Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

I froze up the first time someone said this to me. Of course I prefer random ads, cause this way they're less likely to push the right buttons on my vulnerable monkey-ass brain. Do people think tailored ads are good for them instead of consumerism triggers? Messed up worldview.

You don't even need your "but" (so hold on to it), because this is a classic false dichotomy anyway. Targeting does not require spying nor does spying tend to improve targeting. Basic immediate context (what you're doing, not who you are) works better for both advertisers and willing consumers than personally invasive intrusion does.

You should rather ask whether they prefer relevant ads that put them at risk by aggregating everything about their lives into databases that regularly get breached or relevant ads that don't put them at risk. They can get relevant ads either way. They've just been sold a bill of goods on the need for personal invasion to do it.

I was okay with the targeted ads in the sidebar, when that's all it was. I opted not to block ads on facebook with adblock plus. I learned of all sorts of products that I probably never would have heard of had I been getting random ads, or ads intended to appeal to a wide audience. I never felt manipulated.

The tweaking of the news feed feels wrong though even without ads. Maybe it was an inevitable result of the quest for profits, but if I could go back to targeted ads the way they used to be, I would do it in a heartbeat.

The reality is that I've been fed targeted ads all my life, but the targeting wasn't was optimized. Automotive magazines are more likely to have ads for spark plugs than hair products. A cooking website is more likely to have ads for spatulas than tractors. At least, that's how it used to be. With ads fed from Google, ads are likely to be related to what I've recently searched for with their search engine. The result is often comical: I no longer see ads relevant to what I'm interested in at the time, but to what I was interested in 30 minutes ago. I'm not clicking any of those ads; I've already moved on.

My response to that is "I prefer random ads, because relevant ads are an indication that I'm being spied on". My objection to ads isn't the ads themselves -- I'm going to ignore those no matter what -- it's all the spying the ads bring with them.

The issue is allowing any old engagement.

I’d like to see the hacker news system scaled.

Some things that could make moderators actions go further to keep the cost down:

- outrage detection: before you hit post, you’re warned that your possibly inflammatory post will be flagged for moderation.

-timeouts: if a moderator finds outrage or outrage bait in a post, the poster gets a seven day timeout (cannot log on). ANYONE who replied to or liked the offending post gets a one day timeout.

Don’t get me wrong, I prefer it this way. But you’d think they’d be better at it by now.

Absolutely. I've seen entire websites completely reinvent themselves because someone complained to Google about some "offensive" page and got their ads pulled. Stuff I used to like got deleted because of advertisers.

If this "sanitized advertiser friendly web" is the future, I'd rather not have a web at all.

The only ads I specifically don't like are the ones Youtube have randomly showed my wife and I. It's only happened twice to each of us, but they were a bit adult themed. Having a child in the house, I was pretty peeved.

Why is it that the only the first page of search results in a search engine "matter". (Some search engines are now showing a total of 5 (!) results. Brave's new search engine does not even have a page 2!)

Why is it that an "app store" has limited search discoverability but instead provides "Top 10" or "Top 20" lists. And more recently, "recommended apps".

Why is it that a video hosting service has "recomendations" enabled by default, recommended videos show up in search results and the top "recommended videos" always have the highest view counts.

"Tech" has no viable "business model" except advertising. (Time will tell if this "model" is actually sustainable.) This is because they are nothing more than middlemen. They do not produce content and offer nothing of value that they in fact own. Whatever they offer can be obtained directly from its true owners, provided there is motivation (e.g., avoiding payment to a middleman). If "tech" did have something of value they own, it stands to reason they would charge for it. This would provide others with the motivation to cut out the middleman. Hence, "tech" cannot charge "users" money for middleman services.

Why or why not?

Not that long ago someone posted this beautiful Banksy quote about it on HN:

> “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” - Banksy

I’ll damn well block all shitty ads on every site.

You’re a newspaper site and want to block me for using an ad blocker? Feel free, I’ll leave your site.

