Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes | Hacker News Reader

Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

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446 pointsasimpletune328 comments

It's simultaneously remarkable and utterly unremarkable that Facebook has been dragged kicking and screaming into building a consent screen for this kind of tracking.

Watching this tracking notification conflict unfold in the media has really helped me to refine where I stand on this: if a business depends on non-consensual tracking to be able to survive, then I'd prefer that the business has to fold before stripping users of their opportunity to understand and agree to the surveillance infrastructure at issue here.

You're more forgiving than I am. As far as I'm concerned, individual-targeted advertising has such inherently perverse incentives that even those starting out with good intentions (e.g. consensual opt-in) will eventually find themselves engaged in unethical, privacy-eroding behavior as a matter of course.

Consider what would happen if you outlawed individual-targeted advertising. Ad relevancy falls overall. What then?

Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really. Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors. Companies have to spend money on ads because the competition is spending money on ads. It doesn't matter how absolutely effective the campaign is, as long as it's relatively more effective than your rival's.

Would consumers spend less money? No, a consumer has a budget that is independent of the relevancy of the ads they see.

The advertising industry thrived for a long time in the absence of individual user tracking. It could do so again.

>> Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors

I would like to know how this conclusion was reached. By that logic, the advertising industry would not really need individual targeting at all

Individual ad targeting is needed only as soon as someone does it. It is not “needed” per se.

For sure there are some advertisers, they would not be able to advertise if there is no individual targeting. Problem is for one of those honest businesses, there are 10 dishonest ones abusing the individual targeting.

If it is targeted without explicit direct consent of the targeted individual, it is not honest, at least from my personal point of view. If it was for me, targeted advertising would illegal.

> By that logic, the advertising industry would not really need individual targeting at all

You're right, they don't. But the point is not to argue that ad relevancy itself is bad. In a vacuum, improved ad relevancy is good! However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of user tracking.

To use an example, on a Facebook group for gamers, it would be fine and dandy for Facebook to establish a market where PC hardware and video game companies bid to show ads to users browsing the group page. Note that this doesn't have to involve advertisers receiving any identifiable data about who the ad was shown to, and nor does it have to involve Facebook tracking your behavior online in order to show ads based on other sites you've visited, e.g. gaming communities on Reddit. The targeting is as simple as "show the game ads to the people in the game group"; it's extremely coarse demographic-based targeting that doesn't require any sort of persistent user profiling. It's no more of a privacy issue than back in the old-timey days when a company would buy an ad in an enthusiast magazine.

>> But the point is not to argue that ad relevancy itself is bad. In a vacuum, improved ad relevancy is good! However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of user tracking

Agreed, this is where the incentives of the users are misaligned with the incentives of the ad tracking companies. But users don't have a choice, hence individual ad tracking.

> However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of user tracking.

Spot on.

How good or relevant adverts doesn't matter if the way the information is collected is by unethical. If you went to a store and while you were shopping, an employee attached a tracking device to your car, it would clearly be a violation of your rights and you'd be rightly pissed. The equivalent of this happens all the time with software on your phone.

Yet here we have people defending Facebook and Google for trying to protect their spy-monopoly.

This would just return to 2000-esque state of affairs, where the ad model was based on selling page views, clicks or actions.

That model favors small publishers (as niche advertisers flock to niche publications) and disadvantages large generic publishers (social networks, email clients, portals).

> That model favors small publishers (as niche advertisers flock to niche publications) and disadvantages large generic publishers (social networks, email clients, portals).

I agree. Advertisers would have to go back to contextual targeting, identifying websites that are likely to appeal the target audience, rather than simply buying the audience programmatically on Google's ad network

Which in turn would create an incentive to actually create websites attracting different audiences?

I’m not entirely convinced this is true, but equally if it is I see it as an absolute win.

Have you ever spent time around advertising people? This is exactly how they talk to each other. An agency shooting a commercial for a hospital in Houston, TX shot in Amsterdam because the director wanted to. Another agency person bragged to a person in another agency about how much they spent. It's a game to these people. Once you become a brand, it is less about advertising a product/lifestyle as much as it is to keep the name prevelant in people's mind.

>” Would consumers spend less money? No...”

I’m not sure about that. A lot of advertising is about appearances and superficial things. Example. Do we need cars in the US to get from place to place (NYC, etc excepted) Yes! Does it have to have bells and whistles? No. Can an entry level car do the job in the great majority of cases? Does it have to be a “luxury” brand? Or an upscale model?

Spending would go down. Good, bad? That’s another discussion.

I think there is the question of what people would do with the money they save by buying only the entry-level car. Would everyone really just save the money? I expect people would just spend it on something else (that maybe has more effective advertising, even if via word-of-mouth or something else). So spending would remain roughly the same. I don't have any hard research I can personally point to though.

Given how many people seem to find themselves with crippling debt, or unable to save enough of a buffer to handle unexpected (but not especially unusual) expenses, I'd be inclined to say "good".

Much of the advertising industry isn't about getting you to choose Company A's product rather than Company B's, or to choose the deluxe version rather than the entry-level one; it's about getting you to buy things you would never even have considered otherwise, and certainly have no "need" for.

Exactly! How do you grow by 25% quarter over quarter without discovering new business models? "Knowing" us even more and getting us to fork over 25% more! Or moving spend from a site outside of FB to within it.

> Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors.

This is absolutely not the case. Google’s biggest ad clients achieve pretty incredible ROI (called ROAS) on each dollar they spend. And they track these obsessively—I supported a large travel client that had a small (but highly skilled) engineering team dedicated exclusively to their SEM bidding and monitoring systems.

The reason digital advertising is so valuable is pretty exclusively related to attribution and tracking. If companies weren’t sure they could make so much money with their spend, their budgets would absolutely drop.

Advertising has existed without this feature in other mediums forever

'When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?'

https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...

What happens when small brands don't spend on digital ads? Nothing Happening is the worst possible outcome.

I do believe small brands can get more ROI using social media than wasting their money on digital ads.

Isn't part of the problem that Facebook limits the reach of accounts once they get to a certain size? My understanding is that they basically block you from broadcasting to your friends. The ROI of a small business is then limited because after a point you have to effectively pay for digital ads anyway.

Matthew Inman posted about this https://twitter.com/Oatmeal/status/923250055540219904

As an aside, this also reflects on the honesty of their ad campaign about supporting small business. If they really cared about small business they wouldn't make them pay to reach the audience they created on their platform.

That's a good point. I didn't know about that, and I'll have to think about it.

Anyway paying FB's mafia style extortion probably isn't the solution.

Companies obsess about these metrics because they don't want their ROI to be less than their competitors', because that would put them at a competitive disadvantage. It's not in doubt that individual-targeted advertising is more effective than than the alternatives; by eliminating user tracking you would be decreasing ROI across the board, but that's fine because, again, all that you're fighting for is a higher ROI than your competitors. And to reiterate, it's not like consumer dollars are just vanishing into the ether; every dollar a consumer makes either gets spent or saved, and regardless of the ROI of a specific ad campaign they've still got to buy dish soap or diapers or what have you. Just because advertising ROI drops does not mean that the company revenue/profit will drop; if it did, that probably means another company has better ROI (and if they can do so, and as long as they're not tracking users, then good for them!).

This model is based on the assumption that ads are for things the consumers already know about. This is not correct.

Example: I type “housing insurance” into Google and the “organic” results are dominated by the mega insurance companies.

Without targeted advertising, the ads are also dominated by mega insurance companies because they have the biggest advertising budgets.

With targeted advertising, I can see an ad from a provider specific to my location that I didn’t know existed who offers way better rates because of the different risk pool.

The same applies for thousands of other products/services that are localized.

Similarly, the ads for someone interested in DIY vs someone who is happy to pay for skilled labor are drastically different when you search “drywall repair”.

> Without targeted advertising, the ads are also dominated by mega insurance companies because they have the biggest advertising budgets. > With targeted advertising, I can see an ad from a provider specific to my location that I didn’t know existed who offers way better rates because of the different risk pool. The same applies for thousands of other products/services that are localized.

You're talking about geo targeting here, which imo should still be possible. That's an in-the-moment targeting akin to an advertiser choosing to show their ad on a local news site. This doesn't require extensive tracking and profiling of users.

Fair enough, it’s not clear what level of profiling we’re eliminating. That’s why I also gave the example of a DIY profiled customer vs a “pays for handymen” profiled customer.

On both examples, the user can trivially reach the desired search outcome by manually adding their location or "diy"/"for hire" to the search query, without the search engine needing to know a single thing about them.

Agree, but the users don’t know to include that. And Google became dominant because they learned how to attach that context automatically.

I don’t think these examples require individual targeting at all, but I agree with your point.

When you are looking for housing insurance and Facebook shows you divorce attorneys, because they know you’re gonna need one pretty soon, that is a spend that would be affected.

There’s a big difference between localisation of ads (which the industry has always achieved) and targeted ads that know you are interested in DIY vs hiring a contractor.

Saving that DIY enthusiast a single modification of their google search is not worth narrowing their entire experience of the web for, or worth giving up their privacy for.

And to OP’s original point. If your business relies on invading the privacy of others, your business should not exist

> Saving that DIY enthusiast a single modification of their google search is not worth narrowing their entire experience of the web for, or worth giving up their privacy for.

Sure, but let’s be clear that it is a trade off. If you’ve ever seen non-techies Google things, they don’t provide the contextual clues that we instinctively know to include. The majority of the population just types in “drywall repair” and expects the computer to know what they “obviously mean”.

> Similarly, the ads for someone interested in DIY vs someone who is happy to pay for skilled labor are drastically different when you search “drywall repair”.

Google doesn't need to "Track and target" me personally to know that a web request I make comes from a specific location. Knowing I bought cycling shorts last week isn't going to increase the relevance of that search. Likewise, the reverse is true.

FWIW, have you tried searching for something like Drywall repair? Google's results for that type of search are almost identical to what you get on DDG, you just have to scroll past a page of Google garbage first.

Also... it's not too tremendously difficult to type "Drywall repair in Hoboken NY", that's what I do by default regardless.

> you just have to scroll past a page of Google garbage first.

'Google garbage', aka Google Maps listings (which DDG also has above their search results, although it uses Apple Maps).

You didn’t read my drywall example close enough. It’s not location specific, it’s specific to the type of customer. Should we be advertising a hardware store or should we be advertising “Teds drywall repair service”?

As Ted, I don’t want my ads wasted on people that want to repair things themselves. As a customer who doesn’t care how it gets fixed, I don’t want an ad for Home Depot.

I find it unlikely Google presents drastically different results (or adverts) for someone who is interested in DIY versus someone who might be looking for a contractor. Mostly because it's a terrible thing for Google to try and guess.

While Ted might find it convenient to target people based on whether they are wealthy homeowners who hire contractors or DIY guys, I have no interest in sharing that information with Google (or Facebook). It's neat for Ted, not so neat for me.

Other things which might result in "better" advertising which I don't like:

  - Companies scanning my license plate while I'm at Home Depot.
  - Someone camping the county building permits office with a video camera and facial recognition software.
  - The phone company forwarding my phone records to advertisers.

All of these are similarly invasive to Google & Facebook's tracking and equally disgusting.

This is all particularly true since just buying the Adword for "Drywall Repair" in my area, would likely yield the exact same results without tracking.

It would get rid of a lot of verticals that only run with positive ROAS. Ecommerce, political donations, etc. We won't spend on direct to donate ads unless the ROI is strong and I know that is not possible without FB and their data.

