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.
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 IS annoying that their nag box doesn't have a "go to settings" option, at least.
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.
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.These dark patterns will only go away once there are properly enforced laws against them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
One can only dream.
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.
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.
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.
Unless it’s a one person business, have the office administrator do it. No need to bother with every detail.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
My social life actually got better after dropping social media simply because I'm spending less time scrolling in front of a screen.
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.
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.
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.
This is a false equivalence.
Facebook is nowhere near at that level of need yet.
There is also an issue of Maslow style leveling here, but the core point is identical.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I get the privacy implications, but asking "why would anyone agree to this" is kind of narrow-minded.
"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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sampling methodology. Every ad impression in your sample was shown to the same person, but the ad industry is interested in billions of people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People don't drive stocks. Banks and bots do.
Except for GameStop. But that's a different fish.
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?"
FB aren't entitled to a user's entire internet presence (digital and physical) just because the user doesn't pay for the account.
And that is the entire story of dark patterns.
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.
(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.)
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.
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".
You're just not the one paying for what the service is.
But you are the PRODUCT.
Apple shipped this tracking feature in the first place.