The fact that Facebook appears to consider user consent an existential threat to their business model tells me everything I need to know about them right now.
Devices do listen to all sounds to listen for their "prompt" - how do I know what is actually discarded? And with precedence, I don't think it is 'crazy'.
Example: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/25/614470096...
Just as if my location/microphone were able to be physically turned off on my phone I would not have to trust that someone isn't always listening in on me. If I can't do that it is not unreasonable not to trust it. There have been plenty of instances of these things being abused.
(I'm not making a claim either way on whether or not in this case it's true that devices are spying on us, just that this line or thinking is absurd that it doesn't really matter if a given thing is true)
Fast forward to 2013 and Snowden.
Our defaults for "they wouldn't do that" when it comes to your privacy are all wrong.
If that's a "conspiracy theory" that you need to dismiss so that you can go about your life, fine. But the truth is, these people are constantly up to no good and you can't trust closed software nor hardware. The technical capability for draconian mass surveillance exists.
Kind if like, 'I cant believe it's come to this, but given all the evidence, it's justified."
At the same time we see the incentives, and the incentives are to collect and analyze things.
A device which does not have a hardware cutoff switch, which you've allowed to listen for it's own prompts ("Hey Siri, etc") can listen to you. So far we're all speaking "current knowns". Nothing about that is conspiracy.
The trust part is "storage of data received" and "use of that data". Sure it probably does not today - but will the terms of service change tomorrow?
An example parallel are Alexa devices listening, and accidentally storing whole convos.
Insurance companies analyze purchase records for modeling lifestyle risk.... if I were discussing a family member who had a health scare how do I know that info isn't 'surfaced' to insurers, etc?
It's kind of fascinating how hard they (not just Facebook) push you to use their "so much better" app even when their HTML version seems just as good if not better. It's just so much better for them. If you try the app and it's not better then you know what it's really about.
If she adds a friend, it’ll send me a messenger message telling me I have to approve it, with a link. If I try to follow that link, it will tell me that my desktop browser can’t be used to manage Messenger Kids and that I have to install the app on my phone. Although it seems like in most cases you can open up Messenger Kids in the panel on the left, and then there will be an approve/deny button, so it’s mostly lies that you can’t do this on desktop.
I don't think the "threat" is the obvious one... Nobody trusts Facebook -- many, if not most, people honestly believe they listen to their conversations already. The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight.
A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers, and some label won't stop Facebook users or meaningfully impact Facebook. Hell, when Microsoft faced anti-trust breakup, the company didn't sit and whine. They fought the threat and sold billions of dollars of software and solutions to their antagonist.
I think there are parallels here. I see a focus on getting _current_ users to stop tolerating naked privacy. I think that ship has sailed. But in time the entire culture can shift where future generations do not accept naked privacy.
Once reality started setting in and denial didn't cut it, they acted to protect the shareholders. Phillip Morris bought things like Kraft that they could spin-out later. They settled claims and paid states billions of dollars for healthcare costs a few years before healthcare started going up 30% a year... which capped their liability AND made it politically impossible to put them out of business.
Google seems to at least attempt to do something similar by entering and investing billions into businesses like Cloud, cars, etc. I don't see that with Facebook... Facebook digs in and spouts some nonsense about connecting people, like the capitalist version of Soviet PR people.
Can confirm. I visited many a windowless office in Manhattan where everyone smoked, and air circulation was nil.
Fixing electronics in those days always started with swabbing a thick layer of tar off the circuit boards.
The customer had built a wall blocking all of the windows in the late 80s (this was circa 2000), we had to go in the the area inbetween.... 10-15 years of no interior cleaning and high temps resulted in these weird formations of tar drips. It almost looked like a cave formation. Absolutely vile.
The story from the site staff was that the print and mainframe operators back in the day would essentially sit and continuously smoke, all day, all night. IIRC, we found a half dozen defunct cigarette machines.
Nicotine is as hard to quit as heroin. The fact that we still punished smokers through public shaming, exclusion and excessive fines just shows how unsympathetic our culture is to perceived "moral failings."
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2018/10/17/why-its-so-hard-to-...
So, what do you advocate? Reward smokers? Encourage smoking?
P.S. Before the downvotes come, I'm rather fat and a mostly ex-smoker, so I'm not attacking obese people, just wondering at the inconsistency.
The main difference seems to be that smoking in public inflicts secondhand smoke on others, while obesity inflicts... taking up more room on public transit? IF shaming is effective at curbing public smoking, and there is no shaming for smoking in private, then I think you could have a logically consistent position.
I don't know if the first of those is true, and the second definitely isn't (although maybe a different level of intensity), so I'm not saying there is consistency, just that it's possible.
