions, quickly moves on, new phones can't install it, you can't revert back, etc).

Forced updates are neither good nor bad in themselves, for me. For one, they help move the platform forward faster, bring everyone to the same page, and serve to land new features which is good (as a counter-example, remember how long Windows XP or IE6 took to die, with tons of security and compatibility issues dragging the platform behind?).

On the other hand, they can potentially break features someone depends on, or introduce new bugs.

Same at OS X. Sure, you can stay 2-3 releases behind. But often those releases are not supported on new devices, they stop getting updates fast, and new third party programs assume you have the new version and even require it. It's not like Windows, where you can stick with a 10-15 year old version and still be fine. In MacOS after 2-3 years, you're stretching it!

In any case, the forced updates are a clear tradeoff, coming from two different ideas about how an OS (move fast, be opinionated and ocassionally break things vs always-be-compatible-and-flexible).

Gruber to say iOS updates aren't forced is misingenuous.

> The update might not be "forced" in its installation

It's forced passive-aggressively. Update notifications are sent daily, sometimes 2-3x in a day. There's no opt-out or blocking the system notification. Users can only defer and the defer options change each time.

>It's forced passive-aggressively. Update notifications are sent daily, sometimes 2-3x in a day. There's no opt-out or blocking the system notification.

You can however set the system to manual update, and you wont see any notification.

That's not true. I've tried every setting (opt-out, manual, automatic) on every device and Apple essentially does it the same way regardless: repeated notifications to manually update.

Opt-out works the same as manual. The only difference between manual & auto is that auto will pre-download OS installers, but you still have to manually run the update.

This is the one part of the blog post where I cringed. I like Gruber, read DF, and listen to his podcast but this is in the "technically true" camp at best and he knows better. Yes, you aren't forced to update but you get notifications, auto-updates at night if you haven't disabled them, and you can't rollback.

I understand all of the decisions that Apple has made and even agree with them on the whole but to pretend Apple doesn't try and force you at every turn to upgrade in a 1-way process is just disingenuous.

See how Fb's ad weasels its way out of even saying what Apple's change is that they are objecting to?

Think with the head of the average print newspaper reader who has no context. The ad is just pushing mental buttons and appeals to emotion.

Apple will introduce a pop-up permission dialog that asks the user if their personal data should be shared with the app for tracking purposes (including ad personalization). That's it.

> The ad is just pushing mental buttons and appeals to emotion.

Facebook has monetized manufactured outrage over half-truths. It only makes sense they’d employ the same strategies they’ve seen their best clients develop on their platform.

> The ad is just pushing mental buttons and appeals to emotion.

Hehe well, par for the course, as the entirety of FB is exactly this.

I hope that schools of the future will teach our children about the dangers of weaponized emotional manipulation.

That's already been perfected by early 20th century propagandists. Do we learn it in school? Not much I guess.

Right, it’s clear FB’s assumption is that a significant % of iPhone users will choose “Ask App not to Track.” Ie they know some significant % of people don’t want this. They just blow past that entirely.

I wonder if Apple’s App Store rules allow them to charge a subscription fee if users choose not to allow it, as an alternative revenue stream.

Can someone put in plain terms what this actually means for advertisers? I realize this is about protecting privacy, and I fully support that, but putting that aside for a second, I am part owner of a small business and an advertiser - what consequences could this have? I rely on Facebook ads to market to parents in the local area (as well as Google). We use several FB tools to try to make the target audience as specific as possible. This helps, because not everyone is interested in the services our business offers, and saves us ad money. Does this mean that the campaigns I run could become less effective, because FB is less capable of figuring out what the user is like? What will breaks exactly? Is it just retargeting?

That’s the right question, and it doesn’t seem clear yet. FB will have iOS 14 specific ad accounts due to how different everything is, and I’d expect CPA, VO, and LAL + retargeting to be neutered

They aren’t losing their audience for impressions, or their targeting data for FB users - unless shadow accounts won’t work as well, but I’m not sure how that data is gathered.

The removal of IDFA and shimming SKAdNetwork between the app and ad networks means the ping back of rich app usage is useless, which is what breaks more advance campaign types.