You’re an advertiser who refuses to bid on ad space as too many people block the ads anyway? Please stop bidding then.

But don’t pretend that by offering your site for free and me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads.

If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it I’ll pay for it.

The earliest iterations of banner ads weren’t that bad. They were basically print ads with some low-key animations added at worst, and many weren’t even graphical.

But then arose an arms race to create the most attention-grabbing, obnoxious ads possible, and ad supported pages quickly became neon disco raves that sucked up CPU cycles and sometimes even hijacked users’ browsers. This was the first tipping point.

And then ads became ever more invasive, fingerprinting users in any way possible. This was the second tipping point.

Had web ads stayed lightly-enhanced, unscripted print ads, I doubt anybody would care to install an ad blocker, but here we are today where doing so is practically essential not just from a privacy standpoint, but also from a security standpoint (since ads can exploit 0days).

So the industry largely brought this upon itself, at least in my eyes.

I could go on and yet I think some points start to emerge. I'm OK with ads, I don't like the pervasive tracking. I'm OK with ads, I don't like them interrupting the functionality. I actually even like ads when I have some control over them, not them controlling me. Give me more options to choose which types of ads I want to see (not only don't want to see), don't track me to try to guess/manipulate which ones I want to see.

Lastly, I think in physical real estate, there are laws about who can advertise, where, and when, and I think in digital real estate, there don't seem to be those regulations and advertisements and ad-tracking creep more and more. While advertisements seem to be one of the best ways to grow income (i.e., more people viewing/more accurate audience = higher ad price), I think an ad does have a ceiling price and then once it hits it, companies start to make more ads, more intrusive ones, and more tracking ones.

I think more than anything, I want more agency over the process, and right now, my options for agency are often do nothing, avoid the site completely, constantly click on ads to say "I don't want to see ads like this" and end up seeing more ads tangentially like it, install an ad-blocker, or one of many other almost guerrilla-like tactics to gain some semblance of agency.

As a side point, many labour-of-love websites start to monetise to sustain the hosting costs. But some of the best blogs I read are flat HTML. The running costs of such websites must be negligible for all but the most heavily trafficked blogs. When my blog got hit by hundreds of views per second over the course of a few hours via reddit, Apache on a Core 2 Duo barely broke a sweat because it was flat HTML. With modern CSS websites can look fantastic with minimal assets and bandwidth. I'm happy to pay €20/month for such a server myself, and donate my content to whoever wishes to read it.

I don't want anything that's advertising supported. Anything. There is no media I want to consume so badly that I'll tolerate ads to watch it. There's no product so interesting I'll view ads to use it. No website contains information I need that badly.

People keep saying that without ads we'll have to pay for things. Fine. Sure. Set up a Patreon. I give money on Github to a few projects I rely on to make sure their maintainers don't get day jobs. I couldn't afford to pay a programmer's salary, but I can afford to pay a small percentage of one.

I think the problem has actually been the donation button itself. You want $1 a month out of me that's a pretty easy sell. You want me to sign up for your website and give you my credit card information and you're SOL. I tried to donate to VoiceMeeter a few months back because it's so good. They only accept $20 donations, no more no less, and their payment system wasn't working.

Just, like, get a Venmo.

The small additions I might enjoy might be some flash games, Wikipedia, and blogs; these were early 2000s IIRC. I would actually draw the line at Youtube. It's great and all, but it could as well not be the web, but a dedicated native app for all I care, but give me the old YouTube at its very first breakeven point[1].

We pretend like the current multi-hundred billion dollar Crapshow Creeper Web full of carnival barkers hounding you every second is absolutely necessary, and it's not. What fucked up the Web was money--way too much of it. We're in a denial phase with the Web bubble desperately pumped up with steroids to support multiple 800 pound gorilla/leeches that provide little value other than "scale" (or some shit).

[1] (and Google will never publicly say when that was, but definitely before 2010--it's just that the stupid growthism mindset required absurd revenue growth to keep up with stockholder and executive greed).

