Apple's Power Move to Kneecap Facebook Advertising Is Working
bigtechnology.substack.com
bigtechnology.substack.com
It’s almost as if no one wants this “feature” Facebook has been “providing” and given information about it and a choice have roundly rejected it.
I can’t wait to see what some of Apple’s other initiatives like the anti-tracking features in Mail on iOS 15 and the upcoming iCloud Private Relay do to the industry.
Hell, US intelligence agencies block ads at the network level because the ad industry is so infested with tracking/malware/spyware/exploits/etc. That’s a hell of an indictment.
Of course any time someone looks into it they find that that click-rate fraud is at outrageous levels. So maybe no one needs Apple. The fraud bots will keep the ecosystem running. /s
https://www.imore.com/96-iphone-users-have-opted-out-app-tra...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ypke/the-nsa-and-cia-use-a...
How capitalistically gauche!
> on top of the most secure monetary network
Because eth is a circus: major cult of personality issues, major scalability issues, monetary policy is all over the place, changed at a whim of god knows who or in reaction to past shortsightedness and a planned transition away from the one thing that keeps at least some semblance of stability - PoW towards even less politically stable rich-get-richer PoS, being sold as scalability solution without having anything to do with scalability at all.
It’s a joke.
1. I want to look around and find what is useful for me. I'm not willing to spend very much money per unit of information, because I'm sifting through a bunch of crap.
2. For stuff that is valuable, I'm willing to pay, but I can't tell if something is valuable until I look at it in its totality.
These companies need to find a better business model, otherwise they are about to go the way of the dodo.
I don't want the tracking either, but not badly enough to stop using the free services I get.
I think most people probably actually feel this way, but I don't have data to back my assertion.
Cable TV used to be ad free when it started out.
HBO is probably the best counterexample, but if you look at what they’re doing with HBO max, even they might not be able to resist forever.
However, it could also be that people are sick and tired of having all of the data collected with no control over how it is used. It could be initially used for one thing, but then re-accessed later when something new the data is determined useful. It could even be used by a different company than what originally collected it.
When asked in a manner that makes it obvious it is tracking, people clearly are saying no. When phrased in a manner like 'allow us to offer you deals', as it has been in the past, it is less obvious and people have just shrugged their shoulders and said "whatevs just stop bugging me".
Not being in the US, I don't know what the situation is precisely. But I do know that a "1 hour" tv show is over after 42 minutes... apparently, cable went from almost no ads to 1/3rd ads.
I moderate my long-term expectations for streaming accordingly.
Frankly, hidden externalities should be illegal.
I'd love to see how the lawyers would phrase that one.
That content on Facebook that keeps people coming back? It's not the ads or deals; What keeps people coming back is what their friends, families, and idols post. They're effectively generating content for Facebook which they are then profiting off of "for free".
The straw man argument here is that Facebook is providing the platform and that is how people are compensated for their content. It's kind of fair, but it's been wildly abused. There are competitors, but it's the lock in and invasion that has given Facebook it's value not choice.
There is no informed opt-in, discussion or debate about the value you provide to Facebook in exchange for the value they get out of you. That is the cash-cow Facebook has been milking and when given an informed choice people are now saying, "No, I'm worth more than this garbage."
I'm tearing into Facebook because that's the target of this post but that content is provided on every platform. The value is in what the users are providing not the platform. Reddit, Hacker News, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Google Everything. The content is provided by the users for free to the platforms. The marketing content is noise that people complain about and do not want.
I'll admit that I don't use Pinterest, but from what I understand, it's main feature is being a place for user-curated image collections, yes? That's very different than algorithmically distributed, paid-for ads.
What is missing from your rant is, why would any platform exist then? Nobody is building them without expecting to profit off the mutual relationship. I never understand the POV that everything should somehow magically be provided for free. You want a BBForum, go right ahead. But every platform you listed is significantly more complex than that.