Traffic, app install, engagement etc will still be valid, and you should still be able to use existing FB audience details since that’s backed by FB usage data.

So I’d guess the impact depends on your ad type usage, and how you target users. Targeting parents in specific geos should work fine on IG and FB. FAN is going to suffer though since it doesn’t have FB account backing and relies on IDFA

What Apple is doing here seems like a good change! It is aiming to give users some control of tracking. If FB wants to engage in such tracking, it is up to them to convince users of the benefit so that they will choose to enable it.

When it comes to defaults being rolled out to millions of users, I like this approach. They aren't blocking everything a la uBlock Origin, or putting themselves in the middle as the gatekeeper like Adblock Plus.

Ultimately, though, I think Facebook's business model is the problem. It depends on users giving them something for free that the user really has little incentive to provide. Sure, on its own the argument that users prefer personalized ads over generic ones makes some sense, but when I think when users have to consciously evaluate that trade-off (personalized ads BUT you have to allow someone to track everything you do on the internet), that is a hard sell.

I'm completely on Apple's side on this one, or rather on the side of user choice.

I just wish Apple would also give users a choice where it doesn't so clearly benefit Apple's own business interests, such as choosing which apps to install, where to buy them or how to pay for them.

Utterly lost me at 'There’s nothing “forced” about the software update', which is true only in the narrowest, least useful sense.

In what sense are iOS updates ‘forced’? It’s a single binary slider in prefs - auto update/don’t.

And then you get constantly badgered by notifications and your apps start shutting down because they need a new version of iOS and up-to-date version of app to run.

It's not just about the slider.

App developers are making the decision to prioritize newer iOS versions because Apple has been successful at supporting older devices and making updates seamless...

...and suddenly that's a bad thing, despite the security and support advantages.

Apple can't win.

Then

1. Don't use the offending developer's apps 2. Ignore the notifications

It really is that simple

Apple uses dark patterns and doesn't provide a "stop bothering me" option. I used to get nagged by Apple so I turned on the auto updates just to not have these popups. I guess it worked..

https://imgur.com/7ErVNiw

Bundling non-security changes in with security updates is 'forcing'.

Lovely phone you have there, be a shame if it got hacked.

Not sure what you mean? In what way is the update 'forced'? It's not being silently installed, it's not like existing apps will suddenly stop working if it isn't applied.

This is only "forced" when you look at it from Facebook's perspective, as it'll directly impact their app, they don't control the OS version of their users. But they specifically used the loaded phrase "Forced update" to trigger an emotional response from the reader. Paints Apple as a malicious antagonist.

Not technically forced since it's not mandatory that update, but not updating is not a viable strategy for most users. If you want new OS features or security patches, or apps that rely on those features, or if you buy a new device, then you don't have an option. Eventually everyone will have this update.

So the article is "correct", but not really in a useful way.

OTOH, this is more a natural side effect of how software development works than any malicious intent on Apple's part. Letting users opt into specific OS patches would be a maintaince / security nightmare.

Two key points IMHO. First:

> It’s an unfortunate quirk of the English language that free as freedom and free as in beer are very different meanings of free. But when you see an ad headlined “Apple vs. The Free Internet”, most people would assume they’re about to hear an argument about free as in freedom.

> Not Facebook. They’re arguing about free as in beer. I mean, they’re alleging that Apple is taking away freedom — the freedom of small business advertisers to benefit from unrestricted tracking for ad targeting — but their argument to the public is that such privacy initiatives will cost users their free beer.

Second:

> Apple clearly has no control over anything related to the advertising on websites, other than whatever privacy controls are built into Safari. Apple isn’t limiting the ability of apps on iOS to show personalized ads, either. They’re also not limiting the ability of ad-tracking technology to track users. What they’re doing is giving users awareness of and control over that tracking. In broad terms, changing tracking from opt-out to opt-in.

What does "free as in beer" mean? In what way is beer free?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_as_in_free_beer

Sorry, but I read this whole article and still don't understand.