If we did really understand the implications of the society we live in, we would not stop at selecting "don't track me" on a phone.

We're living through a major extinction, we know that the next century is going to be a bloodbath, we know this crisis has been brought to us by productivism, and we're discussing whether it's fair to ignore calls for more consumerism on our phones.

1. I want more honesty and transparency in products and services. I'm tired of being sold something to "Connect with friends and the world around you" that are actually just a front to collect as much information about me as possible to for advertisers.

I'm not even opposed to targeted ads, but at this point have to assume that if a product is capable of collecting ever bit of data it can and selling it, it will. Even privacy policies and user agreements are meaningless because they all contain text of the effect that the provider can change the terms at any time.

I just want companies to be honest about what they are actually doing and what the cost to me really is.

2. I want ads to back the hell off.

I don't mean they need to go away entirely. There are times when I _want_ to learn about different products and find new things to solve problems I have.

But I'm tired of them them pushing to get as in my face as possible, of them beating me over the head with problems I don't have, and of them trying to manipulate me into giving them money instead of helping me find things that will actually help me.

It's as if product discovery isn't profitable; like companies are afraid to be honest about their products. So instead of making better products, they entire market just makes different colored cheap boxes with nothing inside and uses ads to manipulate as many people into buying them before they figure it out.

I block ads guilt free because at this point I honestly don't feel like I can trust any company that participates in this racket.

Personally though, I'm might just be willing to give up on products that depend on ad revenue. While I admit I do use some services based on ad-tech, I'm pretty quick to leave any site that complains about my ad-blocker and don't really feel like I'm missing anything. I could probably be convinced to leave most these other services behind if they started making a worse experience of it.

For the sake of argument, lets assume FaceBook is a top-grade product that people currently don't pay for with money. It exists because advertisers pay FB. The targeting of ads to individual users allegedly results in a high CTR or whatever. Without targeting, FaceBook can still sell ads but they will be less targeted, and presumably have a lower CTR. That means they will be less valuable than other forms of ads and the ad spend will be adjusted accordingly. That seems bad for our "free" service. OTOH if we stop targeting in all areas, there will be no medium that is "better" to put ads and so the spend will likely move in proportion to where peoples eyeballs and ears are, as things used to be. That might actually result in more ad spending in areas like radio, TV, and any other medium that never gained the ability to target specific people.

Maybe that's a good thing for us consumers.

I would like to see us move to direct payments. If direct payments were the norm, the web would be less polluted with UX anti-patterns and other crap.

There's nothing particularly extreme about this idea. We pay for all our products and services in the physical world. We pay for streaming music and video. Heck, even in social networking, people pay/paid to use WhatsApp, iMessage and BBM, which are/were two of the largest messaging platforms (BBM and WhatsApp had monthly fees and iMessage is paid for with device purchases).

If your social media platform cannot convince people to pay, say, $1.99/month, perhaps it just isn't enriching the lives of your end users, and thus shouldn't exist. A lot of people (particularly those focused on growth hacking) would say this is a flaw of direct payments, but I view it as a feature.

The average HNer has absolutely no clue the economic impact derived from invasive privacy tracking and the not-so-secretive data industry. It's absolutely massive across finance, consumer-facing-anything, insurance, and government.

One particularly good journalist covering the topic is Joseph Cox [1]. Follow his work and you'll start to get a tiny sense of how massive we're talking.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/contributor/joseph-cox

If someone really wants or needs something, they'll find a way to pay for it (directly or indirectly) if access cannot be had any other way. Everything else is "nice to have" until the cost or friction gets a little higher than zero.

The fact that people are increasingly unwilling to "pay for" things like FB seems to suggest these services are not actually _that_ vital despite their high usage figures.

The system we have now is micropayments. Personal data has economic value and we pay with that.

The engineering problem is to figure out how to make the payment system less indirect so that companies can't rent seek by extracting more data (payments) for the same service.