Where do you live where obese people and crack addicts are not shamed?
So, generic "smoke is bad for you", "overeating is bad for you", "junk food is bad for you"; and positive reinforcements like "say no to smoke", "say no to junk food" would be a good start.
And if some groups comes out and state that those messages are "shaming" well, those people are idiots.
P.S.: ex-smoker and ex-fat person here
I mean why do people feel it's their duty to get into someone else's life? How about assume fat people and people who smoke know it's bad for them and just leave them alone. I think people in society would be much better off of they worried themselves with their own lives. I guess that's a lot harder than pointing out other people's problems though.
I agree 100% with the "perceived moral failings" part. Shaming people does not help. I couldn't kick the H until I stopped shaming myself. The guilt made my usage worse. It was caused by complex mental health issues, dealing with those got me healthy.
The whole ordeal has made me a much more understanding, compassionate person. I'm extremely grateful to be one of the few that made it out.
If Android follows suit (not guaranteed but iOS and Android often converge on features within a few versions of each other), then they are going to take another hit. Executives want to prevent this change in the interest of their personal wealth.
While I welcome the change as an iOS user (for privacy with my other apps, I don’t even have a Facebook account) I can understand why Facebook is coming out hard against the change.
Google might be incentivized to do it, as doing so would harm the effectiveness of other ad networks without affecting their own (as long as the user has a Google account)
poor little snow flakes. i have zero sympathy
This would be amazing. Imagine all the talent that would be freed into real problems.
BTW: I remember while working in the financial sector, in the financial bubble, how terrified they were if markets were to be corrected, like they did.
I don't agree with this. It seems less of an emotional response than a business one: the changes from iOS will have a large, material impact on Facebook's business, and it will get even worse if other gatekeepers follow suit (not likely, as Google's model is pretty close to Facebook's).
I think the real takeaway is how much money is riding on surveillance capitalism, and how these business models take a real hit when you just explain clearly to the user what's going on and give them a choice.
It's very telling that personal privacy has Facebook's leadership fudging its collective Huggies, while every other company — even Google — is going along with it.
One unexplored possibility is that they actually needed to do quite a bit of analysis to determine all the uses the data is put to within their organization and doing a legal review so that they didn’t end up making a false statement.
That's the opposite of true. It didn't stop _every_ smoker, but research has established that anti-smoking marketing and labeling has a massive impact on how many people smoke overall.
I mean, it goes against the business model they operate under, but they could, right?
They're clearly at least trying to move in the opposite direction and have been making those moves for some time now.
Maybe they won't always go that way. Maybe they will.
No one is saying they're our savior, though. No one is begging Apple to please save us.
Why would I need to be saved? I'll just buy a device from a different manufacturer. If there are literally no privacy-respecting options, and a majority of people think there should be one, either a company will form on its own, or constituents will make enough noise that the government will step in.
If not in the US, the EU still seems to have some basic respect for the rights of their citizens.
... which is really no mystery, because Apple users are customers, and Facebook users are product.
Apple makes money by selling more products which means they innovate by making Watches, Earpods, M1, etc. Facebook makes money by selling your attention and data, which meants they innovate by extracting data from every experience they can (Oculus, Whatsapp, ...), using more complex technologies (Facebook AI), and encouraging whatever behaviors create more ad spend (hint: outrage).
Add in the fact that Apple has made privacy a core part of their brand promise and it means that Apple has strong incentives to protect their customers in a way that most companies, especially Facebook, do not.
But regardless it’s not Facebook’s value prop to business that people have an issue with but ya know, how they actually deliver it.
On the other hand, it's argued that Apple doesn't care about their developers because they enforce draconian regulations on what iOS developers are allowed and not allowed to do, and don't hesitate even to shut down billion dollar apps (i.e., Fortnite).
I have mixed feelings about Apple's walled garden, both as a developer and a user, but when it comes to user privacy, I'm firmly in Apple's camp. I can't think of a single other large tech company that has a strong stand in favor of user privacy and acted on that. Basically, if Privacy is a killer feature for a consumer, then Apple is literally the only game in town.
Every other company would have been falling over themselves to unlock a terrorists iPhone.
Apple said no, hired Ted Olsen, and litigated (along with lots of other less well known cases).
This may have even hurt them in some consumers eyes (hard to understand them protecting someone who killed a bunch of people). So the PR risk was very significant.
So they do seem to have a pretty committed consumer focus (and now make money because of that).
It is virtually inevitable though that someone will go after them (anti-trust etc) because this is a game of billions and folks who for example do in-game loot boxes (fortnite) and marketing (facebook) etc are going to be in regulators ears and in ny times ads and op-eds calling for this horrible situation to be broken up.