> The English adjective free is commonly used in one of two meanings: "for free" (gratis) and "with little or no restriction" (libre).

To be clear, I understand this distinction. I'm just wondering in what context or culture beer is considered free (gratis).

> For example, they are used to distinguish freeware (software gratis) from free software (software libre). Richard Stallman summarised the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer."

This is just repeating the phrase and doesn't answer my question.

> As the English adjective free does not distinguish between "for free" and "liberty", the phrases "free as in freedom of speech" (libre, free software) and "free as in free beer" (gratis, freeware) were adopted. Many in the free software movement feel strongly about the freedom to use the software, make modifications, etc., whether or not this freely usable software is to be exchanged for money. Therefore, this distinction became important.

This article seems to only explain the distinction between "libre" and "gratis", and treats the idea of beer being free as a given.

Is there a particular culture where "free beer" is a common phrase? Why not say "free as in beer, not free as in lunch"?

Free as in lunch also exists in anglo culture, with the notable example of There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). The concept of free beer sounds natural because there are multiple contexts where you could potentially expect beer to suddenly become free for whatever reason (someone pays for a round, festivals, college dorms etc.) Free pizza would be a good substitute as well. Some consumables just have associations that aren't completely easy to explain to someone not familiar with them.

From the Wiki article

> Richard Stallman summarised the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer."

Free as in lunch would also work, but I'd hazard to guess that "free beer" is more relatable for the target audience Stallman was addressing. That being - computer enthusiasts ("nerds") who skew(ed) largely male, 16 - 35 (roughly).

It’s common at western weddings and other lavish parties for beer and other drinks to be served to the guests for free. Hence, “free beer.” When people say to one another “hey, come to the party, they’ve got free beer!” It’s instantly understood that the beer is gratis, not libre.

The german Wikipedia has an article on free beer ("Freibier") if you do not mind a foreign language source.

Here is an excerpt with an example:

"Eines der wahrscheinlich größten Freibierfeste ist jedes Jahr das Sommerfest der Braustudenten an der Technischen Universität München am Standort Weihenstephan in Freising. Dort werden jedes Jahr über 150 Hektoliter Freibier von über 300 Brauereien ausgeschenkt."

Translation: "One of the most likely largest free beer fests in the world is the annual summer fest of brewer students at the Technical University of Munich at the location of Weihenstephan in Freising. Every year, more than 150 hectoliter [i.e. 15000 liters] of free beer from over 300 breweries is served."

Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freibier

Also, Die Draufgänger's "Looking for Freibier" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLZtnqnV2Jc plays with both semantics.

> 150 hectoliter

It is funny. When I worked in the US people thought I tried to be funny or smart when I said "2 hecto gram" about weight or used decimeters.

It’s not as complex as you’re choosing to make it. When someone tells you, “There’s free beer at Oktoberfest,” is your first thought that the beer has no monetary cost, or that the beer is unencumbered by particular legal restrictions?

Now someone tells you, “There’s free speech at Oktoberfest.” Is your first thought that there’s no monetary cost to expression, or that the expression is unencumbered by particular legal restrictions?

(Happily, Oktoberfest has both.)

>I'm just wondering in what context or culture beer is considered free (gratis).

When beer is described as “free,” it’s understood to be gratis. When speech is described as free, it’s understood to be libre. These are used as examples for more ambiguous situations, since software can be one, the other, both, or neither.

>Why not say "free as in beer, not free as in lunch"?

For three reasons:

1. “Free for lunch” is a way more common phrase, and it already means “unencumbered by schedule or previous commitments.” 2. “Free lunch” is already part of a more common phrase which states that a free lunch cannot exist, ruining the effectiveness. 3. Beer and lunch are both expected to be gratis, not libre. Exceptions (http://freebeer.org/) have to explain themselves over that hill.

Right, I think I was getting hung up on the "beer" word because "free speech" is a comparatively much more common phrase. But it sounds like almost any word that doesn't imply "libre" could be used to illustrate the point. I suppose beer is as good a choice as any.

You are overthinking it here. It is not a carefully thought out phrase, but something Stallman came up with in a speech for a particular audience once, and it stuck.