I think going back to content based advertising will greatly improve the quality of content on the internet.

The way it works now, the most valuable content is the cheapest content that can get valuable eyes to look at it, which leads to clickbait and low effort content.

If advertisers can only make ad decisions based on the content, quality content will be more valuable.

Or, as continuational said, you will have to pay for it.

And cryptominers are not borderline malware. They are malware full stop.

For me, I pay for email and web hosting. The only big thing I rely on is news, I believe. And Internet search.

Youtube is mostly useless except when I'm trying to repair stuff at home. Almost everything else falls into the category of "entertainment", for which there are plenty of alternatives that don't involve ads. If there is one thing there is no shortage of in this country, it's entertainment.

Most of the (non-news) articles I read online really don't add much to my life, and there were plenty of choices pre-Internet (e.g. magazine subscriptions).

I'm happy to get ad-subsidized stuff like they did in the old days (news + magazines) because although it was annoying, it was not invasive.

So apart from Internet search, I'm having trouble finding anything that is (invasive) ad supported that benefits my life. If most of these things will go away, I will happily revert to the old ways. I'm definitely not happier now because of ad supported services.

Of course, that would mean techies stepping up and doing this for their families and tribes...

Many of us seem to be preoccupied with chasing the advertising dollar which exploits those same people.

I am perfectly willing to see ads as an indirect payment for free services. Show me some ads with tasteful photography, good art, or a nice pun. I might even click on them and buy something! This is not new, we have been doing this for centuries.

What we currently have are hardly good ads in any way, shape, or form. They rely upon invasive tracking to show you lazy creepy notifications like “Oh you live in 123 Evergreen St. and bought a toaster recently? Here are ads for five other toasters!". Ugh, no thanks.

Advertising is fine. Getting rid of invasive personal tracking will allow the creativity and art to come back into advertising.

Fantasy world. These products do not exist, as far as I'm aware. The reality is trash products. I couldn't care less if all that trash just vanishes from the internet.

Is Facebook a "higher-grade" social networking product than other free ones that exist without the same monetization of personal data, or than other free ones that could exist without the same monetization of personal data if such monetization of personal data was considered unacceptable? I don't doubt that Facebook delivers more value to shareholders than if they were not able to monetize personal data to the same extent, but I see no reason to believe that they or their competitors would be less of a "top-grade product."

Do we have any proof that regular, old non-tracking ads could not sustain a top website? I’ve heard stories that websites can actually earn more by excluding all the ad tech middlemen from the equation.

Don't want.

Does this change if nobody is allowed to do surveillance? I.e. if privacy-respecting ads are not competing with more intrusive ads, does the price change?

I think discussing options is a waste of time if we don't have any data to base our decisions on.

I think most HN users will agree that the good stuff costs money. So the question is really who pays, and how.

For me the ideal end-game is ability to get what I want through a direct pay-as-you-go transaction. In the ideal world this transaction is explicit, instant, anonymous, nearly zero overhead and non-recurring. Explicit, because as a consumer I want to be able to say no, and know exactly when I engage in a transaction. Instant, because waiting X working days sucks. Anonymous, because there are many reasons to stay anonymous. Zero overhead, because we want to cut middlemen. Non-recurring, because a recurring payment is _always_ an up-sell. Paper money works great in the offline world.

Any kind of an indirect payment is not ideal because it takes control from the consumer and gives it to someone else.

By outsourcing ads to a 3rd party the website has lost an element of control over their "own space on the internet" and hence led to mish mash crap on so many sites - and it follows you making the sites all blend into one another!

I would accept a website to host it's own static advertising - not GIF, not video, not audio - that doesn't discriminate between myself and fellow humans. A website on my browser, or any similar browser around the world, should be the same, barring accessibility differences.

This would bring us back to motoring websites having ads for cars, tech websites having ads for tech etc. People don't get tracked, they get ads relevant to their interests, and pages look cohesive and have an identity.