It's fairly obvious that, given Epic was saying "you can pay $2 less to get the same amount of vbucks" that Apple was going to lose a huge portion of revenue from the App if they didn't pull it, and if they actually left it up, they'd have to allow every other app to institute third-party payment processors as well to not appear like they're playing favorites and the PR nightmare that would come from that.
It doesn’t mean anything at all.
https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/the-fortnite-m...
Anyone who wanted to flout any rule could claim Apple was playing favorites with Epic.
It has nothing to do with being screwed out of $2 per purchase of in-game currency.
Saying that developers are "buying" users makes no sense. Devs are not a customer of apple. If anything, devs are a supplier to apple. Since the net money flow is from Apple to Dev.
As always, just follow the money.
Now, the legal view of Apple's ecosystem is being litigated right now. What I posted above might be how the court sees it, or what you posted might be how the court sees it. We won't get a definitive answer until either Epic or Apple go home with the key to processing payments on iOS and all of the other systems that are effectively an iPhone with a different form factor (eg PS5, xbox series).
(I’m not entirely opposed to this arrangement; I’m typing this on my iPhone. But I bought it knowing and accepting that I’m partly the product)
It’s not what people mean when they say ‘you are the product’.
What they mean is that if you aren’t paying, then the company is only interested in retaining you as a user so that they can satisfy their actual customers.
When you are paying, you are the customer
It’s also true that iOS developers are customers of Apple’s distribution service.
Buy Apple’s users are not a product in the sense that anyone uses this phrase.
First the money flows from from end user to Apple, and then from Apple to developer.
The simplest way to model it is as a supply from dev to apple, plus a value-adding supply from apple to end user.
People here are arguing it is a supply from end user to dev, plus a supply from Apple to dev. That's obtuse way to model it IMO. Then again those are the kind of people who probably devising tax avoidance schemes and making big bucks so what to I know.
Not in China:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...
I doubt you would be arguing that, if Apple bricked basically every iPhone in China, it would be evidence that their "incentives are aligned with their customers".
Being a separate device, as you said, means the phones would still work independent of Apple.
The Chinese government would block updates and sales, hencecustomers would blame them, not Apple, because Apple was incentivized with customers instead of the government moving forward.
It is not "bricking phones" as you said. As much as you don't like this fact, Apple had a choice and decided to put the Chinese government before it's users.
An iPhone that cannot connect to Apple’s servers is essentially bricked. Not only do a significant number of critical features on the phone require reaching out to Apple to function, but IIRC, after a certain period of time without being able to contact Apple, the phone will require you to log in with your Apple ID. I believe this is to prevent activation lock bypasses by blocking network resources.
I remember reading about an issue a while back, where a person got locked out of their phone at sea, because they didn’t have network access for an extended period of time.
You're splitting hairs here about Apple choosing to share their user data with the Chinese government over their user's privacy.
Will they put the consent pop up on App Store and News?
You can think of it as a common. Blocking tracking essentially is a destruction of a bit of commons; the app developer will get less revenue. By systematically encouraging this block, Apple is making it comparatively less worthwhile to have an ad-supported app instead of a paid app, thus moving revenue to the app store (where Apple can tax it) instead of the advertising side (where it is monetarily free for the user.)
If we really wanted to find out what is right for the user[1], the correct thing is to see if users want to buy their way out of tracking. Offer the apps with advertising with tracking, with advertising without tracking, and without advertising - at different prices, representing the value of the advertising and tracking. My bet is that a majority of users would not want to pay the cost of non-tracked advertising - either they'll want to buy away advertising (and that will only be a small fraction) or they'll want the free variant. Basically, all data I've seen indicate that most people don't want to buy their way out of advertising - it's too expensive. I expect the same applies to tracking.
[1] Under the assumption that we've got an efficient market and will see an equilibrium of development that correspond to value created.
Everything in it is structured around forcing you to pay Apple for access to things you want. Microtransactions, apps etc. All of it must go through Apple and they must have a cut of everything.
You can say they're more honest because they're taking your money up front as opposed to facebook selling you to advertisers, but I don't think it's in Apple's customers' best interests to be milked like cows
It's in Apple's short-term best interest to win over public opinion. It not only cools down anti-competitive rhetoric, but it also helps sell phones.
But everyone seems to conveniently forget about the absolute moral nightmare that is Apple’s supply chain.
Remember when they had to put up nets to stop people from killing themselves? [1]
What about when they were accused of using literal slave labour? [2]
Or the time they actively lobbied Congress when a vote came up to restrict American companies using slave labour [3]
I don’t say this as a shit post, I mean it, it’s really not at all clear to me that Apple are somehow morally less reprehensible.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-human-cost-of-an-...