Worth noting: beer is encumbered by legal restrictions in many parts of the world. In these places, even free beer is still not legally available to anyone under 16, 18, 21, etc...

At boat shows, a certain boating magazine guru will host "cruiser parties" after hours where you may attend and have beer and pay no money. To you, the beer is free.

There's no such thing a free lunch. Ie. Time-spent

Time spent chugging a beer is regained by removing your inhibition to say "this conversation is over."

It’s a phrase used to describe free software.

> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

It means if someone says beer is free in whatever circumstance, we can assume they mean no cost. They don’t mean the beer has liberties or is unencumbered.

If anti-prohibitionists chanted “free the beer!” that would be a different story.

the expression confused me when I first heard it to. I think it should change to “free as in peanuts” or “free as in stickers” or something. It’s rare that you’ll find free beer

Peanuts already means something with a value so close to free that it’s not worth worrying about. “That’s just peanuts compared to space.”

Might be true of stickers too. To a parent, “free as stickers” probably means something that’s likely to go right in the trash bin without being used.

Naming is tough.

This has bothered me for years! I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who didn't already understand the concept of "free software" for whom this expression was actually helpful. (Maybe RMS lives in a world where there's a lot of free beer.)

A better way of explaining this is surely that the "free" in free software is about freedom rather than about its being zero cost.

If you go to a cookout or a party, people often bring more beer than they drink, thus people who didn't bring any can get free beer.

That kind of communal donation is similar to how people donate their time and effort to open source projects.

> What does "free as in beer" mean? In what way is beer free?

I believe another (perhaps simpler) way to say this, that should be understandable by English speaking people, is "free as in gratis".

Tangent: the title is unfair to bullshit, which is a useful substance in its own right, as fertiliser.

Absolutely, it made Peru extremely prosperous for decades [1], though you must use bird instead of bull.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Era

> Apple’s change will limit their ability to run personalized ads. To make ends meet, many will have to start charging you subscription fees...

It's pretty audacious for Facebook to try to protect its 42% profit margin / $70 billion yearly profit with a story about the little guy just trying to make "ends meet".

For the sake of accuracy, FB's recent margin has been 28-35%, and the $70B number was 2019 revenue, not profit. They made $18B profit in 2019, and look to do around $25B profit this year.

Facebook is always against the choice of privacy and all about control disguised as socializing. Didn't Zuckerberg once claim the time of privacy is over? Except his of course.

Just saw a green dot in my iPhone toolbar while scrolling in Instagram, meaning Instagram looks at me when I watch at pics...

Boy I'm about to delete my account, haven't found the button yet because it's well hidden, but trust me, I'll do it! (haha)

Only use Instagram on desktop + browser. Switch your user agent in the browser to mobile and enjoy a less invasive experience.

What...is this true?

I've been working on a side-project that aims to be a self-hosted alternative to centralized social media. The core idea that anyone should be able to easily host their own private website where they control access and retain control over their data. With RSS protected by http basic auth, people can create their own feeds. I'd love some feedback on this model if anyone cares to share some thoughts: https://simpleblogs.org

"The information used for tracking belongs to the users whose behavior and interests is being tracked"

I don't understand why this should be considered true. If I had a business and I jotted down in a notebook how rich I guessed each customer was as they walked in, based on things like what they're wearing and what they bought, and then used that to determine how rich I thought my average customer was, why would that information belong to anyone else but me?

In some places, following a person around and building up a dossier on them is considered stalking and is illegal.

True, but I'm talking about the data collected specifically. Not all of it is gained from tracking users across the internet - lots of it is just building a profile based on what you do on their site, and potentially their partners' sites. That data doesn't seem to me to be owned by the users. But I totally agree that what is an obvious problem is the following of users around the web.

> Facebook’s argument is along the lines of arguing that the police shouldn’t crack down on burglaries because doing so might hurt pawn shops that have been thriving during a years-long crime spree.

Except that Facebook isn't benefitting from criminal activity, is it? This is a case of a classically naive public who really doesn't care one way or the other.

At least in Europe you could very well think so with the GDPR.