Fine, Facebook knows which hobbies I'm looking at on Instagram and has incredible ads and suggested posts. Ok that's fine. But random 3rd party I don't know getting that data... No thanks.

Do we want them to though? What would a web without free look like?

A global ban on targeted advertising. Fines in % of global revenue instead of fixed sums. Bankruptcy of adtech companies and concerts in the ruins of their headquarters.

What I do is Building relevant ads to my content when I find fitting affiliate programs. As they are just text (or image) with an link they ain't blocked and respect my users privacy.

I would argue that are the only actually targeted ads. And lucky content creators won't be blocked either (usually)

Other projects I just go for a paid or free/paid model.

I don't actually. If I could pay for something that gives good value and by doing so I also shut off all tracking of any kind, I'd do so, assuming it was something I was interested in.

I don't think the typical HN user insists on not paying for the software we use. I don't understand people who insist they want unpaid software.

1. Pervasive, asymmetric surveillance increases the power differential between individuals and big corps/governments. The latter groups can use that power to preempt healthy competition, causing individual quality of life to stagnate in a local maximum.

2. Ads themselves are attention hijacking, thought injection, and manipulation/coercion—all forms of mind control. Most people consider their mind central to who they are (often along with body, memories, and personality), it's wrong to mess with that non-consensually. (No, clicking "accept ToS" isn't consent.)

3. Centralizing surveillance data (as by companies and governments) prevents the surveilled from protecting their own vulnerabilities from bad actors. It's like passwords: you can invest in memorizing many strong ones, or re-use one that's written on a post-it on your desk, but since in this metaphor the surveillants are also storing your password in plaintext in paper filing cabinets, so it doesn't matter how much effort you put into protecting your passwords. Put another way, if the Coke recipe or a Boeing blueprint were leaked, it's the company's loss, so they work hard to protect their secrets. But if someone hacks a consumer company's user data, it's the users who are affected; if it weren't for regulatory fines and news exposés, companies wouldn't even be hurt by such breaches.

As for the end-game goals: Companies surveil and advertise because they're allowed to and it works.

We see futuristic attention hijacking tech in sci-fi films and TV, like giant holograms [Blade Runner], ads that address each individual [Minority Report], or ads that stop until you're paying attention again [Black Mirror]. But it's less common to see futuristic attention protection tech. (That makes sense if you consider the funding source of these sci-fi productions.) Black Mirror did have one episode where a person was exiled from everyone else's senses, but I can't think of others.

[It works] The individual's goal could be total control over perception of the world. As a natural-born human, you can easily close your eyes, but your other senses are harder to dampen, and so provide vectors for involuntary thought injection (ads). Now with widespread earbud use, you can sort of close your ears too. But imagine installing an ad-blocker so your senses just didn't report ads, or your brain didn't perceive them? As with many technologies, it'd be quite dystopian if centrally controlled, quite freeing if under individual control. Even more fantastical would be the ability to experience but be unaffected by stimuli (including ads), which might not even be a technology exactly.

[They're allowed] The other goal could be simply to use our collective power (i.e. government) to more strictly regulate—or even ban—surveillance and advertising (and enforce it!). While this always possible, I'm afraid it's no longer realistic in U.S., though other countries could still pull it off, as could whatever government eventually replaces the American one.

Lastly, what if nothing were free? Part of the problem is that the difference between $0 and $1 is much, much larger than from $1 to $2, i.e. free is a way better price than even dirt cheap (or sometimes even being paid). Tech start-ups are especially guilty abusing the marketing power of "free" in combination with unsustainable infusions of venture capital, which is dishonest if not somewhat fraudulent. Business would survive the removal of tactics like "free + ads" and "loss leaders".

The devil's in the details, for sure. Such a system would immediately turn into an arms race between running it fairly and gaming it. At the end of the day, what I want the internet to give me is neither impressions nor time spent, but value, and only I can really judge that - but I don't really want to be thinking about judging it all the time. The best scheme I came up with was one that tracked time/impressions/whatever and came up with a default payment for a given site, and let me adjust it if I felt it was high or low.