[2] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale
[3] https://www.axios.com/apple-lobbied-congress-uyghur-slave-la...
For the record... this posted from an iPhone. I got rid of the MacBook already but it’s a process.
Presumably if you were going to criticise companies using Chinese suppliers, a company like that wouldn’t be top of your list. Or is there something else going on here?
I'm making a point that the largest company in the world not only does so but actively took steps to ensure they wouldn't be legally prevented from doing so in the future.
No, everyone hasn't. Apple has its problems, too, and nobody denies that. But arguments like yours amount to no more than "Hey, look over there! Don't look at Facebook, look at this other thing!"
Deflection. Whataboutism. Call it what you will.
I am responding to someone calling Apple a hero. I did nothing other than to point out the fact that like many things in life, it's not that simple.
There is no attempt to help Facebook or whatever you had in mind, that was your own projection. We can talk about 2 issues at the same time.
In fact they were offered billions of dollars in revenue by Google for customer location data in Google Maps. Apple turned it down and instead spent billions of dollars and several years building Apple Maps instead.
If they were intent on monetising users data, you’d expect them to make a deal with Google to allow tracking in Safari in exchange for a higher fee for default search.
In other words they don’t seem to be doing any of the things We would expect to see if this theory was correct.
No, probably more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWRlxSGf_ns
They see it as the beginning of a slippery slope. And I hope they're right!
The concept of social media and living our lives on the internet is new, in the scale of things. The last ~10 years have been like the period of time where the sun goes in but the thermostat hasn't noticed yet. Now people have decided they don't like being cold (having their data harvested) and are pushing back.
The way to reduce potential damage is to evolve, adapt, pivot, and diversify. Not to kick and scream.
Facebook has enough money and enough smart people to do and be anything it wants. It chooses to be the neighborhood creep in the bushes watching your daughter through your windows.
It is enough to highlight the policies and products of Facebook that you disapprove of.
Do I qualify as too much alarmist when I'm horrified from seeing doctors and lawyers happily exchanging photos of clients sensitive documents using Whatsapp? (read: forgetting them in their phone gallery, ready to be exfiltrated by any malicious software or repair technician). The sad part is that people is slowly adapting to not give a damn about their and others privacy because today's electronic gadgets and services are designed in a way so they're almost unusable by privacy conscious users.
> Power cycle device.
'Apple Verification. Enter the password for "<email>" in Settings.'
> Tap 'Not Now'
'Apple Verification. Enter the password for "<email>" in Settings.'
> Tap 'Not Now'
'Apple Verification. Enter the password for "<email>" in Settings.'
> Tap 'Not Now'
'Apple Verification. Enter the password for "<email>" in Settings.'
> Tap 'Not Now'
Probably they are competing for engineers, Messenger / WhatsApp vs iMessage, time spent on Facebook content vs on Apple content and other things I'm missing.
On the other side they benefitted from the popularity of Facebook (and many other internet properties companies) because they gave an extra reason to people to buy smartphones and using them a lot.
They're both huge companies whose largest risk of disruption comes not from the marketplace (they can monitor, acquire and influence challengers), but from regulators. The appearance of competition helps both companies to reduce that risk.
Nothing existential about it at all. It's an actual threat to Facebook's business model. And I'm OK with that.
"Existential threat" means a threat to the very existence of a thing, so a thing that is an "existential threat" is a very big actual threat. I think maybe you're confusing "Existential" with "Hypothetical"?
Politicians started using that phrase en masse about a year ago, and the internet has latched onto it and now misuses it all the time.
"Existential threat" means something so devastating it threatens the subjects very existence.
It's meant that for as long as the phrase has been in use.
> an existential threat is a threat to the existence of something.
I can't decide if this comment is very clever ironic satire or... not ;-)
> Politicians started using that phrase en masse about a year ago
"Existential threat" has been in wide-spread use for a really long time. The first time I heard the phrase used was probably some time in the late 90s. And that's more a function of my age than of how long the term has been used. The cliche is at least half a century old and has been used by politicians for at least decades.
For example, the phrase was commonly used in anti-proliferation and denuclearization advocacy during the last quarter of the 20th century, when nuclear weapons were characterized as an "existential threat" to humanity. This use persists today; see, for example, https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/nuclear-weapons-and-ex...