Because it’s all network effects, it either needs to be a centralised walled garden (even Wikipedia fits here to certain extent) or else a federated system like email. Whether the business model that maintains a centralised system is for-profit or not is basically irrelevant. Facebook would have as much difficulty taking over wikipedia’s leadership in online encycolpedias as Wikipedia would have trying to become the dominant social network. It’s just a matter of who got there first (at least until they possibly get displaced by something else that users drift toward).
I’m not sure how to reply to someone that compares multimedia, feature-filled social networks to a mostly-read-only information store.
Yeah, they really aren't that much more complex. More complicated, I'll grant you, simply owing to the vast amount of cruft and legacy that such privacy-eating titans inherently accrue. But the actual media type is pretty irrelevant as far as I care.
While you can be pedantic, I did not reply to their actual points.
> Yeah, they really aren't that much more complex.
This really reminds me of the infamous HN Dropbox comment, but worse.
These are synonyms. Please disambiguate with contextual examples, if you believe otherwise.
There are various features provided by Snapchat (camera, filters, games) and FB (marketplace, messenger) that nobody would ever compare to a BBForum/Wikipedia. They are inherently complex and valuable to the majority of their users.
I mean, sure, but you can't just swap them in and out like that - you can have something complicated which is not complex (say a knitting pattern with four colours) and something complex which is not complicated ("put this arrow into the centre of that target").
I was merely pointing out that you can't toss off "complex and complicated are synonyms" as some kind of argument "gotcha".
I admit the distinction got me at first as it is quite a subtle one but the point made by the parent commenter is valid.
I disagree that these features are inherently valuable; in fact, I disagree that they have any value at all.
As far as I'm concerned, the basis of any media enterprise is the generation, dissemination, and moderation of content. The smallest, most well-known, prototype of an enterprise that accomplishes all three is Wikipedia. Aside from these features, anything extra is cruft.
Yes, this is overly-reductionist, weirdly neo-ludditic, and speaks past your points without paying your arguments the proper dues. We're cross-talking because we have different values; I do not value the things that you value.
The games, filters, marketplace, and messenger you mention are not features. They are deficiently complicated ways to achieve the core features of media enterprise; further, I don't think they're valuable media to deliver in the first place.
As to how I disambiguate complexity vs complicatedness, the first relates to the variety of interactions in a system while complicatedness relates to the sum total state of a system. A system with one node whose only input is its output, which outputs a TB of data to itself every second, and which stores all data it generates, is complicated. A system with two nodes, whose only inputs are each others' outputs, where one generates a byte of data every century and neither saves state, is more complex than the first but less complicated, and the converse is true.
I only consider the complicatedness vs complexity of features that _I_ deem worthwhile; if I don't consider a feature worthwhile, then all of its complexity is just cruft, which gets lumped into the less-granular metric of complicatedness.
I don't deem any of the features you mention (which differentiate FB, etc., from Wikipedia) to be worthwhile; therefore, they're all just more complicated versions of Wikipedia, without any meaningful improvements in the base complexity.
Also, how inherently complex are these features? Can you give me a best-case complexity? How are you measuring this 'inherent complexity'?
I've read through your replies to this thread. If I had your values, I'd agree heartily with you. What you say makes sense, your arguments are well-reasoned, and you present yourself well. I sincerely appreciate that you've taken the time to engage.
I hope I've confirmed the suspicion that seems to be built into your replies: our disagreement is not logical. It's entirely based on a difference in our values.
Or at least the common misconception about it. See [0] for a summary of how the comment was actually mostly spot on, and even YC agreed[1]. Quoting dang, "we should see it as a successful conversation with a graceful ending, rather than mocking someone for not knowing the future".
--
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
[1] - "When YC funded Dropbox, it was because they believed in Drew, not file synchronization"
They have since asked for some compensation it looks like: https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec...
Notice that Wikimedia Foundation has little to no influence over the content or community that runs Wikimedia sites. The money is primarily used for running the infrastructure, developing the software, paying the staff (a large percentage of which is spent on tech and legal), and organizing community events.
disclosure: I worked for Wikimedia during the earlier years.
Which is how I’ve come around to blockchains for social. Not just for equity, but trust: you can see the governance contracts / how equitable / how easy to change the deal is.