At least someone in this thread gets it. Ad tracking really is about attribution, personalized ads are secondary nice-to-have.

This is how small businesses figure out their advertising budget. Where are our customers coming from, or more importantly, where are they not coming from, so we know where to spend or not spend our limited resources?

But I’m not surprised this isn’t pointed out more often. The hardcore privacy zealots really blow up when you try to explain that it’s mostly innocuous.

The tracking technology itself has a much wider scope of application than "small businesses focusing their development budget". Ads are used as a commercial justification for broadening the larger ability to surveil.

It can be mostly innocuous. And I feel no sympathy for facebook’s business model here. I don’t want my attention to be bought and sold like a horse between faceless companies. I’d much rather pay $1/year to WhatsApp than have the content of my personal life analysed by the world’s marketing teams. I want to be the customer, not the product. I want the software I use to be primarily designed around my needs - not the needs of advertisers.

Because (all other concerns and objections aside) the intent doesn't matter.

Apologies for the crude analogy, but if I install a camera in your bathroom and say, "okay, technically I could watch you poop, but the only reason I'm actually doing this is to figure out when you're out of toilet paper", that explanation won't leave you satisfied.

Similarly, if someone is tracking me across the web and trying to link my identity across multiple sites/devices, I don't really care whether or not they're worried about attribution. The concerns about attribution are secondary to the fact that they're still watching everything I do online.

Filming me defecating in the privacy of my home is not comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value traveling from my computer to another.

Also, please remember that this conversation is very specifically about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA, not about general web tracking or other data vacuuming issues. The fact that these two separate issues get conflated is part of the problem.

> about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA

Which is used to uniquely identify me across apps, a totally equivalent level of tracking as identifying me across websites. It is the same result, just on a different platform.

And all of this data gets combined and utilized with the "other data vacuuming issues" you're talking about. You can't treat those like isolated issues, the unique identifiers across websites/apps enable the data vacuuming.

You're arguing that these identifiers aren't primarily being used to build profiles, that they're mostly innocuous, and then you're saying that the fact that profiles are being built and data vacuuming is happening is a separate issue that's not relevant to the current conversation? No, the data vacuuming wouldn't be possible to nearly the same degree without persistent identifiers. That makes it relevant.

> is not comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value traveling from my computer to another.

You're arguing about a matter of degree. The point I'm making is that violating my privacy doesn't become automatically OK just because the advertising industry promises me they won't look at the extra data they're getting. And I think the reasoning behind why it's not OK is the same in both scenarios -- because in both scenarios, it's not reasonable to trust the person gathering that data to keep it secure or to never misuse it.

People bring up "quasi-anonymous" as if it's some kind of perfect defense that puts these identifiers into a separate category of information, but it's not. If it was actually anonymous, you wouldn't need to put the "quasi" in front of it. But if it makes you feel better, I'll put a camera in your bathroom and then disassociate the video stream from your home address or name, and then I'll blur your face with an AI. Then the video stream will be quasi-anonymous too. I promise I won't ever try to link it to a real identity, you can trust me.

The point is, it is a violation of my privacy to track every website I visit and every app I use. The reason why a company is doing that doesn't matter.

> Filming me defecating in the privacy of my home is not comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value traveling from my computer to another.

It's not a "Quasi-anonymous" token the moment it's tied to your Facebook account... which is exactly 100% the point here. Facebook wants to be able to tie your off Facebook activity to your Facebook account.

Also, there are some incredibly private things which happen on people's phones. If I went to the courthouse or a DUI lawyer in town, I don't want Facebook to know this. If I have to install an app due to parole restrictions, this shouldn't be a thing Facebook finds out about.

There are piles of other private activities which people keep in the apps they use.

You're too generous. I disagree with the parent that the intent is innocuous.

The intent is almost always to convince people to purchase something where they otherwise wouldn't purchase it - by a mix of catching them in a vulnerable moment, and brainwashing them with repeated exposure over time. It's malicious.

My goal in this conversation isn't to argue one way or the other about the ethics of our current advertising industry in general, it's to make the point that regardless of whether or not someone considers the advertising industry to be moral and/or its data usage innocuous, the tracking is still a problem.

So you mean their REAL purpose is attribution, but they just chose to build giant databases covering peoples locations, friend groups, hobbies, desires, careers, sex, sexual preferences, relationship statuses, political alignment, voting probability, race and more in order to implement a 'secondary nice-to-have'?

And that's better?

As a side point, I don't see why attribution tracking requires any form of cross-site tracking or fingerprinting. It seems like it would be pretty trivial to implement this without all the privacy issues (i.e. just direct the ad to domain.com/ad123 and track the user on-site from there).

None of that has anything to do with this topic. This is about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA. There are no web URLs involved[0] when you click an ad on instagram and it launches another app on your phone. These are separate issues, and I don't entire disagree with the others you brought up.

[0] Before someone comes in to correct me, I know I'm handwaving here. The point stands.

The apps on your phone would not have the ability to suck up isolated pieces of data about your usage and combine them into a single profile with your age/gender/etc... if they didn't have a set of shared identifiers that they could use to associate that data across multiple sources.

It seems very relevant to me. The larger privacy problems wouldn't be quite as bad if there was no way to tell what device an app was running on or who was using it. That seems like it would limit data collection in a pretty significant way.

> None of that has anything to do with this topic. This is about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA.

You don't seem to understand what the implications of the IDFA are. Facebook uses the IDFA to tie your activities together. It is one of the fundamental ways they collect all this data.

This is why they are fighting so hard to maintain it.

> hardcore privacy zealots

Way to lose all credibility.

You aren't necessarily disagreeing - their ROI would be even better if their competitors were spending less.

Or, flipping it: if some advertisers are extremely effective, that pushes up the price for the ones that aren't.

> This is absolutely not the case. Google’s biggest ad clients achieve pretty incredible ROI (called ROAS) on each dollar they spend.

Yet overall advertising spend is relatively flat. It's just shifted from one media to another.

Advertising will not collapse. Companies budgets for advertising is fairly flat as a percentage of revenue. Who get advertising dollars will shift, but even there, not too much.

Nor will we see more advertising. Sites have already bloated sites beyond the capacity of what most people will accept.

What will likely happen is more special interest content will continue to slip behind paywalls... much as it was in magazines and specialist journals you paid for prior to the web.

> This is absolutely not the case. Google’s biggest ad clients achieve pretty incredible ROI (called ROAS) on each dollar they spend.

It's their job to figure out how to best advertise, not mine to hand it to them on a silver platter at my own expense. This is my data, information about me, which they are stealing without my knowledge and profiting from. If someone asked me if they could snoop around in my personal affairs for money, the price would be a hell of a lot higher than the big fat zero I get in return here.

Whatever Google or Facebooks' advertising ROI is, does not make it ethical or interesting to me.

Credit cards get the benefit of knowing where I shop, but at least I know when and how they are getting that information. Likewise, cellular service. It's a price we pay for ubiquitous access to information. But I would cut them bot off as well if there were some way I could.

It's parasitic and it's zero benefit to me.

What could be the end result? I give the algorithms my bank account and they are responsible for restocking my fridge, refilling prescriptions to purchasing books and investing in my stocks?

Some aspiring product manager (of course another algorithm in training) is furiously jotting down all of the above...

What bank account? With everything-as-a-Service, minimalism being trendy (a form of consumerism as a lifestyle), ever shrinking buffers in supply chains, ever shrinking apartments - soon we won't be collecting money on accounts, we'll be paid in and paying with securities. Your position at ACME will entitle you to 100 units of payment, which you'll allocate to different services.

(Note I said 100 units, not 100 units over time - since even now, people tend to get paid monthly, and subscriptions tend to bill monthly, it's only natural to factor out time from the equation...)

> people tend to get paid monthly, and subscriptions tend to bill monthly, it's only natural to factor out time

I know you’re painting a picture of a dystopian future, but isn’t this basically how health insurance works in the USA today?

If the company is public, multiply that by 10.

Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really. Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors

This premise seems wrong to me. It assumes that advertising is always a net positive, regardless of how targeted it is.

As someone who runs a company that built apps and have spent ZERO on advertising and PR, I can tell you that is usually not the case.

In fact, the biggest component of user acquisition cost is the untargeted advertising. Much better to reduce that cost to zero by increasing the viral k-factor and user retention. Those two metrics matter way more than advertising. If you can reduce the ad spend per user, or per customer, you are BETTER off, not worse.

For example, Google adwords nor any other advert network offers NO WAY of targeting MacOS, only iOS and Android, so we couldn’t make any money advertising our Calendars for Mac app.

And trust me we experimented with all kinds of monetization in that app:

https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-43386918

Original article was im ArsTechnica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/there...

https://www.google.com/search?q=qbix+mining&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-...

> Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really.

I disagree. Currently, targeted advertising is able to hold a premium over non-targeted advertising. The more targeted, the higher the premium. Facebook wants to keep up in the arms race with Google (and others) in how targeted it can be.

As both an advertiser and publisher I'd also be far happier without individually targeted advertising. On our websites I would prefer to just show contextual ads, and when advertising I'd honestly rather just get our message out there in places where it's likely to resonate, rather than trying to target a specific person who's ready to buy a car, or whatever.

> if a business depends on non-consensual tracking to be able to survive, then I'd prefer that the business has to fold before stripping users of their opportunity to understand and agree to the surveillance infrastructure at issue here.

Up there with "we can't afford to pay our workers a living wage." Businesses do not have an unalienable right to exist.

"This won't allow us to collect new types of information..."

Yeah, just information you've already been shadily collecting.

From Facebook's consent screen: "This doesn't give us access to new types of information" [emphasis mine]

I don't know whether to laugh out loud or to cry. It literally shows the consumer that - at least according to Apple - the data Facebook was collecting up until now is detailed enough to require an extra prompt.

How exactly is that supposed to reassure someone who would supposedly deny them tracking once the prompt shows?!

Why would anyone agree to this? I don’t see a benefit to letting Facebook or any company track me across the internet. When did we ever decide this was what consumers wanted?

Every time this topic comes up I check Facebooks stock price and realize how detached people are from facebooks revenue driven by the advertisement market.

People like you and I didn't decide that it was what we wanted. We just have no other options, because the companies which impose the terms aggressively snuff out or buy up their competition.

I would argue that people are accepting these terms under duress; "consent" is the wrong word.

The market believes that Facebook et al will be able to continue enforcing their will unilaterally, and that is good for the companies, so their stocks go up.

Everyone has options. I deleted FB years ago. No one actually needs FB.

I agree in principle, and so did I, but there's no denying that it puts a major crimp on your social life. It's wrong that people are forced to decide between accepting predatory terms or losing touch with friendly acquaintances.

Also, if you own a small business, there's a real chance that you'd rely on Facebook for a significant portion of your business, because without a presence on their platforms you had may as well not exist.

> but there's no denying that it puts a major crimp on your social life

In what way? Social lives existed before 2008 when FB went mainstream. I don't have a FB anymore, and I still text my friends for get-togethers.

> In what way?

In the obvious way for some people? It's disingenuous to pretend that opting out of FB doesn't have negative social consequences for some (many?) people, and dismissing their concerns probably isn't a good way to change anyone's mind.

A lot of my friends use social media to stay in touch. Not being on social media would keep me out of the loop, which is not desirable. I try to restrict its usage as much as possible though.

Collect alternative methods of staying in touch with friends you care about before leaving social media (phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, etc.)