They've been fined for where they've violated the law. I'd argue not enough, but that's the fault of the regulators and lawmakers. Still doesn't put FB's activities comparable to the pawn shop analogy unless there are valid claims that these other apps and sites are breaking the law in the data they collect and provide to Facebook.

Facebook has only been fined once for GDPR violations, and that has to do with a bureaucratic technicality. The actual cases against Facebook have been held up for ages [1]. You can look up all GDPR fines here: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

1: https://noyb.eu/en/open-letter

> This is a case of a classically naive public who really doesn't care one way or the other.

It is hard to know whether or not someone cares about something when they have no choice. Most of my family members think their devices are listening to them constantly, but what are their options? They aren't going to get rid of their phones and TVs.

> Except that Facebook isn't benefitting from criminal activity, is it?

Facebook's activities may very well be illegal (eg: criminal) given the allegations in the recent lawsuit filed against Google.

The people using Facebook to perpetuate frauds often pay Facebook for advertisements and that can be interpreted to benefit from criminal activity.

How can a post with 453 points posted only 5 hours ago not be on the front page? Currently # 37

another post's stats:

    26. Cyberpunk 2077: How 2020’s biggest video game launch turned into a shambles (theguardian.com)
    126 points by helsinkiandrew 15 hours ago | hide | 209 comments

You need to give less weight to flagging, maybe?

Neither company has pure motives here. Apple just so happens to take a 30% cut of in-app purchases, so they stand to benefit immensely from a change to that model. They also have their own ad platform that will benefit from this.

Both sides are concealing their selfish motivations under the guise of altruism.

> They also have their own ad platform that will benefit from this.

No, not since 2017: https://developer.apple.com/support/iad/

Interesting that they are posting a bunch of new reqs for their ads platform

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=ads%20platform&so...

Apple still has search ads: https://searchads.apple.com/

From the first of those listings: “Today, our technology and services power advertising in Search Ads in the App Store and Apple News.”

This meets one of the criteria you specified (“They also have their own ad platform […]”), but not the other (“[…] that will benefit from this”).

Search Ads don't count why?

Apple’s search ads will indeed benefit greatly from this change. When an app developer runs an ad on Facebook, and a user converts and buys the app, attributing that conversion requires “cross app tracking” that will be banned by this update. On the other hand, if the developer runs the ad though App Store search, Apple will be happy to attribute the sale to get paid. One could reasonably guess that the real purpose of this change is to take that market from Facebook.

That’s quite impressive research! Why did you decide to look for this?

I just googled "Apple Ad platform" lol

Facebook's statement referenced in the ad: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ios-14-apple-privacy-...

> It’s actually quite interesting that Apple does not force software updates, or perform them in a hard-to-disable-or-detect manner.

Since at least iOS 14, automatic updates are defaulted to on in the out of box setup flow, and it's up to you to go in and turn them off, several screens later in the settings app once the OOBE is complete. It tells you it's doing this but offers no ability to opt out.

Subsequent updates have restored the autoupdate switch to on, explicitly reverting my choice. It's now part of my iOS point release update checklist to ensure that autoupdates are disabled.

I don't think Gruber is being entirely up-front here. Apple very aggressively wants all iOS devices on the latest supported version.

You know, I think there's a number of separate issues in general. Assume the tracking and collecting of personal data from other sites is fine, that there's nothing wrong with it. They could still a) not try to buy up all their competition and b) not pollute the feed with things people don't want to see. Why should clicking 'interested' in an event broadcast it to all my friends? Why do I get pages in my feed my friends commented on? One action in particular may not tell you anything about the company but when you keep getting predatory behavior it maybe says something about how the company (or 'engagement engineers' or whatever) views the public

While this article is about Facebook. It is clear to me this is a fight of who gets to sell to me: either Apple or someone else.

As long as Apple is disclosing the same information in their apps as they are forcing FB to do. Meh.

Not sure if you have used macOS or iOS lately but for [edit: two years] now—and well before this public spat with Facebook—they show a privacy disclosure splash screen before turning on many features for the first time. And yes, the Apple apps in the App Store have the nutrition labels.