I’m speechless. If you’re actually serious, could you give some examples of the social networking apps/features you are using via the blockchain?
I'd agree with that on the surface but those platforms you listed are basically forums with a new name! They provide very little over and above that. So, in actual fact, they're only made more complex as a result of rules added by the owners to squeeze as much data from every visitor as is legally (and illegally in some cases) allowed! So they provide nothing of value above a regular forum imo.
In reality, they are lists of submissions from end users that have been categorized, however the categorization engine happens to be algorithmically generated, rather than ordered by date. And the companies themselves are doing whatever it takes to monetize your eyeballs regardless of whether it affects your health or not! They are abusing every visitor to the maximum extent that the laws allow!
Their business model is to centralize all forums on their platform and for that there is a massive cost at that scale. That's their choice to host all forums! However to pay for that they are abusing every visitor.
Using Reddit, a single forum about Ubuntu (/r/Ubuntu) would cost around $5 a month on DO for someone to host themselves. Using something like BBForum or something similar would not require much in the way of maintenance.
The point I am making is that all this stuff existed long before the big tech platforms. It can easily exist without them too. They are not actually providing anything of any worth that couldn't easily be found elsewhere (well, used to be found elsewhere!).
For people who love BBForums (like HN tbh), everything may seem “like a forum”. But that is very reductive and uninspired.
There are various features provided by Snapchat (camera, filters, games) and FB (marketplace, messenger) that nobody would ever compare to a BBForum/Wikipedia. They are inherently complex and valuable to the majority of their users.
Yeah. That's because all those features used to be separate applications, not tied to BBForum/Wikipedia engine. They're all complex, but they're also orthogonal to the platform, and their implementations are pretty much commodities.
The only value provided here is by integration with platform (particularly UX-wise). Which seems fine, except the only reason this is valuable in the first place, is because the platforms prevent everyone else from doing such integrations themselves.
Of course, these are addons to the platform. But the platform is still the same fundamental application as a forum. Nothing more.
Doesn't matter what the company calls themselves, it's a forum that people upload phone pics to and those photos/images are then displayed in an algorithmic form (used to be chronological with forums)... same as a forum!
Remember, Google is an advertising company but they'd consider themselves more of an engineering or search company... doesn't mean they're right!
Edit: Forgot to ask, how do Snapchat make their money? Is it all through advertising? It's a genuine question, I don't use it and have no idea! If it's all advertising revenue then they're an advertising company like Google and Facebook!
There is no forum aspect to Snapchat. I don’t think you should be arguing about this topic, without having used it. G’day!
For that $5 however, you're not getting DDoS and spam protection.
> The point I am making is that all this stuff existed long before the big tech platforms. It can easily exist without them too. They are not actually providing anything of any worth that couldn't easily be found elsewhere (well, used to be found elsewhere!).
There's a reason ye olde ways of communication are pretty much dead, replaced by centralized platforms... dealing with the obvious noise of hackers, script-kiddies, spammers, piracy and CSAM is the biggest IMO. As a moderator of a sub-reddit, you don't have to deal with any of that, you are free to focus on moderating content - and unlike mailing lists, usenet or classic forums the users can perform self-moderation by downvoting, further lessening your load.
DDOS is provided by many hosting companies now for free.
Now, I'm not trying to make this out like the Dropbox post many years ago comparing it to self-hosting, nothing of the sort.
But Reddit (and other tech giants) provide very little above basic forums imo and in any case, the price is too high!
Yes it is easy to make a forum and throw it on some low cost hosting, for a person skilled in IT. However FB, Reddit et al. provide a platform (heh) to any kind of group no matter the size. Nobody wants to create dozens of accounts for their local chess club, their local shop, their local pub and whatever. I can be a member of a anti Phillips screw subreddit, but wouldn’t create a forum for it.
The value of centralised identity is enormous.
> The value of centralised identity is enormous.
That's what OAuth is for. As usual, the technical problem has been solved but social problems remain.