The second problem was -- what's up with $10/mo? Might that be low, for specialized content? High, for poor people? I had set it based on gut feel relative to the price I was paying my ISP at the time. I thought that perhaps what I'm paying by default can be negotiated with paywalls behind the scenes, and if it isn't high enough they can ask me for more for the one impression, and I can set it higher ongoing if I like what they have. An alternative approach was the one pursued by Project Wonderful, which had advertisers bidding against each other for space on a web site and (maybe it was this project or another) users bidding against those advertisers for those spaces to be blank! The free market enthusiast in me loves that in principle. In practice, projects in that vein all failed for reasons I don't understand.

That leads into a third problem, though. A lot of the value I get out of the internet is user-generated on larger sites -- like comments on this one. I appreciate Reddit pioneering some ways to thank these people, but as for making a larger and more general fair solution, I must admit I'm a bit lost. I dislike the idea of paying Facebook for aggregating the content of people I really want to be thanking and taking all the money for it (which is in fact, more or less what happens now).

With that said, I do like services that have this sort of fee for subscription for all content model. It seems to be dominating these days, and I take that as validation that the scheme is fundamentally the right way to go about solving the problem. But it needs another iteration. I hate having a dozen content subscriptions. I hate that they come in "a month" as the smallest size. And I hate that it gives the network so much control over where my money goes -- these schemes are notoriously unfair to creators. It would be much better if my relationship was with the creators directly, as I know what things are worth to me. If I could just cruise onto YouTube and it would hit my GlobalContentPayer up for $0.30 for an hour of ad free viewing (or $19.99 for a movie that just came out) or whatever, I'd be a much happier camper. I'm willing to pay you, but I don't really want that much of a relationship.

I definitely hate one-sided ad relationships. I don't mind ads like the old newspaper classifieds -- where both I and the advertiser got value out of it and that's the only reason it worked. Information exchanges are good, and if both parties are paying for access, that's a good sign of their health. One-sided ad relationships in which I am a product and not a party are inherently toxic. While I am sympathetic to creators needing a way to support themselves, that sympathy doesn't extend to allowing that sort of psychological abuse into my life. I avoid these sorts of ads whenever I can, in any way I can, without remorse.

I'm the first one most of my friends come to for tech questions, and I make a point of explaining privacy issues to them and helping them counter creepy behavior in apps/websites. When my parents buy iPhones, the first thing I'll be telling them is which button to push when apps want to stalk them.

By myself, I'm an irrelevantly small data point, but it's not just me—most of my "tech support" friends are privacy-aware and evangelize it. I suspect iOS losses have only just begun, and will continue.

Why?

Not only dependent. Don't forget how many psychology PhDs get jobs at Facebook and Google instead of "helping people". Why would you work with a bunch of depressed drug addicts and wife-beaters? Why not get a joint degree in PhD and Marketing? https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/joint-doctoral-degree-in... You'll make 10x as much.

> For consumer researchers, psychology is one of the foundational disciplines that comprise the field of marketing. For psychologists, the marketplace is filled with questions and insights about human cognition and behavior.

It's so on the nose it's painful - I truly think limiting the amount a business spends on advertising would have a net good for society.

Where are you getting your information? There are entire businesses built solely on top of FB/Insta/etc ads. I went 15+ years on the internet without buying anything from an ad, and then in the last 5, I've made at least 5 conscious, purchases from Insta ads. They've become really good in recent years.

This may conceivably be because having previously visited a website is a stronger indicator of interest than say, male 18-30 making $XYZ/yr.

It may also be purely coincidental and garbage. You were going to buy anyway/you already bought it.

The truth most often lies somewhere in-between.

The statistic rigor of the people purchasing these ads is not always the highest. The companies offering these solutions typically have very little reason to not sell as many ads as possible, as long as the metrics look good.

In the end consumers are blasted with stalking ads that they don't want and the entire industry is shooting itself in the foot

It's hard to believe the economy is dumping almost 100B/year into a product that doesn't work.

