Hacker News Reader

Comment by samizdis | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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. 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'.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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"

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.

> 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is the general public.

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

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

> 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

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 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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com