These apps and some system features also go through the same dialogs for mic/camera/photos/etc. access as third-party apps.

They also wrote an extensive webpage with several whitepapers on how different features are designed for privacy: https://www.apple.com/privacy/features/

Apple's own advertising network, iAd, was discontinued, and now as far as I know the only way they are involved in paid advertising of third-party products at all is through App Store search result placement.

> at least a year now (...) they show a privacy disclosure splash screen before turning on many features for the first time.

This has been the case from the start of the Apple App Store. Here is a 3 minute video of Steve Jobs talking about it in 2010 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo (Zuckerberg comes up too funnily enough).

I was referring to these, introduced two years ago in iOS 11.3:

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/01/26/apple-privacy-icon-...

I think you are referring to the "Allow Facebook to use your location?" pop-ups. Notably, these have gotten progressively more sophisticated—apps now have to specify a reason for the data request. You can block access to backgrounded apps, and opt to provide a coarse location instead of your full GPS fix. Other protections apply to photo sharing, etc.

What are you talking about?

Apple doesn’t sell your personal data.

And this has nothing to do with what is disclosed - both Apple and Facebook are disclosing what they collect.

Google doesn't either, but that doesn't make them as safe. In fact, I think there is very little data that Facebook sells or makes available to partners, since that data collection and analysis is where they make themselves marketable.

Apple is only different in what they don't collect, and what they do to prevent others from collecting, too.

Well, that and the fact that although Google doesn't sell data to third parties, it has certainly monetized that data and built their business off of it.

“Apple is only different in what they don't collect“. This seems essentially false.

Facebook makes almost all of its money out of targeting ads based on user profiling. Also true for Google.

Apple makes none of its money that way. Apple is the same as almost all businesses in this regard.

On the German language we have the word "gratis" that's equal to "for free". It's heavily used in advertisements like "get this phone gratis and for 0 € (but pay 29€ per month)". I don't trust advertisements and never did. I hate it how the customer gets lied to with every word, sound and visual. Facebook is nothing different, they are a company kept up for selling ads. I not mad at them, it's just hard to ignore them when they start to cry because they try to lie to their customers...

German does a better job of separating the words for free as in speech ("frei") and free as in beer ("gratis", "kostenlos", "umsonst").

But curiously, it's exactly the other way around for "einfach", which has two drastically different meanings ("easy" and "simple") that Germans tend to conflate because German only has one word for it.

</linguistics-funfact>

You're absolutely right! In English it's easy for me to distinguish the meanings but in german it's hard to find the difference and to find alternatives.

The interesting part of this campaign is that targeted advertising doesn’t even work.

I wonder how Google and Facebook will fare when that becomes common knowledge.

I think you are right but I have no data only analogy.

It feels like when your new girlfriend tries to buy you a Christmas gift based on your interests, but because you are so deep into the esoterica of your passion it is near impossible for her to get you something you don't already have or have already passed over.

At least with the gift it was the thought that counted. ;-)

I land on the Apple side of this argument, but the best defense of Facebook comes from Ben Thompson’s Stratechery.

He does a podcast with John Gruber so they’ll likely talk about it at some point.

Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences:

https://stratechery.com/2020/privacy-labels-and-lookalike-au...

> Without personalized ads, Facebook data shows that the average small business advertiser stands to see a cut of over 60% in their sales for every dollar they spend.

It seems like the not-so-thinly veiled complaint is that Facebook wants to change what they’ve been charging but that their service will no longer provide the value it once did.

That doesn’t sound like an Apple problem to me.

This guy is an Apple fanboy. How can you even argue in favour of its "privacy protections" when the OS has embedded advertising IDs you can only reset but not remove, logs and reports every application you launch to the motherboard, etc? The FB case is embarrassing, but let's not also drink the Apple kool-aid too.

The embedded advertising is is designed to be a single point of data that resets on its own so that advertisers can only use it for fingerprinting. It’s a thin line to protect privacy without scaring away the whole industry and dear god, the Android situation is much, much worse.