Plenty of smaller platforms exist for reasons other than profit (e.g. altruism, or desire for feeling important). But for-profit platforms are fine too! Mutually beneficial relationships are a good thing.
But we're talking about Facebook, et al. here - advertising-based platforms. They way they're making profit off the relationship is not through mutually beneficial exchange of value. The platforms instead are abusing their position of power in the relationship to pull the users in, keep them glued, and expose to maximum amount of advertising. This is not a case "here's an ad box because we have some server costs to cover, you know". These platforms are thoroughly optimized to maximize ad revenue. Every feature they just "can't seem to get right", every weird UX blunder, every feature that's obvious but missing for unexplained reasons[0] - all that are not mistakes, but decisions to give you a shitty product in order to make you more exploitable[1].
Or, in short: as a user, your actual relationship with big social media platforms is the same as between a cow and a farm. Cows are there to be milked, and make more cows for milking. They're not the ones who get to say how the farm is run.
> I never understand the POV that everything should somehow magically be provided for free.
Right? They have costs, after all. But you're looking at the wrong people. This expectations wasn't created by regular people - it was created by companies who figured they can do the ultimate undercut of their competition by offering their product for free, and make money through a side channel. Since most people are extremely price sensitive, nobody can compete on price with $0 - so the model stuck, and it's because of this that people expect everything on the Internet to be free.
> But every platform you listed is significantly more complex than that.
That's mostly because they have more money than they know what to do with, and are competing against other platforms with similar amount of spending cash. Most of that complexity goes to supporting the advertising aspects of the platform and the dark patterns that keep the users in their pens.
I mean, modern factory farms are significantly more complex than the stereotypical family farm of centuries past - but as a cow, you probably don't want to experience that complexity.
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[0] - E.g. sorting your feed by date, or searching posts by date, or a "dislike" button, or ...
[1] - One interesting facet of attention economy is that it seeks to make every task as inefficient as possible - because money is being made on friction. The longer it takes you to do a thing, the longer you can be exposed to advertising. The more frustrated you are, the more susceptible you are to that advertising.
Make it free, or make it paid, or if you really must use the data harvesting model then at the very least make it very clear that it is not free because you are paying via a different means.
If your users are unwilling to pay for the service, then perhaps the value it provides is zero and it shouldn't exist.
That maybe provided for free. However the hosting infrastructure is paid typically by advertising.
NB: I vouched for your comment - not sure why people flagged it.
I think it's safe to say their ads are doing A LOT more than just paying for the service.
People are dumb as hell. Most people just do, say and think what the people around them do, say and think.
Information asymmetry within the chimp troupe is at all time highs and those who have info exploit those who dont. Fact of life.
Nobody was complaining or refusing to use advertising to their benefit pre-internet, so why wouldn't the same non-privacy-destroying methods work just as well as previously?
But advertisers will always go to the ad exchange that promises more conversions, and website owners will partner with the ad exchange that promises the highest payout. If you can achieve the highest of both without tracking, I can guarantee you advertisers and web admins will jump ship and swim to your ad exchange.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for advertising as a business model and it's awesome how advertising on the web has allowed at least some of the content creators on the web to monetize their valuable work. But I'm strongly against the idea that anything in that equation actually depends on the global spy network of the advertisers.
Eventually people pay for advertising.
First, we pay with our data, and then we pay for the ads too (in the form of more expensive products). We pay twice!
And people don't want these services as most are perfectly fine without them.
So what changes? Currently you can buy ads and you can buy surveillance, which costs about 3x as much. If surveillance stops being an option, there is no reason to believe prices for ads won't change. However, even if they didn't the only thing that would happen is that ads replace surveillance and the number and size of ads might change a bit. The end. Why is this a big deal to you?
They’ve just made apps behave in an upfront honest way by letting the user know about it and giving the user the option to stop it.
You are being downvoted, but I agree in principle. This is why I have multi-tier privacy protections (NextDNS, uBlock Origin, etc.) but subscribe to services that offer paid subscription (YouTube, several news sites, etc.). Unfortunately, FB doesn't give users that choice.