There are many success stories with ads. I’ve been involved with two exits that is all attributed to digital advertising. No where else do you get a ROAS in the double digits. Here is a good example of the difference. When I worked for a challenger bank. We paid under $75 per signup and $10 per app install. Chase and BOA pays $1200 per new customer in marketing expenses using traditional marketing channels.

But who are the FB ads rivals that aren't affected in a similar manner by this change? Since the tracking permission isn't specific to FB, wouldn't other players with a similar business model also be negatively impacted?

Can’t wait to see more paid placement in content, getting around my paid subscriptions, ad blockers, and “do not track” requests.

It looks like the 7% and 13.6% figures the article quotes are the initial revenue decreases for a single quarter, which the model assumes would recover thereafter. In general, the model is based on some very, um, stylized assumptions. I'm really skeptical that a 12.5% increase in the number of users who block tracking (from 80% to 90%) would result in a 60% increase in the impact of that blocking on revenue.

That said, I don't think the numbers are drastically out of line. Apparently >60% of Facebook's revenue is from iOS, so it wouldn't take that large of a decrease in efficiency for the revenue hit to end up in the 10% ballpark. The main question to me is the extent to which the loss is borne by Facebook or by advertisers. It's possible that advertisers are effectively price-takers and will keep paying basically the same amount despite a decrease in efficiency.

I highly doubt this. I suspect this will instead signal a pivot to products that are intrinsically "trackable".

It's important to remember that ATT doesn't disable tracking in its entirety, it only disables cross-app tracking. It's only harmful to your business if you are reliant on tracking users while they are not using your product.

Lots of products will continue doing fine - think about Google Search, where you directly tell Google what you want. There is not necessarily a huge need to track you while you are not using the product - after all, the product literally revolves around you directly telling Google what you want.

The products that will benefit the most are the ones that a) shows ads, and b) where the product's functionality intrinsically collects information about the user without the need to rely on third-party data.

Oddly enough FB's apps fit decently into this. Your behavior within the FB main app are still "fair game" as far as tracking goes, and FB shows ads directly in the app.

I am not quite sure what advertisers are complaining about. Facebook should still be able to track purchases of physical goods, since most of those will require an email address and facebook can use that to link up the sales.

Web site retargeting is not really affected by this. I guess people using shopping apps would be impacted, but a lot of those folks will be logged in and trackable. This article references "Most retail websites" but they are not affected by the recent change (ITP does affect them, but that is not new).

App downloads are probably much less trackable and that would definitely be affected.

I guess ads will continue to work about as well as before and then ad buyers will realize they can buy ads directly instead.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

Patreon, paid newsletters and paid news subscriptions are all mature industries now. Why do we act like the sky's going to fall if the spigot of useless memes, influencer primping and political propaganda gets turned off?

I never understood why these companies don't offer paid options with no ads or tracking, at least in adddition to the ad supported "free" version.

Something like Deny Tracking Allow Tracking

instead of the "Ask app not to track" I have to read the prompt a few times to make sure i pick the right one

Would they be willing to accept the end of Facebook to stop the tracking? No. How do we know that? Because they kept using it in the past.

This is a real phenomenon known as consent fatigue.

However, if nobody could be monetized, then Facebook couldn't exist, making those people (for whom monetization of their eyeballs is an acceptable cost in exchange for Facebook) to be worse off.

The only reason piracy and ad-blocking haven't totally killed for-profit media is because most people don't use them (either because they don't know how, for legal or ethical reasons, or because it's a hassle).

I wonder, are people who use facebook and who would prefer to not have their eyeballs monetized like this not aware of Facebook's business model?

How do they think Facebook will stay operational? I personally think it's best to just drop Facebook, but I'm sure my parents and grandparents would rather have Facebook with adds than no Facebook.