Yea. If your friends will abandon you just because you’re not on social media anymore, then I have bad news for you: they probably aren’t really your friends. When I ditched Facebook about 10 years ago, I lost contact with a whole bunch of people who weren't really part of my life anyway, they were simply "names I recognized."

My social life actually got better after dropping social media simply because I'm spending less time scrolling in front of a screen.

> If your friends will abandon you just because you’re not on social media anymore

That's a very binary view of the world that I don't share. But that's not a topic I want to get into.

Can you keep in touch with a certain group of friends through non-social media platforms? Absolutely. I do it daily, but that's not the point.

The point is that staying away from these social media platforms reduces your ability to have a social life. It's quite like saying that you decrease your chances of finding work without a driving license or cellphone number.

I could probably get away without social media today (modulo telegram/whatsapp). But at what point would I surrender? Most people of my generation use it, and it looks like newer generations will have even higher usages.

I deleted my facebook account a long time ago, but I definitely do not get invitations to some parties and events because of that. Facebook events are the easiest way to invite people to a party or other gathering.

> I definitely do not get invitations to some parties and events [..]

Our 7 year old goes to an arts and crafts centre, in the aftermath of the furore over the WhatsApp Terms of Service update the organizers changed their contact details to suggesting reaching them via Signal instead. So we switched. Job done.

Yes, valid points. Also don't think they should hold social interactions hostage in an effort to not lose their grip on selling your attention span. If their product is worth paying for or the individuals in question are too cheap to pay for it without using ads then so be it. Let them monetize on ads, but I don't expect anyone to give a shit about small businesses profiting off our data. I didn't agree to support them by selling my data so I don't feel any emotional attachment to their situation.

> if you own a small business, there's a real chance that you'd rely on Facebook for a significant portion of your business

Source?

Even if this is true for some types of small business, in some markets, it's a bit of a stretch to claim this applies across the board.

> but there's no denying that it puts a major crimp on your social life.

I completely deny that.

I deleted Facebook when I was 25 and never once missed it. It never once put a crimp on my social life because my social life was never really organised around facebook in the first place. I still wanted to keep in touch with friends, and they wanted to keep in touch with me, without facebook.

> Also, if you own a small business

Unless it’s a one person business, have the office administrator do it. No need to bother with every detail.

> It's wrong that people are forced to decide between accepting predatory terms or losing touch with friendly acquaintances.

Yes and no.

While I've lost touch with a few older friends I don't do anything with, I've learned that reaching out by iMessage and SMS is welcomed by a lot of people. Instead of talking to people the lazy way and posting on Facebook, I text them individually or in small groups and the response tends to be much warmer and ignored less often.

I've always thought I was bugging people, but I've found that many friends appreciate the more personal approach.

It's very narrow-minded to assume that because you don't need Facebook, no one does. Facebook clearly provides some value, or no one would use it at all. Some people can't afford not to take advantage of that value. You can't tell a small business "don't use Facebook for social media outreach, it's evil and monopolistic" when the alternative is being outcompeted by those who do.

Totally agree. I have a very niche small business (you can check my comment history) and all the community is on facebook, it has completely replaced forums. I don't have a choice, I need facebook and instagram otherwise I wouldn't be able to reach them.

Also, remember that this is only about the FB app - and only on iOS. You can use only the FB site like I do and have all tracking and ads disabled.

I never signed up in the first place.

But I don't go to a school that posts assignments on FB (I have heard of this quite a bit), my workplace doesn't use it (ditto) and I'm in a comfortable-enough place that putting up with the passive aggression from family and friends when they whine about my comm preferences is no big deal.

Yes, everyone has options. But not everyone operates under the same pressures.

> No one actually needs FB.

No one actually needs a car either. Or to eat industrially produced food. Or etc. etc.

"Nobody actually needs X" where X is a thing that empirically a huge percentage of people do, is I suspect never a compelling argument.

edit: bordercases brings up a good point, I picked particularly entrenched/difficult areas for examples but it wasn't necessary.

My point was more about the futility of observing a common behavior and rejecting it superficially, so perhaps I should have used "Nobody needs a smart phone" or "No family of 4 needs a >2000sq/ft house" or the like as examples.

Categorically yes, but the connotation is that it's still possible for the vast majority of people to get rid of Facebook and still lead a satisfying life. I can buy this. I can reason that it's likely true from e.g. the hedonic setpoint. There are a lot of people that were happy before Facebook and will be happy after Facebook is gone.

Facebook is only ~15 years old and it deals mostly with aggregating text-based communications from people that feel the compulsion to post almost entirely because it's there. And they don't need Facebook, they just need the functions it provides; there was a time when these functions would have been split up into separate services until they were acquihired or integrated.

And although Facebook is monolithic, its monopoly is primarily enforced by network effects and conventions. Shit happens, like stock rallies or privacy scares. Facebook might still be around but the exodus of e.g. WhatsApp to Signal still shows the power of close substitutes to challenge what is "necessary".

There's also nothing fallacious in your counterargument. Both cars and industrial farming are being challenged in their own right. Cars for issues behind pollution and sprawl (resulting in ride-sharing, electric cars and transit) and industrial farming for its ethics and chemical impact on the environment (organic food, veganism, greater awareness of bioaccumulation of pesticides and microplastics). In educated circles these have become widely considered as Good Things, but would involve challenging the assumption that things we take for granted as necessary are actually so. That's just progress.

“No one actually needs a car either. Or to eat industrially produced food. Or etc. etc.“

This is a false equivalence.

Facebook is nowhere near at that level of need yet.

I think it's not really a false equivalence, as a matter of degree - but see edit made in response to this.

There is also an issue of Maslow style leveling here, but the core point is identical.

I still think it’s essentially a false equivalence:

> Nobody needs a smart phone" or "No family of 4 needs a >2000sq/ft house" or the like as examples.

Even these are in a totally different class of ‘need’ to Facebook which is trivially substituted by comparison.

I think you miss the point the point I was trying to make (i.e. I didn't articulate it well).

Regardless of how trivial you think it is, the fact that so many people demonstrate a preference not to should make you think harder about the problem. It's not just the technology, and many tech people tend to get this wrong consistently.

Let's put it another way: if it was actually as trivial as you seem to think, it probably would have happened already.

That makes the point a lot worse, and really just comes across as you responding to a set of assumptions nobody is actually making.

What is the ‘it’ which you imagine people think is trivial?

Who is saying anything is trivial?

Where is anyone saying it’s just technology?

Who said people don’t have a preference to use Facebook?

How do you know how hard people have thought about this?

I don’t think Facebook is trivial to replace, but that isn’t because people are dependent on it in a way that is comparable to the other examples you mentioned.

Unlike the examples you listed, people can easily do without Facebook. There just isn’t much incentive for most people to do so, since they don’t perceive the downsides adequately.

I think we're down in the weeds here - so I'll leave it at this. I shouldn't have focused it on tech so much, other people make the same category of mistake.

The assumptions that I am talking about are basically this. (1) "people can easily do without Facebook", or the variant that "Facebook isn't very important to them" (2) There are viable replacements available to the people who do value this, at least in their own estimation.

Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people. If you reject them both, you are basically saying people are incapable of really knowing their own best interests, which is laughable. The best you can do is advocate they understand the implications better.

Hence this falls in to the category I was drawing, mainly that if you say "People don't really need X" and lots of people are at the same time saying "I really need X" and "I don't see a good replacement for X" then you are far more likely to be wrong than they are.

You dislike all my examples, try this one "Nobody needs a fossil fuel engine car". Obvious, right? Electrics are available and better in every way (just ask your favorite tesla owner). Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do. Even when technically true for some values of "fine" and "need", it's not useful.

Ignoring most of this, because you really are just talking about your own assumptions about what other people are thinking, which are nothing to do with me.

However your example:

> You dislike all my examples, try this one "Nobody needs a fossil fuel engine car". Obvious, right? Electrics are available and better in every way (just ask your favorite tesla owner). Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do. Even when technically true for some values of "fine" and "need", it's not useful.

Is interesting for two reasons.

On the one hand, it’s just as bad as your prior ones, because the impact of doing without a car at all will be for many people quite significant in a way that I maintain is simply not the case with Facebook.

I know all kinds of people who have stopped using Facebook and it just hasn’t been a big deal, unlike all the examples you bring up.

On the other hand, I would imagine most people would simply accept that electric cars are a viable alternative to gasoline cars today, and that they will eventually switch to one in the future at some point, even if the economics don’t make sense now, which again makes this analogy just inapplicable to talking about Facebook.

What I take from this is that you are arguing against an amalgam of views you have seen elsewhere and trying to dispel a kind of misunderstanding that is somehow implicit to what you have seen.

I don’t really have anything to do with all that.

What I’m suggesting is that you dispense with these analogies, and simply consider the possibility that people don’t actually need Facebook, and that quitting Facebook wouldn’t actually have much impact for most people. Of course there are exceptions, but that’s not the point.

Being willing to consider this possibility sheds light on Facebook’s own behavior as well as the current situation with regard to what would make things better.

Why would you think it ‘laughable’ that people don’t know their own best interests? That seems to just trivialize a complex issue.

Many of us hold that it is important for society to treat people as though they do, but for the most part that is an ethical assumption that restrains abusive institutions. It’s equally true that most people know that they don’t know their own best interests in many ways, and we all obviously hold many false beliefs about both ourselves and the world. It’s pretty easy to think something is more (or less) important to you than it actually is.

Ok, you haven’t said anything remotely convincing to me as to why these are a actually different category, rather than a scale. And you seem to be misunderstanding what I’m truly if to say prettty consistently. Regardless of whose “fault” that is , this really isn’t a good forum for getting into properly, so I guess I’m out.

I’m not trying to convince you that these are a different category rather than a scale. They are neither.

Placing things on a scale is a choice you are making in your analysis. You are free to place things on a scale as much as you like.

I’m pointing out that when you place these particular things on a scale, you produce false equivalences.

> Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do.

This argument is symmetric: telling me that I need FB because someone else does is equally fallacious. You want to break the symmetry by appealing to "the vast majority of people", which leads me to...

> Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people.

This is contingent, or at least more contingent than your confidence reveals. This is the point was making in my previous post, when I was giving examples of how things can change, rather than assuming what many people want now will be the same as what they want later.

Appeals to the crowd, like appeals to expertise, are useful as a first-pass heuristic of what's valuable and true. However, without other evidence, the hidden assumption is that there is exists an equilibria justified with a claim along the lines "if you're so good why aren't you rich" or "since people are rational things would have changed already if they could". This is an assumption which you've stated earlier.

The way that you strengthen this type of argument is by giving reasons why it's impossible to go back or move forward from the equilibria. Here, your standard of evidence has been weakening from the categorical "it's never compelling", to the economic "it's otherwise intractable", to the pragmatic "your view isn't useful". This isn't wrong, but it's consistent with underrating that Facebook's ubiquity is conditional, not set in stone. You've backed yourself into a corner by first staking a categorical claim while using a heuristic.

In my view, this issue is about (a) whether there really is path dependence that produces an unshiftable equilibria, and (b) whether privacy violations are necessarily coupled with social network use, such that people wouldn't switch at the opportunity to safeguard their privacy if the social networks are otherwise equivalent for their friend group.