But the term isn't particularly partisan or limited to extinction-level threats. it's also been used throughout modern history by right-wing populists to refer to one group or another being an "existential threat to our way of life". See for example https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44498438
The point is, the phrase has been used for a long time, always with the same meaning, and its use hasn't been particularly partisan as far as I can ever remember. Both sides use the phrase for various things. But they all definitely mean the same thing -- a threat to the existence of something (humanity, dominant cultural norms, the country, etc.). Not a "perceived" threat.
I'm genuinely and sincerely curious where you got the idea that "Existential threat means an implied, or perceived threat" rather than "a threat to the existence of a thing". The former has never been anywhere close to the dominant accepted meaning. Possibly you heard a politician or pundit use the term in a sarcastic way and misunderstood their sarcasm as literal? Or you heard someone use the phrase in a hyperbolic way?
Can you share one or more sources where people are using the phrase in the way you describe?
(It's debatable whether or not Google is any better. At least they're a lot less overt about their contempt for user privacy and data sovereignty.)
The argument still stands - just replace TS with mom jeans. My point wasn't actually about Taylor Swift marketing - it was that demographic targeting is a reasonable way to identify an audience. Those mom jeans are not going to sell very well in a younger, urban demographic compared to Iowa.
More information here. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
Nearly every company in the world does not fit that description, and I would bet that the vast majority of them would benefit from targeted advertising. One example being local stores targeted only to local people.
>TADELIS: Yes. So, for non-branded search, we actually had no idea what the results are going to be. Because here, if I am searching for, example, a studio microphone I’m sure that on eBay I might find a variety of used ones. But if I’m not thinking about eBay, and I just search for “studio microphone,” if eBay doesn’t pay an ad, they might not even show up on the first page. And by the way, the automated machines at eBay that were doing the online bidding, they had a basic library of close to 100 million different combinations of keywords, because eBay has practically everything you could imagine for sale on the site. So, we really had no idea what the returns for the non-branded searches would be.
>TADELIS: And we took a third of these D.M.A.’s, and we turned off all paid-search advertising. This was an extremely blunt experiment where we’re saying, “What would happen if we didn’t advertise at all?” And to our surprise the impact on average was pretty much zero.
The interesting question is much tracking adds on top of simpler targeting based on location and context.
Or make it optional and just show that ad to users that have set their location field.
Facebook and others have convinced people that they can do better than simple location based advertising.
People would call the last one personalized and not "location targeted", but it's pretty hard to see where that flips.
Mass advertising needs to die off already. Just hold better search and filtering tools and empower people to discover what they want instead of telling them what they should want.
There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that happily pay for ads on Facebook over other platforms and see improved results after tweaking the targeting.
The issue is the privacy loss we get, not the efficacy of targeting.
No... ~targeted~ advertising only enriches ad platforms not the buyers of the ads.
> In our previous episode, we learned that TV advertising is much less effective than the industry says.
Sounds like almost all advertising is just a zero-sum game.
All that said, I am not an authority on if any evidence exists, I have never looked into the literature my self, so perhaps this evidence already exists and I just don’t know about it.
Regardless of its efficacy, the legality should be out of the question.
Targeted ads work really well for many scenarios, b2b software.
I’m also not sure if it matters whether they are actually effective. At least for the short term. If people believe they are effective, is there any difference in the dynamic?
One can directly measure ROI and prove the value of this advertising. Especially FB provides for my business (political marketing) at least 10X better direct response value and that is mostly using 1:1 targeting and lookalike modeling.
What I like about the HN discourse is that if someone slings out a statement which is demonstrably false, someone that knows better might respond with a correction. That is why I left this comment, as I all my knowledge with the targeted ad business was anecdotal, and I desperately needed a correction.
there are a lot of ways to measure outside of FBs analytics tools.
including the very simple simply using a refcode or even a specific product/url. How many purchases did you get / how much did you spend?
this is what i'm referencing. like that's so incredibly basic and it bugs me HN just either doesn't understand or lets their opinion on it go first
In my experience FBs inaccurate reporting is just a tiny amount of impressions delivered and they refund the $1 or whatever it is a couple times a year. Have they ever had a reporting anomaly on their analytics tools for tracking off FB conversions? they very well could have but I haven't heard of one.
There is no way to validate their impression/click data that all the downstream metrics are reliant on. If you have a way, I'd love to know about it. The claim isn't that they make up conversions, the claim is that they overstate the ROI and cv% based on the denominator.
There is also an academic researcher who regularly publishes as well.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...
and of course there's Tim Hwang.
https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis
Internet ads do not work past simple location based targeting.
I have routinely gotten over 100% immediate last-click roi from fb ads, for many clients.
I know for a fact many others have too. There are a ton of direct to consumer online-only products that easily measure this. Just make a page or item which you only use to advertise on FB. sales/spend. Game developers track this closely too.