Just stick with content ads.
But summary is they use a bunch of stuff about the device (past purchases, location, fingerprinting-like data such as carrier and so on) and your usage of a bunch of apps like apple news and stocks.
The problem is companies selling customer data to each other and snooping on customer activity outside the company's own web site or app. This is what is meant by tracking and Apple doesn't do this in their ad service.
It seems like what Apple is doing is trying to cripple tracking for other ad services to make their own service more competitive.
Amazon and Google have abused this data in the past to undercut the competition with their own better promoted offerings and make purchase decisions with data the competition just could not have access to.
I'm sure Apple is going to offer exactly that, as the conversion-rate data of an Ad into an actual purchase elsewhere is where the big Ad-money is. Apple will just do all that without handing off any data to another party, providing only the persona of an end-user to the Ad-customer.
Their dilemma is that doing this today at an "Apple-price" has limited competitive value to Advertisers. But if Apple cripples the competition to become the ONLY company able to provide such data, they suddenly become a mandatory supplier for every Ad-campaign in the world, as only Apple will be able to provide effective Ad-analytics on iOS.
>> It seems like what Apple is doing is trying to cripple tracking for other ad services to make their own service more competitive.
Exactly. Which should be a strong sign that regulation is urgently required, but somehow people still are stuck on the wrong narrative.
But second, sure they didn't sell it, they gave it away. Facebook claims the data delivered to Cambridge Analytica wasn't sold. No, it was given away because facebook calculates that it benefits from research which improves targeting on their platform. Nobody is fooled by any of this, unless they choose to be.
But you don't know who that person is [ until they create an account or give you info ]
This is exactly what they're doing to FB and i hope FB wins a maassive anti-competative suit. I hope they still don't get to track but i hope apple is given a slap on the wrist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd
Selling search ads on the App Store kinda sucks--I wish they hadn't done that.
Could this be why ad recommendations are so bad? Recommendation engines being trained on (mostly fraudulent) click-through rates instead of ROI?
Edit: It seems like it would be just a little more work to check both, but often incentives aren't aligned to doing the best work...
I am not sure that Apple deserves this power. What if Apple is the next evil megacorp?
For me this sounds like science fiction. Megacorps waging subtle war against each other. What's next?
Power to... present user with dialog asking whether they consent to be tracked? The horror!
Oops, users are too dumb for that, but Apple will protect them!
It totally wouldn't happen to us…
I kept both platforms for _years_...then in a time where I was actively looking for work, discovered that my Nexus phone and GoogleFi was sending folks to voicemail without actually ringing me through. When my phone can't phone, that's a pretty good reason to jump ship.
The processors are similar, the form-factors are similar, the OS's are at near feature parity...it's the glue that binds it all together that seems to time the scales slightly to Apple.
(Where did that SMS go? I swear, I can choose from 3 or 4 different places for it to do, and now I can't tell if it's in the SMS app, Messenger, GoogleChat...or?)
“Opt out? Yes/No.”
Do you ask every grocery store or 7/11 what their processing fees for the transaction are?
I am not a fan of either company, but one sells thousand dollar phones to the global 1%, an the other provides services to 2B people, supporting infrastructure through ads.
The fact that one of these companies is considered evil and other other "the good guys who care about your data" blows my mind.
Apple is one of the evil megacorps, this is not in question.
> What's next?
Given that apparently the thing that is in vogue now is making the universe of snow crash more real, probably a long slide into (more) corporatism.
It's like that everywhere.
Yesterday a friend of mind was revealing to me that crypto currency exchanges were pressuring them to create bots so that their coin trading volume would go up or they would be delisted.
There are bots to write comments on trip advisor and to star on amazon. Bots to follow on twitter. Bot to click on referal links and bot to farm in games.
I'm pretty sure if we all suddenly went offline, half the internet would seem to keep going as usual.
Seems like a reasonable estimate if half the internet is porn.
13 sec video of a Chinese click farm (quite loud):
https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1072114511212109824
10 sec - thousands of phones (not loud):
https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1148447866366464000
Those who run the bot farms will find other scummy work, and no end of desperate workers.