For |A|: The path-dependence claim is trivial to refute: people have switched social networks before, and use some social networks more than others. Facebook is the biggest social network in existence, but a part of this comes down to acquihiring other social networks to prevent them from being competition. Instagram and WhatsApp are two examples. TikTok is an example of a competitor to Instagram and WhatsApp that has seen massive growth. From the business side, businesses usually aggregate across many social networks at once rather than using social networks directly. They care about Facebook because that's where users are, but they don't need their users to be on Facebook. So as long as Facebook doesn't keep acquiring their competition it will be possible that their userbase can switch.

For |B|: Suppose that people were maximizers, yet with bounded agency. If most people can acknowledge that violations of their privacy are bad, but social networking is good, yet they aren't smart enough or wealthy enough to roll their own and get everyone they interact with to switch, we should still expect ceteris paribus that they would want to switch to the privacy respecting option given the right opportunity. Since you've assumed that people must be maximisers, you must think that people generally don't value their privacy if given an option between more or less privacy, if you also think it's impossible for Facebook to be less valuable in the future, and thus no one will ever find a good reason to switch, thus changing the equilibria.

To be honest, I will be disappointed if I'm wrong when it comes to how the crowd values their privacy - that's also an empirical assumption. But this leads into the next point.

> Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people. If you reject them both, you are basically saying people are incapable of really knowing their own best interests, which is laughable. The best you can do is advocate they understand the implications better.

I'll pull a Fermat and say that I countered this argument in writing, but it was too long to put in the margin.

The long and the short of it is that people knowing and adhering to their best interests completely, is also empirically incorrect. Instead people's preferences are weighed differently based on situational factors, and the self-control that people have to enact their desires against temptation, also varies situationally. People don't exercise when they claim they want to etc etc.

As for the second claim, it isn't actually weak, again for reasons which are empirically true. People aren't maximisers, and if they were, they'd still be bounded in agency. So even if people are fully rational about their desires, they don't always know or understand the influence that these companies can or do have over their lives until it gets past some threshold of salience to take action.

In terms of what's different now, we're in a difficult climate, not just in the USA but globally, across the political spectrum and between cultures. Even though we've "known" about the influence of social media to control the flow of information for awhile, censorship on social media has become much more common, intensifying for larger numbers of people and for more high-profile events. This change in scale has been enough to trigger e.g. an exodus from WhatsApp into Signal, or will likely cool the usage of social-media in general if privacy isn't an option.

If both trends continue to hold, the case against our initial assumptions, as they were empirical, will dissolve.

I absolutely detest FB - and I don't like the fact that you can't determine if FB is tracking you even when you do not use it.

Is Facebook still creating shadow profiles? Whether or not you have an account with them, they might still be harvesting data about you. An individual can't really "delete FB".

Actually I run a live theater venue and the vast majority of our tickets are purchased through a combination of Facebook advertising and Facebook event pages. There’s no getting around that. I had deleted Facebook but needed to reinstate my account once I got involved in the theater industry. It’s really frustrating actually. Facebook is the Comcast of social media, you don’t really want to use them and you know they’re abusing you, but you don’t really have a choice.

Every time this topic comes up I check Facebooks stock price and realize how detached people are from facebooks revenue driven by the advertisement market.

People don't drive stocks. Banks and bots do.

Except for GameStop. But that's a different fish.

If you think that’s all retail driven I have a bridge to sell you...

Millions of people already agreed to this: this is how every iPhone works right now, and always has.

Apple shipped this tracking feature in the first place.

They didn't agreed per-se, it was just a default and Apple should be shamed for this.

So that the ads are more personalized. I know this sounds weird, but if I'm going to get ads anyway, I'd like them to potentially be products I'm going to maybe have a use for and might make my life easier.

I get the privacy implications, but asking "why would anyone agree to this" is kind of narrow-minded.

Tracking aside, I prefer not to have "personalized" ads for two reasons. First, they create another bubble based on their perception of me. Second, their personalization is so poor I sometimes wonder how come advertisers believe them.

And this is all assuming you actually want to see ads. I don't. It's only when I need to buy something I enter the buying mode: I disable adblockers and start doing research - this is the only small window when ads are allowed to bother me.

If ads weren't clickbait, obnoxious, or misleading (and didn't violate your privacy) you may find yourself more open to seeing them. Even if they're not always super relevant to you and only you.

Respectful advertising will always have its place whenever the buyer has a choice. It's when the companies selling those ads learn how to manipulate their audience that the 'respectful' parts of the equation get dropped and consumers start to push back.

My Kindle shows me ads. I could pay to opt out, but I actually like the way it handles them. My (former) Alexa on the other hand was IN MY FACE with ads whenever I wanted to even just set a timer. That is grossly disrespectful of me as a human being, so it was shown the door.

> My Kindle shows me ads

I have no experience on Kindles, but on my Amazon Fire HD, I have rooted it, uninstall 50-60% of the bloatware, I have installed "NoRoot Firewall" to cut down on the unwanted comms between my tablet and Amazon, and I now have a perfectly functioning tablet for reading.

Extra tip: install ReadEra and you can read the non-Kindle-app pdf, mobi, epub, etc.

Funny, I feel the opposite. If they're going to try to manipulate me, I want it to be shitty and ineffective, not as effective as possible.

There are many ways to have relevant ads that don't track you as an individual.

You may find that only 70% of the ads are relevant versus 75%, but you will not find that you've unwittingly given away your personal information for the pleasure of buying something.

Does that actually work though? I've been buying things on Amazon for over a decade. For a while I got my groceries through them, I watch a lot of stuff on Prime Video. You would think they, of all people, know what I like. I can't think of more than a couple times where anything suggested to me was actually something I wanted.

Even when I used FB, the ads were so off target from things I am interested in as to be laughable. Like, THIS is the best you can do with teams of engineers making > $200k/year throwing AI at everything? I'm not convinced that all of this tracking crap is just a way for them to market their ad business - "Look we gather all this data about people, your ads will definitely be seen by people who we know for a fact will be interested in them because of coding and algorithms and machine learning and blah blah blah."

It comes down to the advertiser who is creating the audiences on the platform. "I can haz this many people?!" A terrible analogy is no programming language can save you from yourself. The current issue is the inaugural purchase mechanic, like buying a big ticket item or something that's a one off like toilet/toilet seat and now that's all you get moving forward.

Perhaps a small cohort of targeted-ad-susceptible users skew the targeting efficacy stats so far it looks like targeted ads work overall.

Perhaps this cohort doesn’t overlap much with, say, New York Times readers, which might be why NYT and every other brand that tried first party non-retargeted ads saw an uptick in ROI.

For most of us, perhaps these ads don’t work or are negative, while this cohort are more like Candy Crush in-app-purchase whales — for them they really really work, so they spend enough that most players think the game is “free to play” while griping about the endless in-app-upsells.

Ah so it's the "Nigerian Prince" scam, basically?

> THIS is the best you can do with teams of engineers making > $200k/year throwing AI at everything?

Maybe it is the best we can currently do and maybe it isn't objectively great. But the real question: is it better? I mean, better than the random shotgun approach that was TV, magazines, bus wraps, billboards, etc. Is it better than the spam flyers or "yellow pages" the post office delivered to every single household in some geographic area?

Rather than compare to some idealized perfect, we should compare to the practical alternatives. Maybe this is legitimately the best we can currently do given the state of AI and machine learning. If that is the case, the right question for both advertisers and consumers is whether or not it beats the available alternatives. Because if it does, and advertisers seem to think it does, then that explains why Google and Facebook are worth what they are worth and how they can afford to pay what they pay.

I don't buy that. For example - I bought a rowing machine on Amazon. It was the first piece of home gym equipment I'd ever purchased. For months after, other rowing machines were suggested to me. I already bought one, why would I buy another, especially if I hadn't returned the first one?

Ads like this are very common for me - a purchase that I would consider to be a one-off thing (at least, for several years, whatever the standard lifetime of that product is) just leads to more ads for different models of that same thing. Occasionally, accessories that only go to a different model or brand of that thing.

I don't see how this is any better than the random shotgun approach - these ads that are 100% irrelevant and not going to lead to a purchase are taking up space that ads that are possibly < 100% irrelevant (even if completely random) could be occupying.

It seems like this would be a solvable problem for Amazon - aggregate the data of everyone who has purchased X model of rowing machine and see how many of them purchased a second rowing machine, which brand it was, and how long after purchasing #1 they bought #2. Don't show ads for rowing machines to people who have purchased X until time is >= avgTimeBetween1And2, with some fancy statistics in there somewhere.

Clearly I'm missing something in my logic, because plenty of people a lot smarter than me work on this adtech stuff.

> Clearly I'm missing something in my logic

Sampling methodology. Every ad impression in your sample was shown to the same person, but the ad industry is interested in billions of people.

I’m sorry, I don’t really follow. Could you explain a little bit more?

You weren’t served a hyper personalized ad because those get expensive at scale so they segment your id into ad target groups. You fit some form of gym enthusiast who shows interest in rowing segment and some unfortunate rowing company keeps throwing their money at you in a useless bid.

> Clearly I'm missing something in my logic

Your logic may be solid but you probably lack sufficient data. Plato was a pretty smart guy but he thought the four elements were Water, Fire, Air and Earth. His mistake wasn't intelligence or even flaws in his logic - it was missing data. If you begin your logic from one or more faulty assumptions then you will arrive at wrong conclusions regardless of how intelligent you are or how flawless your application of logic is.

I don't have the data either - but you should at least use logic to consider possible reasons why you are seeing the same products you have purchased previously. Perhaps this is a strategy that wins significantly more often than you assume and you just lack the data to illuminate why.

As the other commenter noted, you are but one data point in the literal hundreds of millions of data points available to Amazon. It would be humble to consider that they've tried your best first guess approach and it was suboptimal compared to the alternatives running now. Or maybe you choose to believe you are smarter than every single engineer that has worked on the problem there? And you believe this while lacking any data, having performed no experiments, etc.

>Ads like this are very common for me - a purchase that I would consider to be a one-off thing (at least, for several years, whatever the standard lifetime of that product is) just leads to more ads for different models of that same thing. Occasionally, accessories that only go to a different model or brand of that thing.

I don't have the industry expertise to know how true it is, but I've seen it stated numerous times in threads like this that this is entirely intentional. Supposedly the data shows that a person who just bought a rowing machine is actually quite likely to buy another one (because they aren't satisfied with the first one, because they collect rowing machines, etc) compared to most other demographics.

Is it one tiny increment better? Maybe? I'm with others who are not really impressed. For years the best Facebook could do were "Hot single [your gender preference] in [your city] are looking for [your age] [your gender]". Thanks, Mad Lib ads.

But for the sake of argument let's say there is some small increment. What is the cost we are willing to pay for that? Databases that know exactly how much time we spend on the toilet? Political disinformation campaigns? Insurrection attempts?

It's like making baby monitors a little bit more convenient, but in the process opening the door for pedo hackers to speak directly to your children's cribs. Tiny conveniences aren't worth sacrificing everything we have.

The 1% chance you will click on a singles ad is worth more to Facebook than a 90% chance you will click on an ad for your favourite hobby. The singles company will pay higher for that 1% click chance than anyone else. Even if Facebook could show you a more relevant ad, they are not incentivized to do so.

It doesn't matter to Facebook/Amazon whether or not they show you ads you are interested in (or that might impress you with how deep they understand you as a person). It only matters if advertisers get better results than they would get by spending their ad money on TV, Newspapers, Magazines, Radio, etc.

Long, long time ago, when last.fm radio was still a thing on it's own, I loved it: instead of pre-arranging a playlist, it kept adding the next song by searching for similar ones based on the one currently playing. It kept crawling away, sometimes into terrible direction, but more often into an area I'd like to refer to as "satellite".