Good point about the scanning, though. These scumbags certainly would try to pull something like that off.

they still cluster you, but instead of collecting your browsing activity from partner websites, they do it locally using browser history that doesn't leave your device, and the net effect is that you have an equivalent of a browser cookie or additional http request header that doesn't identify you, but does identify your cluster memberships.

some people are still not ok with this, i'm on the fence.

I imagine a pop-up like this would auto-register for a lot of people the same as "accept the terms of service to continue"

For Instagram the web based app has no adverts, at least not on iOS/Firefox/NextDNS.

How about tracking, aggregation, selling and reselling your data, and abandoned privacy therefrom? Malware? Bandwidth from downloading all the non-content? Burning cpu's to run the teraquads of javascript?

I'd go so far as to say that for a decade advertisers and social media experts have been given a more or less free ride.

It's often not the companies themselves who manages the ad buy, it's agencies who only knows how to click around in Facebook or Google AdWord. They have NO IDEA how to run an effective ad campaign or how to buy ad space.

The advertisers just see the numbers the agencies gives them, and in self defence user privacy is attacked and not the competency of the ad agencies.

The more accurate analogy would be the grocery store owner teaming up with other local businesses to aggregate your shopping habits across stores into a central database. What you're describing would be if facebook installed a RAT on your computer after visiting it.

Or maybe don't use Facebook on Android?

If you have to leave your social circle, or try to convert them all to something else, (or in the case of all those noncompliant GDPR warnings, tapping a button, waiting 15 seconds, tapping 4 more buttons) that is too much work and you give up

I have been using an adblocker for a long time. But a few weeks ago I turned it off 'just to see'. The internet was a lot more 'noisy' than I remember it. I remember when one simple banner ad at the top of the page was considered 'crazy'. If only we knew.

How many more ads could they possibly squeeze in before people just give up using the platform?

A potentially controversial take, but I believe that Apple can force developers to use SFSafariViewController to enhance privacy and UX, without too much blowback. SFSafariViewController is a privacy-friendly alternative that prohibits third parties from seeing your browsing data (unlike the custom in-app browsers used by apps like Instagram). I’ve yet to see a custom in-app browser that has ever provided a better experience than SFSafariViewController.

Exceptions could be provided where it makes sense. For example, I would still permit apps to load webpages owned by the developer in their own in-app browser (this is necessary for web-based logins, for example).

Advertising and marketing have been, at least as far as my cultural memory extends past the 80s, cynical and soul sucking. Always trying to figure out what was going on in people's heads and spit out some amalgam of an image or lifestyle or identity for people to latch onto and, critically, for businesses to exploit.

The wrapping paper has eternally been "what's wrong with matching a product to a customer" and justifiably that is a difficult point to disagree with. If we are to have products and customers it is almost self-evident that they should be harmonized. But the premise in question presupposes that a customer will have a need; to the degree that needs are invented as much as the product even to justify the expenditure of resources to create a product in the first place. In the end we loop back to the the previous paragraph. Creativity in service of what? pure exploitation.

Software Engineering is, or can be, an exceptionally creative profession. That alone isn't justification for whatever we design! We must be more careful.

That needed some pretty clever set up from the marketing folks, company-specific graphics and stuff, and the pipeline to be per company. It was cool, man.

I mean, yeah, sure, lots of you guys would be like "OMG I would hate your company for that" etc. etc., but it turns out that's not how directors at big firms think.

I mean, if you know someone’s personal details, they per definition has lost that privacy towards you.

Do you think Y Combinator investments don't use tracking? You would get laughed out of a room if you said you track nothing and have a solid product. A phone call to ask about your product is tracking because it all gets recorded and noted.

Similar to how if an app sends just one spam notification, it's an uninstall and a 2 star rating.

Businesses assume that every user is a customer, and have inflated profit goals. You're right about entitlement.

No. It is in fact your sense of entitlement that makes us sick.

Update: ok, after checking danbruc's comment history, they probably weren't arguing for tracking, and the second paragraph should be read in third person... I'll take my downvotes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_drift