Let's not kid ourselves; an OS with an advertising ID is an assault on people's privacy and basic computing freedoms. The android situation is much worse, yes, but apple is still giving in to surveillance capitalism and nothing they do short of staying away from it can be regarded as a "privacy protection". Their advertising ID endorses surveillance, it does not protect you from it.

I sometimes forget there are ads on the internet.. occasionally when I am on new devices without blockers set up and I see the ad layer net, it feels so dystopian.. almost unreal..

Look at the verbiage of the ad, Facebook lost its way. It needs to be replaced.

For 2021, we have great things in the pipeline, with new and enhanced tools and resources to help you improve the performance of your app or game to reach a wider audience.

I guess Facebook wouldn't be happy with tab containers I use in Mozilla, or the pihole I use for DNS.

This ad from Facebook reads like something an abusive partner would say to force the abused not to leave them.

I bet Facebook has forced updates.

Now, seriously, why are you still on Facebook? No, seriously.

I left when Cambridge Analytica broke. Reflecting back, FB gave me very little. Now, 4 years later, it feels like complacent inertia there has not been a mass exit from them.

> reducing high-quality free content

I grew tired of paywall sites in my news feed a couple months back so I started hiding them in google news. It's nice to not run into them but the amount of "quality" content I now see is a number approaching 0.

Get ready for the FB smartphone, totally free (ad supported) of course!

They tried it circa 2012/13. It was a partnership with Microsoft/Nokia, meant to get people in developing countries hooked on Facebook at a very low price. The phone was crap though, even by dev county standards. I remember testing it, and everything took foreeeever.

On a bright side, it was the same time when FB put a ton of effort into improving their mobile web experience, realizing how bad it was on bad phones with slow networks.

Seems like they would need to have a compatible Android fork for this ... anyone know what pieces would need to be carved out and rebuilt for FB to mount a successful effort? Ie they don’t want this to benefit Google in any way.

Or is there some other viable mobile OS they could use? Not obvious to me.

Fuchsia?/

I understand why people are upset with Facebook. I find it interesting that same people don't seem to be upset with Apple, while Apple is largely playing the same game.

Forget all you know about Facebook ad practices for a second, and take a look at what Apple is doing, but putting "Mom and Pop LLC" in place of Facebook.

Apple is using their enormous power to essentially pick and choose what is allowed to execute on your device. Sure, they give user a "choice" to either restrict and app, or to allow it, but they never, ever, give user the same choices about Apple itself. Apple "helping" users to restrict others is no different from Microsoft installing internet Explorer for everyone, to "help" users browser the internet.

In this case Apple is getting all the goodies about the user: their location, their usage, their connections, everything. Meanwhile, they are blocking others from having it.

The difference is that Apple is waving the freedom-fighter flag first, thereby making everyone else look bad in comparison.

This is quite the false equivalence.

> their location, their usage, their connections, everything

Which Apple-made apps have access to your location without your prior explicit approval?

The iPhone itself? I mean, I am more than happy to be proven wrong. But can we know, for 100% that while I am simply using my phone, Apple isn't actually collecting its location via their own APIs, or those of my cell carrier?

>In this case Apple is getting all the goodies about the user: their location, their usage, their connections, everything. Meanwhile, they are blocking others from having it.

Because Apple doesn't seem interested in collecting all this data in the first place. If they were, it'd be straight up hypocrisy, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Don't get me wrong, I value open platforms myself, but right now it seems like the choice in mobile OSes is largely between an open platform that leaks data like a sieve and a restrictive platform that at least has some semblance of privacy. I keep flipping back and forth and hope for a better option one day, but I'm glad there's at least someone putting pressure on the advertising panopticon.

Right. I think what I am trying to say is that by focusing on illusion of privacy, Apple can take a long view on abusing the said privacy. They are all trying to murder the other guy with whatever tools they've got. FB is using ads and data, Apple is using their device strong hold, MSFT is going after business users...etc.

It's not that one is better or worse, but I think it's important to recognize that each one has its flaws.

Apple has found out that privacy is marketable and that there's money to be made. This is a good trend despite their own hypocrisy.

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