"Satellite" would be friends-of-friends or even friends-of-friends-of-friends in social media terms.

And this is how it comes to ads: when I bought a magazine, I got a set of ads that only had a rough idea about their audience. Those edges were the ones that allowed ads to broaden my views on the world, and, therefore, ads were useful for me. This, and the financial impossibility of ever getting one - early teen in Hungary -, were the reasons why I loved Sony catalogues in the '90s.

Targeted ads are the polar opposite: they want to change me, force me to buy a certain, specific product, instead of gradually opening my interest to a lot more things in the world.

I feel the exact same way about sampling 'alien' ad culture. It's fun to switch on the local TV station in a new city and see what ads are being shown to people there. It's like a form of social calibration that shows what 'is available.' Same thing with reading the ads in the back of Popular Science or The Economist. I don't get that online unless I VPN+incognito, and I absolutely cannot get it on my phone, which is locked down much tighter.

I want personalized ads when I’m searching for product. I really don’t get the fetishization of sticking ads next to unrelated content. Like I get the whole brand mindshare aspect but that’s not exactly a small-business type of ad campaign.

Like Jesus. If a company had good ad targeting I would actually pay to access it and use it as my product search. It’s remarkably difficult given the type of product you want to buy to survey the market and find different people that sell it. I’m currently going through that hell trying to find a water filter dispenser/pitcher. All of the search results are garbage. I know there is more out there than just the 17 models of cheap plastic crap from Brita/Pur but it’s an absolute slog to actually find anything.

The Wire Cutter (NYTimes) is doing this more and more and iirc they're quite profitable in doing it. They find the "best" products and give you referral links to buy them.

Sometimes your site searches will show lists of things ("looking for a jacket? see our list of the best cold-weather gear"). This isn't a dark pattern. It's not targeting you the individual, it's targeting you the person who just explicitly showed intent to buy X. It's really how buying online would ideally work in all scenarios.

I remember the good, ol' days when you were on a kiteboarding site and the ads were for kiteboarding equipment and not for more toasters after I just bought one. I don't mind ads in the old style but I seriously resent the current state.

Interestingly, my preference is opposite. If I'm going to see ads anyway, ideally I want to see them in a language I don't speak.

Marketers aren't trying to match you up with products that meet some unfulfilled need you have, they are trying to get you to buy anything in the very limited window available to them. You seem to be under the impression that they'll maximize that opportunity by presenting you with something you'd find useful. There are more effective ways to sell, with an enormous amount of research dedicated to perfecting the process. Unsurprisingly, the result of such efforts - unbounded by any sense of morality, are pretty disgusting. Depression. Depressed people make the best consumers. That is what they are looking for when they're tracking your off-site activity. Do you imagine they are above trying to induce depression?

Better ads.

</s>>

This is said so often it's become a platitude, but: Your free labor of creating and curating things people want to look at is the product. It's the companies bidding on access to content you're willing to look at, in hopes of changing your behaviour, that are the consumers.

I would rather get advertisements about tech toys than get advertisements about debeers diamonds.

I'm the opposite.

I spend 8+ hours a day in the tech world; if the "tech toy" is any good chances are I already know about it and/or have it.

If I absolutely have to see ads (which I don't - haven't seen online ads for years) the last thing I want is more tech. I'd rather see ads for stuff I don't actually know about.

If HN were supported by non-tracking ads, do you think you would be more likely to see an add for a tech toy or a diamond here?

I hope it would be ads about recent companies Y has helped start :)

You're not the consumer here. You're not paying for anything.

> You're not the consumer here. You're not paying for anything.

But you are the PRODUCT.

You are quite literally the consumer - you consume the service.

You're just not the one paying for what the service is.

> Why would anyone agree to this?

To help small businesses that thrive because of Facebook and to show the finger to greedy corporations like Apple. /s

That’s kinda how Facebook will paint this, without directly mentioning its disgust for Apple in the message prompt. Facebook will also paint a picture of it being the protector of privacy of the user and how it doesn’t “sell” information. There will be a lot of smoke and mirrors, for sure.

I'm a simple man -- if I see a button with a primary intent color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it, often before I realize what I'm doing or reading the accompanying text. Probably tens of millions of people will do the same here.

Remember though that this doesn't replace Apple's prompt!

That's true, I forgot about that. I appreciate that those prompts don't highlight a particular option which tends to force you to read them.

I wonder how often Apple will allow apps to re-request this permission when it's been denied; I have a handful of iOS apps that are constantly asking me to grant permission to see more of my photos, and I wish they'd rate-limit that kind of abuse.

It actually is. A while ago, someone (i think fb) produced an article that showed that to avoid the issue, they find it is best to show user their own similar screen, and only if the user clicks "yes", show the OS screen (cause for that one you only get one chance). I suspect you're seeing the apps' first "app-made" screen and not the OS one. Look carefully. If so, click yes there, and NO on the OS screen.

Wouldn't this be against the Apple TOS? Might want to report application that are using this kind of dark pattern.

Similar theory behind those “do you like this app” prompts that come from the app itself. If you tap “yes” they’ll give you the prompt to rate on the AppStore. If you tap “no” they won’t. This can seriously inflate an app’s rating and help prevent low ratings. Nice, underhanded and effective dark pattern!

This is called review gating and isn't allowed: https://appradar.com/blog/ask-users-leave-review-in-app-stor...

Interesting! It’s obviously been a while since I was in the 3rd party app business because in my day, the use of these was widespread! Nice to see the vulnerability was closed.

Is it actually explicitly disallowed in Apple's guidelines? Their wording almost makes it indicate they want you to only ask for a rating when people are happy with the app:

    https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
    Make the request when users are most likely to feel satisfaction with your app, such as when they’ve completed an action, level, or task.

I understood that to mean, if you've goals within you app (e.g. CityMapper — completing a journey; Dropbox — uploading a file; some game — beating a level), ask after the user has completed them, rather than what apps used to do (e.g. before you've been created an account, or getting in your way while you're changing some setting). But when they _do_ ask theyre meant to show the rating dialog either way, not first check what rating you would give.

Nike Run Club did this to me just last week. The no button leads to a feedback form, the yes button to the App Store.

Unfortunately it's still widespread, as the rating dialog shouldn't come up during the app review process. So it's unlikely to get caught without being reported.

The funny thing is when they do that, you leave a bad review, they delete your review, and then keep begging you to leave a review.

What App Store allows the developer to delete a negative review? That sounds terrible. Apple’s app store doesn’t allow that.

No doubt FB is preparing to A/B test dozens of variants for maximum "conversion" :)

The dialog I am constantly seeing is this one, which seems to come from the OS: https://i.imgur.com/7JGotq3.png

Now that iOS allows you to share only some photos with apps (which is great) I see this before practically every photo selection dialog in third-party apps. My choice here doesn't affect my ability to share a single image with the app in that moment; they just want to suck my whole library of photos in for background processing. I'd very much like to not see this dialog more than once a month.

Go to Settings, scroll down to find the app, and select it. Then you get the "Allow <app> to access" and a list of entitlements, one of which is "Photos". Select "Photos" and you get three options "Selected Photos" (which is what you likely have), "All Photos", and "None". Push "None" and you should never see that dialog again.

Shit, every time I reboot my iPad it asks for permission to connect to my phone for wifi calling, and I keep on saying "no" and I wish I could just say "never ask this again". It's just as annoying when Apple does it.

You can disable this feature, it's specifically a thing that you enabled at some point. The reason you're getting prompted is because you indicated that you want it. IIRC it's something to do with the wifi calling settings on your phone, not your ipad.

It IS annoying that their nag box doesn't have a "go to settings" option, at least.

If the notification consent prompt on iOS is any indication, it will only be shown the first time it is requested, which is the reason these notification requests usually already have a "testing screen" like the one described in the article.

I assume the button will prompt a system alert of some kind, no?

The article has precisely that prompt in one of the images.

The thing is, just like certain apps require certain permissions (camera app wants to access the camera, device files, etc..) I believe a lot of people will just accept these conditions without realizing they are completely optional.

A lot of people will.

But there's also strong education regarding system prompts. Users know when an app is asking for extra permissions (which this is basically the same of). Those people who care about what permissions apps have will know what to click.

Those who don't care, that's the most you can do. Besides even Facebook estimate that only 10-30% will click allow. I'm not sure if you can ask for more at this point.

It would be awesome if the users were forced to navigate a settings menu, find the app on a list of apps, and manually enable the option.

One can only dream.

What do you think about a 10s delay (or whatever an appropriate reading time is) before the buttons become active?

You want to make the web even worse?

Instead, mandate a standardized header to communicate the intent, as most users have the same intent on all sites.

Show a cookie popup to a user who already said no via the header? That's a fine. Do it again? There goes 2% of your annual revenue.

While I agree with your point about this and that most people will do this it really brings up a lot of questions about what consent actually means. Especially with dark patterns and asymmetric information.

True but looking at my own iTunes App Analytics dashboard for example, about 50% of users don’t opt-in to share analytics with us.

At Facebook-scale 50% means at least a billion users will still opt-in, but probably significantly less than what they were tracking before at the 100% level.

> if I see a button with a primary intent color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it

While cookie-laws have good intentions, this side effect should have been properly researched first. An internet full of shady and useless pop-ups which drive this behavior makes me sad. I'm still hoping they will someday disappear.

The skeptic in me bets that side effect was quite thoroughly researched, by the media companies, who found by normalizing intrusive banners they could get users to agree to whatever they heck they’d want.

The intent has been that there would be two equally available buttons.

Regulators just hadn't understood yet that you have to make that explicit, then hire some people to find the loopholes and make it more explicit. Down to prescribing font sizes and colors, or even a standardized dialog.

Of course, mandating compliance with DNT (or a new header) would be better.

And then you need actual enforcement, because when the compliant players see themselves get screwed out of ad revenue by everyone else ignoring the law and nothing happening to them... they can't stay compliant, and they won't.

used to be like this but these days there's so many dark patterns that try to make you pay for extra shit (or sign up for prime), i instinctively look for the non highlighted button if the button stands out a little too much

Same here. If I understand correctly, the GDPR states that if the user is tricked into clicking that they give consent, that doesn't count as them truly giving consent. Despite this, many otherwise reputable websites try to deceive you into 'agreeing'. Disappointingly, TomsHardware is one such.

These dark patterns will only go away once there are properly enforced laws against them.

I propably already learned the "don't klick the obvious button asap" lesson pretty early, when websites had like 5 "Download now" buttons (ads) and you had to search for the small text with a link to actually get the download.

That's so true. Even though I consider myself privacy conscious, and hate all forms of surveillance capitalism, if there's something I need to read ASAP and I'm in a hurry, and the only thing between me and the content is a GDPR form, you can bet your top dollar I'll click "Accept all" without thinking, just to get the popup out of my face.

(Which is also why I'm strongly in favor of more aggressive fining for GDPR violations. "Accept all" shouldn't be the easiest choice on a website.)

Why would anyone ever agree to the terms in most software EULAs?

Because otherwise you can't use the software?

Why would anyone read this and think about the implications? I may be overly pessimistic, but I think the average user just sees this modal as a potential obstacle between him/her and the content their brain tells them to consume. I know my first instinct would be to go on the path that minimizes the risk that I don't get to do the things I set out to do.

