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Comment by permo-w | Hacker News Reader

Dan Levy, Facebook’s head of advertising, on Apple: “This is about a long-term view that is about anti-personalised advertising, and we think is trying to take the world back 10 or 20 years.” Who does he think he’s winning over here? That’s not a rhetorical question. To me, that sounds brilliant

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> we think is trying to take the world back 10 or 20 years

That's like someone from the oil industry claiming using renewables is like going back to the 19th century.

Privacy is (hopefully) the future, not the past.

As a resident of Alberta, CA (deep oil country) - That happens. We apparently cannot and never will be able to subsist on renewables, and oil is our past, present, and future.

Believe it or not, some people love personalised ads. I know several (they all happen to be women, but I'm sure many men also like them). It's a bit of a tautology - they wouldn't be so profitable and dominant if people weren't clicking on them, so somebody is doing it, and in massive numbers. They wouldn't like going back - my mom is already angry that using my home wifi messes up the ads she gets.

Obviously this shouldn't be read as an endorsement for FB's practices - I think they are as scummy as Apple's anti-competitive bullying of iOS developers. It's unbelievable that we're now openly longing for something that looks a lot like the Windows software market circa 2001: compared to today, it was a paradise of open competition and almost-entire privacy.

I can see your point, but all Apple is doing here is telling users that Facebook wants to track them, and letting them opt-in or opt-out.

If someone is in favor of being tracked, they can allow it.

Facebook's objection is to letting people know about the tracking, and giving them an easier way to avoid it if they so choose.

If they love them so much, they can easily enable them for facebook on iOS, just because these people exist doesn't mean it should be the default setting.

What really surprises me are my friends.

I've known them for years, we shared the best and worst moments of our lives, they are all intelligent people, at least for my standards, but when they use my phone to browse a website they think my phone is broken because I use an ad blocker and they see white squares were ads were supposed to appear.

They think ads are normal and their absence means something is wrong with the software.

They've watched them on TV and do the same with YouTube, they've listened to them on the radio and are not bothered if they hear them on Spotify.

But most of all they actually click on them and buy stuff through them.

I think getting rids of personalized ads is an uphill battle.

Personalized ads used to be "hey this specific item is great for you". Now the targeting is leading to the equivalent of harassment as ad-targeting retargets again and again.

So yeah, I'll take the less harassing version of ads (or no ads even if I have to pay).

Also I don't want to allow FB to pull another Cambridge Analytica.

> Also I don't want to allow FB to pull another Cambridge Analytica.

Yeah.

So many people took away the wrong lesson from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook wants everyone to see "Cambridge Analytica did something bad and Facebook stopped it", when the real story was "Cambridge Analytica did something bad, convinced us it made money, and Facebook stopped it by platforming it and charging Cambridge Analytica for it". The Cambridge Analytica models led directly to Facebook's personalized ads system, with almost everything Cambridge Analytica asked for being added to the ads platform itself. Almost everything that was shady and questionably ethical about what Cambridge Analytica was doing didn't stop being shady and questionably ethical when Facebook simply in housed all of that tracking for "ad personalization" and started selling it as a service to any advertiser willing to pay for it.

> Believe it or not, some people love personalised ads.

Then, they can opt in. Why complain about someone asking for consent?

I don't think the person you're replying to agrees with fb's actions here

Yes, it’s just a very simple point to make to the people who say they like targeted ads (which I have seen quite often, although this sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me). I see my wording could have been better.

> anti-personalised advertising

That is almost Orwellianly hilarious.

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