So that the ads you don't want, are also creepily specific to things you mentioned recently? :D

More relevant ads would be the benefit for the user.

Why would anyone agree to this?

Because the opt-out is hidden under the third pane behind the per party 1 by 1 drop-downs of the opt-outs for "legitimate interests", in a list of 120 "vendors" that require individual sub-pane drop downs and a radio button all having an "agree to selected" button that will immediately negate all your previous selections and just blast you to the content as if you "agreed to all".

There's no opt-out, that's the whole point of the change.

If it was opt out, Facebook could get away with this. Apple is forcing their hand so people are presented with a fairly straight forward choice.

To see the dancing bunny, of course.

(There's a term "dancing bunny attack" for putting interesting content behind a confirmation dialog you want people to click. Facebook kind of does that implicitly. All they have to do is hide appealing content behind this option.)

> Why would anyone agree to this?

And that is the entire story of dark patterns.

There's weird cases. In my DnD group only one person has not switched to Signal and they refuse to. Their answer is that "I can't fight them so why switch?" Which weirds me out since this is exactly how you fight tracking. Btw, this is someone who has a PhD in computer science so it isn't like they are tech illiterate. But I've seen several people like this and honestly I don't understand.

I think at this point a lot of people are now apathetic and have given up. And we know people like to double down on good or bad positions when faced with adversaries. Doing things like "switching to Signal" (when you already have most of your friends there) and "using an adblocker" seem like very simple things that easily respond to "what can I do about it?"

wow what a weak mindset your friend has

I think a big factor is that you don't have an easy choice. Notice it's not "Allow" or "Reject", it's "Allow" or "Ask us not to".

The only "Reject" is to flat out not use Facebook, and probably throw a few related domains into a blackholed HOSTS file. That's a steeper price than most are willing to pay.

They're essentially asking their users to bail them out by trying to garner sympathy towards the nebulous 'small businesses' who probably wouldn't notice any difference anyway. Unless FB threw a bunch of them under the bus first and then tried to blame Apple for it.

FB aren't entitled to a user's entire internet presence (digital and physical) just because the user doesn't pay for the account.

I'm glad Apple is at least making sure users are aware that this is even a thing. While people on HN are much more likely to follow the issue and do something about it, a lot of laypeople are just vaguely aware that Facebook might be a privacy problem without really understanding what levers they have to manage it themselves.

Yes, but I think it would be a bit naïve to think that Apple is doing so out of the kindness of their hearts.

Apple already has access to all the metrics that Facebook would be interested in. It seems to me like this is a set-up for Apple to force FB to buy the data directly from them.

But Apple isn't selling any of that data (which is really just 'downloaded apps' - they don't have the web browsing habits that FB and GOOG have). Their financial interest here is selling privacy with the price being the ongoing commitment to buy Apple products.

Perhaps, but who is to say that they don't have plans to branch out into that business?

It's possible that they have no intent to do so, but a corporation's primary interest is making profit. And what would be a simple, yet significant, source of new revenue? Selling user data.

They tried offering an ad service called iAd that would do things the "Apple" way. No one used it.

> it would be a bit naïve to think that Apple is doing so out of the kindness of their hearts

Good. If they were doing it out of charity, a bit profit pressure, shareholder activism or change in management and the move is reversed. Being grounded in sound business logic and self-interest makes me trust it.

I never meant to imply that I thought Apple's (possible) intent was a good thing.

I just think that a significant number of people will see what they're doing and thing "Oh, they're looking out for me." I think it's best to be skeptical of any company's motives, whether their current business decisions seem to help their users or not.

I don't think it's that. More that Apple in this case is the old "devil you know".

all I hear from my non-tech friends is "Oh yeah, the government and companies have 'my data' nothin I can do"

they basically just assume they're living in a totalitarian society already and don't even think having any semblance of privacy is possible (or understand how easy it is for sinister, small-time third parties to spy on them via publicly-purchasable advertising data..)

The users have already been domesticated [1]. It feels like we have now come full circle back to the 80s to once again grapple with the inherent injustices of proprietary software. Except this time, the proprietary wolves have clothed themselves with "open source" software to prevent us from recognizing them.

[1] https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication...

I am really surprised the amount of tantrums FB is throwing in this saga. This is a golden opportunity for them to reset their platform and change their brand in the world.

Large businesses don't get these kind of opportunities often and this is something, I thought, they will seize. I really thought they will build security/privacy into their platform and weed things out. They could have gone to a paid model in some cases and doubled down on privacy in others. They would have lost revenue in the short term but would be great in the long term.

However, they are doubling down on the catering to fear mongering, cult marketing type things and kicking and screaming without much to show.

Likely this is because they do not have other options. Ever since 2016, they have been 'alerted' that their stack is fragile to regulation and other outside forces. Zuck has been hauled up in front of Congress a few times now over many things, including the tracking issues. The C-suite is very much aware of the problems.

I suppose they are trying to throw a fit now, and then relax to their secondary position when they must. But knowing how large bureaucracies (don't) work, there is no fall-back position. There is no 'there' anymore.

Wow, those encouragements are very weak. "Get ads that are more personalized", "Support businesses that rely on ads to reach customers": why would I support businesses relying on that when only 1 out of 5 ads in my feed is not garbage?

These encouragements make me think that Facebook seems to believe that their ads are useful, which is a bit insane from a user perspective.

Tech companies have been using this kind of rhetoric since the early 2000s. Back then, people were sympathetic to helping keep websites online, especially blogs and such owned by individuals. The line has lost its charm when it's turned into an inescapable global surveillance apparatus.

I’m not on Facebook so I can’t speak to what you personally see. However, I think the “support small business” angle is going to be somewhat compelling. I have, for example, two friends who are starting a niche business, offering a good and ethical service, and reaching people in that niche through Facebook and Instagram ads. The customers they find love what they’re doing and happily paying. If I had Facebook, I could see doing my small part to help them find a few more of those types of good businesses succeed.

I also kind of despise Facebook, hence no account, so I don’t mind if this permission screen fails. :)

I bet for every one small business like your friend, there is 10 scammy business (something like selling 1$ item for 20$ with 40% discount) who is betting 10x more than your legit friend for impressions.

I’d love to see numbers if you have them. The idea that hurting bad small businesses is a positive externality is intriguing. I suppose we could hope that, opt-in or not, the move away from easy user tracking could benefit ethical businesses more than what you describe.

Unfortunately I cannot share any data from the accounts I manage (mainly competitors are the shady ones), but simply you can go let's say instagram or facebook, and log the ads you saw (without clicking) in a single session (like first 20), then you can go check them. Probably what you will be interested will be almost at the end of the list, the first ones will be high margin products.

To be honest, I don't see hope for ethical small business without user tracking. That's why Facebook is pushing that angle, even it is very small percentage on the overall. Big players will be almost not effected anyway.

I have no empathy for them. I tried to advertise my dating business on there, and got insta-banned both times because they basically don't let you compete with their dating services.

Wow! Really. I'm currently working on a nascent dating business and that's kind of disappointing to hear as I was counting on being able to advertise through that channel. Thanks for sharing.

advertising for dating services are nontrivial across most of the popular domains on the web. you need to contact support and go through special processes, even for Reddit Ads.

I agree that’s wrong. Sounds like potential fodder for some of the ongoing legal surrounding Facebook.

Were there no small businesses before FB and internet tracking? Is there any proof that FB actually helped out small business? Wouldn't showing ads for tech on a tech site and ads for women beauty products be shown on a site targeting women be a good replacement instead of profiling you and tracking you everywhere to determine that you might be a woman interested in JS IDE and Aloe Vera cream?

Those are good questions. I would love to see more browsing of independent websites. I think the question is what to do when people don't do that as much anymore, and other forms of marketing communication are too expensive for fledgling businesses.

Have you ever talked to someone who works in adtech? They do sincerely believe that ads are helpful to people.

Complaining about advertising is like complaining about money. Advertising is inevitable in any economy.

I'm OK with advertising existing, it's just the way in which it's being conducted that's objectionable.

I worked in ad-tech for years, ultimately the convincing data is that people actually do click on ads. They do buy the products, and they do this more often than they would have had we not shown the ads at all (for some market segments).

I've often wondered if there is a population of users who simply hate ads to the extent that any impression will be net negative value to the advertiser, and what mechanisms could be used to stop showing them ads. There used to be services which let you purchase all of your own ads, but I think people want something more transparent which outright removes them from the services they use.

>if there is a population of users who simply hate ads to the extent that any impression will be net negative value to the advertiser

This segment of the population absolutely exists and I would guess that it is growing. Many people in my circle block ads on every device possible. Seeing any ad is an immediate negative impression for my group of friends.

This is entirely anecdotal, but I've seen this same sentiment in many other circles and am hearing it more and more often.

> I've often wondered if there is a population of users who simply hate ads to the extent that any impression will be net negative value to the advertiser

Yes, I would characterize myself as such. The best products gain their exposure through word of mouth, and don't need paid advertising. Incessantly raping my eyeballs with your brand would just make me hate it even more. Especially so if it's happening on my own electronic devices against my will.

But then there are people who legitimately want to be advertised to — I know some personally.

> I think people want something more transparent which outright removes them from the services they use.

These are called ad blockers. I use them in some form on every device I own.

> I worked in ad-tech for years, ultimately the convincing data is that people actually do click on ads. They do buy the products, and they do this more often than they would have had we not shown the ads at all (for some market segments).

This says nothing about whether ads are useful or beneficial to people. Buying a product does not mean the product was not a net loss for the customer, with the classic example being cigarettes.

Agreed that a lot of ads are useless, but I've personally seen a few that I wouldn't have otherwise known about. For instance, there's a really cool used technical bookstore near me that I only discovered because I saw an ad for it. Also I would have missed a Humble Bundle that I really liked without an ad.

Don't get me wrong, I probably hate the average ad more than most people (any Liberty Mutual ad just makes me angry), but to say that ads are not useful from a user perspective is a bit too absolute a position; for me, the good ones definitely are useful.

Would you say those occasionally useful ads are worth the added stress (extrapolating from your words: “hate”, “angry”) of having to see other ads?

If you do, I dispute the claim you hate the average ad more than most people, as would millions of Adblock users.

Meh, to me these feel like separate buckets. I dislike a lot of ads that I find to be irrelevant or patronizing, which is why I run uBlock online for most sites, but "stress from seeing bad ads" isn't the only factor here.

It seems like there are three big possibilities:

1. I see ads, and some of them cater directly to me. In this case, I see a lot of irrelevant/patronizing ads, but also some ads that make me see a product or company I like. 2. I see ads, and none cater directly to me. I see a lot of irrelevant/patronizing ads, and fewer ads that show me a product or company I like (and especially fewer that can only afford to market to people that are likely to buy their product, e.g. a sale at a local toy train repair shop or something). 3. I see no ads at all. This is what I default to on the internet, except for some whitelisted sites. There is no stress from seeing bad ads. There is also no possibility of serendipitously finding a new product/company I want to try.

A lot of people are strongly in camp #3. That's fine, I'm in camp #3 for most of the internet. However, given that I have found value out of some ads, it's hard to put "stress from bad ads" against "joy from products I found through ads" on a single scale. As such, I can empathize with camp #1. Likewise, I understand that camps #1 and #2 can be important monetization mechanisms for websites that I support, and I'm fine taking that hit in exchange for those websites still existing (as I'm sure most others are -- if ad-blockers disappeared overnight, my gut tells me that the average person wouldn't change many of their browsing habits by a lot.)

To me it seems like the lesser of two evils that if a company needs to show me ads (in a privacy-respecting way), then I'd like more of those ads to be relevant. All that said, I'm happy to be wrong here, and maybe I underestimate how much other people hate bad ads too (and also, all the above options assume respect for privacy in ad-targeting, something that I don't have nearly enough insight to even make educated guesses on.)

What would happen if legislation were passed to ban all tracking, across the board? Perhaps also inclusive of limits on targeted advertising also (to reduce the incentive to gather personal data).

It seems this kind of universal disarmament (so to speak) still leaves FB in the same dominant position from an advertising perspective. It has the same huge audience, and it’s advertising product is the same as everyone else. If so why wouldn’t FB be actively lobbying for this right now?

(I’m just putting aside questions of monopoly, etc. Purely from an FB self interest stand point.)

There are a few factors at play here when it comes to advertising.

1) Digital is taking over all ad-channels

2) Digital ads can be tracked and attributed ways that were never possible with traditional media

3) It turns out most non-targeted ads aren't actually that effective, and aggregate ad spend is falling.

FB ads are effective and high value because of tracking. If tracking goes away, FB ad revenue will fall to that of banner advertising at roughly 1/100th to 1/10000th the price per impression that FB currently receives.

Such a change would effectively force a rethink of the entire consumer technology business, and see FB/GOOG re-structure to some form of subscription revenue or shutdown large feature sets and product offerings which would no longer be tenable.

How much does Facebook earn from one user, $1 a year? No one would've died if they switched to a $1/year subscription model. People tend to respect companies that are honest with them. Except Facebook won't ever be able to regain its reputation, but still.

https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every....

Depends on the metric you use.

> Facebook’s revenue per user is roaring. For Q4 2018 vs. Q4 2017, it’s global ARPU increased by 19 percent to $7.37, and the US-Canada ARPU by 30 percent to $35. Between 2011 and 2018, the social network global ARPU rose nearly 6x, while the US-Canada grew 11x. With a domestic revenue per user of $112, Facebook is the equivalent of a publisher charging $9 a month. It does that with a free service.

TIL. I thought these kinds of numbers weren't at all possible with an ad-supported business model.

Assuming that the only users who would be willing to pay are those who use one of FB's services at least once per month; then FB would need to charge $26/yr to match their current revenue. Given that they already have 2.7 billion MAUs it's unlikely that they could grow their way out of such a change, and serving ads is ultimately inexpensive.

In Q4 alone, they made $53/user in US/Canada, and $10/user worldwide. This revenue is not evenly distributed, and the type of user who is willing to pay $50/quarter for FB is worth much more than that to FB advertisers.

source: Slide 4 (ARPU) https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q4...

Doing that would equate to $2.7 billion a year in revenue. They currently generate about $70 billion a year. So, yeah; they'd pretty much die if their revenue dropped that much.

Imagine how much money they could save if they stop redesigning every little thing all the time to squeeze every last cent. Imagine not needing hundreds of developers working on a single app.

> FB ads are effective and high value

Not really.

Digital advertising, frankly, sucks from the advertiser's point of view. It's just that people are online now and advertisers have no choice: the inventory providers are monopolistic and unregulated.

A more fair comparison might be that all advertising sucks from an advertisers perspective... but we just didn't have a good way to measure it.

In the world of Nielson and print the only consistently measurable ads were brand ads - and brand awareness had a loose correlation across businesses with revenue. There was no way of rigorously testing whether individual customers propensity to purchase a good from a given business was actually tied to any of the brand awareness ads that were being purchased, or customer's brands they had heard of for trust reasons after deciding on a purchase, or if customer's simply didn't care about the branding. Bear in mind, any negative datapoint that indicates customer's didn't care could always be taken as a sign that the "brand" had to be improved. Not that the ads were worthless.

Now on digital any brand exercise, direct pay per conversion, or other form of ad gets attributed to downstream revenue, and we're quickly discovering which half of the marketing budget isn't working.

> There was no way of rigorously testing whether individual customers propensity to purchase a good from a given business was actually tied to any of the brand awareness ads that were being purchased

This isn't right. Of course there was - statistics, sampling and A/B testing was invented way before computers or the Internet existed.

Advertising is just applied sociology, and sociology is just statistics when done right.

> Digital advertising, frankly, sucks from the advertiser's point of view.

What advertising does not suck from the advertiser's point of view? How are metrics gathered that demonstrate these forms of advertising work?

> It turns out most non-targeted ads aren't actually that effective

Non-personalised television advertising is still doing great.

No, it's not. Eyeballs are down, thus prices and market share are down compared to digital. Different industry sources have different figures, but everyone agrees TV spend was down >5% in 2020 and expected to drop faster in 2021 as digital continues to grow at >30%.

There's now a mad rush to standardize tech for personalized tv advertising, as providers plan to use the email/phone number you used for your cable/streaming service as a personal identifier that can be joined against 3rd party targeting data.

I'm not trying justifying this - just describing where the industry (and money) is going.

Is it not right that 2019 was the highest spend ever for TV advertising?

And a 5% drop would be less than the drop in broader TV production, via coronavirus?

Major events that are associated with large advertising budgets haven't happened: the Olympics didn't happen. The Eurovision Song Contest didn't happen.

> 3) It turns out most non-targeted ads aren't actually that effective, and aggregate ad spend is falling.

While this is a commonly held believe in many corners it doesn't appear to be well backed by data & research. Freakonomics also covered this topic in some detail recently.

Some examples where it's proven untrue:

Nytimes drops targeted advertising in Europe: https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut...

>“The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,” he said. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.”

Danish broadcaster grew revenue after dropping targeted ads: https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/24/data-from-dutch-public-bro...

>The data shows the NPO grew ad revenue after ditching trackers to target ads in the first half of this year

Typically, platforms with smaller reach ( read < 10 million DAU) will only have a few big advertisers who are willing to purchase most ad positions. Behavioral targeting on such platforms with large advertisers will probably only limit spend by cutting out bad impressions, and the in-house or external behavioral targeting isn't anything close to what FB offers.

FB/Goog dominate ad-spend as they are able to effectively match small advertisers with the appropriate audience, and these advertisers typically have specific customer goals in mind. If the goal of the ad buyers on the NYT is simply to associate their brand with the trustworthiness of the NYT, then there won't be much benefit from behavioral targets.

I have a different idea other than banning: make companies pay a tax on each bit of user information they hold.

Tax, how about royalties to the user. They use that data to advertise to other users within a family or circle. It’s data about us, why shouldn’t they have to pay a royalty to users and get our permissions beforehand when they want to utilize the data in different ways.

We have different licenses for code and projects. Why not have something similar for user data / metadata

You could argue that they do pay a royalty to users, and that royalty gets put toward free access to software and services. Whether or not that royalty is sufficient is fine to debate, but at the end of the day someone is footing the bill.

Great idea! It means that the company gets to do the tracking as much as it wants as long as it shares some of these profits with the government, and as a bonus gets to enjoy a reasonably confidence that any initiative to futher enhance privacy will be quashed in a hurry - with bipartisan support, too, especially in the current tax revenue slump thanks to the ongoing pandemic. /s

The word you were probably looking for is fines, but they would have to be punitive and extraordinarily risky to stop the practice...

what I meant was taxes high enough to matter for the bottom line. Also, this would force the companies to open up their databases for government or public inspection, kind-of like we do today with uranium processing. This alone would expose dark behavior much earlier than today

One worry I have is regarding poorly handled legislation hobbling national companies more than intended and driving consumers to worse options (as opposed to just preventing them from doing creepy things.) One of the prime examples here is search: if Google didn't keep a history of my search terms and/or other data about my account, the results they'd return would be far less personalized. I could (and do) use DuckDuckGo instead, but the search results are far less convenient (e.g. when I look up "compilation", DDG shows me literary compilations, Google shows me code-related things).

This in itself is fine, as long as either: 1. The drop in convenience isn't so high that people would prefer an alternative service 2. We can impose these rules worldwide.

If the drop in convenience isn't too bad, then even though there's a little more friction, there's not a mass exodus from these services. If we could impose these rules worldwide, that'd also make this an easy decision.

Given that the web is global, however, my biggest area of worry is that we squeeze all national companies to protect privacy, but it turns out the consumers really did like the personalized and convenient experiences and immediately switch over to Baidu or some other site that falls outside national jurisdiction and personalizes user experience well (presumably through even stronger privacy invasions).

tl;dr: I am cool with legislation, but given the global scale of the web we need to make sure we get the incentives/changes just right.

> ban all tracking

That's a whole can of worms. Does the existence of things like your website's Apache request log count as "tracking"? Or does it only count if it's multiple domains? Maybe we'd need to say multiple organizations, to account for applications with multiple domains (e.g. facebook.com, fbcdn.com, etc.) But then what is an organization? If I sign an agreement with you to sell you my Apache request log, is that now illegal? If so, what was it about that that made it illegal? How do you make that illegal without also making it illegal to share these otherwise benign logs with people for the purpose of debugging website issues? Are you going to base this on "intent"? That is, "you're free to share this data with X as long as X does not intend to use it for advertising, or to share it with anyone else who might [...] who might intend to use it for advertising"? These kinds of intent-chains are spectacularly ineffective, in part because the advertising ecosystem is set up to make these chains as convoluted as possible, and suddenly someone just has some data there and why not make profiles out of it? etc.

> "Apple’s new prompt suggests there is a tradeoff between personalized advertising and privacy; when in fact, we can and do provide both."

It's a somewhat bold but not completely implausible claim to argue that highly personalized ads are compatible with privacy. There are theoretically schemes that could make that work.

But it is, however, a wicked bold claim for Facebook to go a step farther say they are already currently providing both privacy and personalized advertising. Does anyone, at all, believe them when they say that?

It's hugely ironic that this article is written/hosted by a website which runs entirely via the Google AMP platform.

You can't read the article without going via Google's AMP servers, unless you use a website like https://printfriendly.com to parse it for you.

Disable javascript for axios.com. You can do it with uBlock Origin.

Then simple click Firefox's reader mode icon. Even if the page is blank, just click the reader mode icon.

So I guess you should click "Allow" in the first facebook-designed prompt, to trigger the second Apple iOS level system prompt, and click "Don't allow" there, to actually register the do-not-track request to be enforced on the OS/API level?

If you just click "Don't allow" on the first FB screen, it doesn't look like iOS will know about the do-not-track preference at all?

Do people who use facebook actually care about privacy?

I can't understand why any user would want to be targeted by tailored ads or any ads for that matter? It's psychological warfare with the goal of separating you from your money. Stop spending, you'll realize you don't need all that shit they try to peddle.

Less is more...

The difference is that this will show up for every app that uses FB's audience network to show and make money from ads, so many mobile games will have this show after install.

I think most people prefer ads to paying for something. The ads are only a means to what they care about.

> Do people who use facebook actually care about privacy?

Many people probably both use Facebook and care about privacy. Many probably would rather quit Facebook but think they can't because a part of their social life they think important is there. Or even a part of their education is (many students have a Facebook group for their class).

I sympathize with you but it would help to try and understand people who care about privacy but still use Facebook if the goal is to solve this problem.

I've had luck so far I haven't got trapped in Facebook though.

> Many probably would rather quit Facebook but think they can't because a part of their social life they think important is there.

I like that you used “think” in there; it makes all the difference. As Mike Monteiro tweeted[1]:

> I’ve heard excuses from people who want to quit Facebook but can’t that would make heroin addicts blush.

[1]: https://twitter.com/monteiro/status/321048448889663488

Call me weird but if I had ads at all, I prefer that they be relevant. I hate being shown something that I have zero interest for. I actually really enjoy when a targeted ad is spot on at showing me something that I would want. I can sympathize with the idea that it is psychological warfare and I think I'd rather pay for an ad-free experience over seeing irrelevant ads.

>Ask App Not to Track

Gotta love how they flipped that phrasing around from facebook asking you for permission to you requesting something from them.

This whole thing reeks of having been A/B tested to death for max psychological manipulation without straying into territory where they can be accused of aggressive dark patterns.

That's the text provided by apple.

I see. Then my comment was misguided

I'm impressed (in a bad way) at the subtle emotional manipulation in the combination of "support businesses" and the header image they chose for this design.

i wonder if that would have even be a useful ploy if covid hadn't of damaged so many businesses in the last year. tugging on the ole heart strings.

Here is the logic, if you allow tracking, we would show your more relevant ads, if you don’t allow, we will spam the shit out of you. Either way, you see tons of ads, but allow tracking, you see ads more relevant.

Of course that’s not how they word this. They framed it as a benefit,

Notice how it’s worded - allowing for better personalized ad experience - I bet when worded this way, a good percentage of people will think, of course I want the ads to be more related to me and click allow.

What's wrong with ads? Facebook costs money and effort to produce for its users to enjoy.

I don't use FB, but people who do use presumably enjoy it.

Because Facebook's ads require a panopticon of surveillance across every page with a FB like button in order to function in current form.

People are sending much more data to facebook than they realize, and are typically upset when they learn the scope of facebooks dragnet.

If Facebook only used data from the Facebook platform itself (and none of their web of acquired companies), I think people would have much fewer objections to the tracking.

I don’t know if the mockup is what will actually appear in production, but there is some psychology about showing a flower and a smiling black woman. The image plays first to trust (nature, a mother figure, the smile) and if that isn’t enough, secondly to guilt (I need to start trusting black women) to prime the user into accepting the prompt. Imagine if it were a cartoonish Mark Zuckerberg with his tight little smirk, and instead of a flower, a piggy bank.

Facebook isn’t stupid or random. This image must have been very carefully developed and run past some of their staff PhDs. Assuming this is real.

The button saying "Ask App Not to Track": is it binding or non-binding? If I kindly asked an app to not track, I'm fairly certain the app would tell me to pound sand.

"Ask App Not to Track" just means the app will be denied access to the IDFA (which you can already do by turning on "Limit ad tracking" in settings). It's worded like that because this can't prevent the app from using something else (IP address or device fingerprinting) to track you.

Is the discussion moot if users can be easily fingerprinted without IDFA? It makes life slightly more difficult for advertising partners and social media companies, but not impossible. It's just a small additional barrier to friction that buys Apple some good PR.

If it was irrelevant, Facebook wouldn't be worried.

At least it’s a start.

That’s against Apple’s guidelines, violations of which will get your app kicked off the only distribution channel on iOS. We’ll have to see how this shakes out in reality, but as a deterrent it’s pretty strong.

Apple might dislike Facebook, but it's difficult to imagine a world where it's removed from the App Store.

Apple, almost exactly 2 years ago, revoked Facebook's enterprise signing key after shenanigans they had pulled with their fake VPN. Until that was fixed, Facebook devs were unable to install new builds on their testing devices.

Based on that history, I don't think Apple is scared of Facebook. They probably won't pull the app because it would be flipped back on Apple, but I'm sure they could find something to push back on Facebook with.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...

There has been an article on here just a day ago where the "app privacy" labels turned out to be false, so clearly Apple doesn't actually police this very well.

I found at least one instance of that in my own research. Do you have the link to that submission?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969570

"Support business which rely on ads to reach customers"

Well if you put it that way... still no.

I am happy that this is happening. It was about time someone gave it back to FB. FB has time and again crossed boundaries for which it has had to apologize everytime. It seems like they cannot regulate themselves so someone from the outside has to step in. I hope this changes the individual tracking landscape a bit even though the Big G is still a larger issue that needs to be addressed

The more I know about Facebook, the more I like Apple

I'm ok with Facebook having to beg for my permission to use my data instead of just taking what they want without telling me.

To be honest, I dont accept the argument that extremly detailed tracking is the only way to show relevant ads. High level information is probably enough and I'm sure FB would still make tons of money by even showing random ads.

Makes you wonder if there is actually another reason for collecting all that data? Like building AI and ML models for other purposes.

If regulations don't prevent them from doing so, I expect FB to pivot into Surveillance As A Service for authoritarian states.

From what I gather, Apple has been using IDFA since 2012. It's baked into the OS and Apple generates the ID. It was enabled by default. Before IDFA, Apple used UDID. My question is why did the privacy focused Apple ever include such a thing in the first place? They provided the tools. Others, like FB, used it and were profiting. I'm no fan of FB (I don't have an account) but it seems the blame is being laid at the wrong feet?

https://branch.io/idfa/

I think that this is going to end well if:

- Facebook educates people about how the company uses their data - Apple doesn’t make it hard to access data for companies that got their users’ consent

> Apple’s new prompt suggests there is a tradeoff between personalized advertising and privacy; when in fact, we can and do provide both.

We provide both as long as you trust us.

I know that this is unpopular here, but a lot of people (including me) don't mind that they get targeted ads.

If you fear for abuse, then there should be clear laws what should not be allowed and severe punishment for this.

But forbidding facebook to track behaviour and then allowing apple to do so (e.g. they even track what programs you run, is just wrong. Who knows, maybe apple will even start its own "privacy" network later on.

Usually Apple hates when App developers make any user prompts that points out changes Apple has made.

I wonder if Apple will pull the Facebook app in response.

I would hate to be the PM on this project. They would be lucky to get 5% conversion. That's still worth billions in the long run.

lol @ people who think Apple pushing back on FB tracking is out of their goodness of heart.

They want FB to introduce a subscription model so they can rake in that sweet 30% commission.

I am in favor of more consumer options, always prefer subscriptions to ads/tracking, and am a huge fan of Apple products. The issue is more that 30% commission is extortionate imo.

I met my fair share of wantepreneurs in the last couple years. The majority has no business plan and even no intention of making money. However, they’ve got an answer if you ask them: “We’re going to sell the data!”. This idea of collecting and selling the data to someone just became so deeply rooted into their minds.

if FB stops using IDFA completely and just create the profile out of the logged in user ID, wouldn't that be enough? At the end of the day, mobile Facebook app gets most of its data from FB servers? So, If someone has liked /YellowBirds page and spent 2 hours on /BirdsBirdsBirds page, you kinda get they are into the birds? Wouldn't that already provide looots of information?

If they don't use IDFA, I guess they would loose capability of linking the events from different apps. I don't know targeted advertising world that much, but is that a big deal? I think even without cross app tracking, FB has capability to provide quite detailed targeting. I'm not sure why they reacted this aggressive, feels to me like there is egos involved, possibly Zuck struggling to accept Tim can force him to do something.

Other thing I wonder is how this notification going to look like in the apps using FB SDKs.

Do not miss the Facebook articles linked from the page.

"We disagree: personalization doesn’t have to come at the expense of privacy. We can do both, and we can do both well. We’ve built products that lead the industry in transparency and offer settings and controls to help people manage their privacy."

"So if you recently bought a hiking backpack from a local outdoor gear supplier and are no longer looking for a new one, you can choose to remove the outdoor gear supplier from this list of businesses, and disconnect that information from your account."

For a company that prides itself with transparency, you could start with not lying to people in such a blunt and despicable way. See, I don't want you to know that I bought a hiking backpack. Why should you know? Why do you think you are the arbitrer of the market, that people cannot do their own research and that small business need you? This is a false premise, and your position is a blatant JOKE that at this point is also sad and unremarkable.

Stop lying to people, you sad surveillance capitalists.

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/12/personalized-advertising-a...

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/a-path-forward-for-privacy...

Thank goodness we've all been conditioned by the EU cookie consent screens to say yes to every damn popup that pops up!

Seriously - the EU is bombarding us with damn cookie notice screens. I wish apple had been more in charge of the web than these EU folks.

Facebook makes so much money off of tracking users... why don’t they just start paying us.

A horrible thought experiment:

What if FB only maintained their Android mobile app and made iOS second class, gradually lagging in features and operational support/stability?

If that experiment 'succeeds', Instagram could follow.

What do you suppose would be the outcome?

It might make some hard core Facebook users shift to android. They will get lower engagement metrics from iOS users (the smart thing to do is to try again with moving to a web app). But the declining engagement of iOS customers will likely hurt Facebook monetarily more then the lack of fidelity with targeting.

The problem is the iOS demographic often correlates with one of the most valuable to advertise to. While targeting will become harder again, which might hurt prices, overall its not like that ad spend is going to go away. Targeting will become more coarse-grained, but at the end of the day, facebook has so many on platform data sources, that it remains quite profitable to serve them.

Perhaps better as an all-at-once: if you want FB or Instagram not on iOS. If Instagram 'influencers' are in fact that and can only reach their network on Android they wouldn't really have a choice.

Of course I wish a shift did happen, but driven by consumer values (right to repair, appstore policies) to a more open platform.

That's all well and good, but does anyone believe that this won't be a broken feature?

Edit: Also, I am absolutely positive that some of my family will agree because they'll think FB would not work correctly (update their feed) otherwise.

Can’t FB incentivize this a bit? I understand that they can’t gate the app with ad tracking approval, but what if they promised to provide you with discounts on the merchants this tracking promotes or something like that?

Better: Opt in or your WhatsApp stops working.

Opt in or get universally deplatformed and lose access to the banking system. Private companies btw.

It would be great to see the public bombard these companies with a demand for privacy. Petitions/demonstrations/email campaigns...whatever it takes.

Not unique to FB, these days it seems every news site has (at least) a nag popup if a ad blocker is detected, with many having a hard block on content.

Disabling JS for that site helps and most news websites don't make any good use of it anyway.

do you use a plugin for that?

Yes, this one: https://github.com/mtimkovich/one-click-javascript-toggle

I wish we had consent forms like this in regards to medical data.

There is so much to be learned and gained if people were more sharing of aggregate data in this area.

Are all the smaller social media companies like Twitter, SnapChat, TikTok, and Reddit struggling with Apple’s new rules too?

Myspace wasn't that bad after all.

Does Android have any analogue to this kind of tracking protection?

Ok I found that Google does have a GAID/AAID and you can hide it in Android under Settings -> Google Services -> Ads

In the end, they will end up asking each user until they consent.

File under "in-app PR"

actual title:

"Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes"

Yes, that was bad. Changed now. (Submitted title was "FB testing screen to encourage users to accept active tracking")

Submitters: please follow the HN rules, which ask you "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

what... benefit can facebook offer to its sheeps now with this consent screen? pennies?

do i get a consent screen if i don't have an account

if you don't have a FB account, why would you install the app?

FB has been known to maintain marketing profiles for people who have never or no longer use their services.

in my case i would install so i can sniff the connections and suss out the code where possible, likely tuck all that away into a folder for development of a putative anti app.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theonion.com/cias-facebook-...

Non-Amp link: https://www.theonion.com/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-...

I wonder if Google ever sanitizes web pages filtered through its amp servers.

I thought the more appropriate one is https://www.theonion.com/entire-facebook-staff-laughs-as-man...

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