I had a private contact within google's SRE team and spilled all the beans, ask where I should dump the information within google. The answer was as blunt as telling: no one would be interested since it would hurt their bottom line.
Tried to inform a couple of Googlies at different cons in the months following: as much as they liked the tricks we pulled to get in, as little did they want to bring the subject up in their teams.
Clicks are Google's Crack.
Taking Facebook as an example:
Creating an account, linking Oculus Quest to it and leaving the account dormant - accounts locked en masse.
US account that logs in from Indonesian IPs, never posts anything, likes 5000 random things ranging from a shampoo to a cafe in a small Ohio town, to the new shirts of an Albanian soccer club - in Facebook's view that's a perfectly legitimate account.
It postulates that the majority of the "organic" content is actually generated by bots, and the number of human interactions online is a tiny subset. We are all wandering unknowingly through a wasteland haunted by robot ghosts.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...
That could be a good Black Mirror like scifi movie, everyone dies but chatter and social media just keep living on.
"Did you guys see that amazing sunset last night? Check out this book to capture these amazing moments!"
"Can't wait to see the new [dystopian movie] this weekend!"
"Amazing shows to see this weekend. Download our event app to log on and find the fun!"
"The [other party] are a it again today... protests should be intense today at the capitol."
... no one there ...
> CGI 3D Animated Shorts : "LAST DAY OF WAR" - by Dima Fedotov https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjJmTeBSEzU
I think this just means that they have a different threat profile than I do, and they take it seriously. There is a chance that an ad could attempt to attack me, but I am not likely to be targeted. If I thought state level attacks were going to target me specifically I would do a bunch of things differently, but it is not currently worth the effort.
If Apple gave developers a way to add a benefit or two, eg personalized experience or whatever, I bet we would see that % be much lower
I'm presumably in that 96%, but it wasn't an explicit choice. (I'd have opted-out, obviously.)
I have an employer profile on my phone for email/internal app/etc and one of the things this does is force this setting off.
The only remaining arguable benefit is that you will see “more relevant” ads, in other words, instead of seeing ads from whoever pays the most for your [well guessed] demographic, you’ll see endless “retargeted” begging for you to buy the thing you ordered last week.
Facebook had found a way to monetize it's iOS app without Apple getting a 30% cut.
Apple decided to cut that off to prevent Facebook from making money without Apple taking their cut. The fact that Apple can sell this to users as "privacy" is all the better for Apple.
At the end of the day Apple is still a corporation. They are beholden to shareholders, not privacy advocates. Apple will maximize profits and has found a way to cut off revenue to competitor and breed goodwill at the same time.
Judging by this comments thread, it is working very well.
Privacy on iPhone, that's a laugh! The only company ever to ship phones with an automated, unverifiable on-device scanning/reporting to authorities system. As we know, CSAM is just to get the foot in the door, of course.
Fuck Apple and their locked-down consumer hostile disposable garbage, and while we're at it, fuck Facebook for just about everything they do. I have no need for either of those garbage companies.
Nitpick but so far this hasn’t shipped.
The two for one of hurting competitors and making customers happy is about as good a play as they could make. It makes making the 'right' decision easy. Blocking facebook from tracking everything we do online is a win most people can appreciate, except Facebook (and potentially some advertisers taking advantage of it).
Actually a significant percentage of Apple’s profit comes from free-to-play iPhone games, which contain a lot of adverts.
Grabbing some figures from different sources:
* “Apple reported a profit of $23.6 billion in its second quarter, on record sales of $89.6”
* “According to the ruling, gaming apps account for approximately 70% of all App Store revenue. That 70% is generated by less than 10% of all App”
* “Barnes calculated that the App Store had hefty profit margins, which increased to 78% in 2019”
* “Apple's App Store had gross sales around $64 billion last year”
78% of 64G$ is ~50G$, and 23.6G$ x4 is ~95G$, so let us say that 50% of profits come from the App Store.
I would guess that at least 25% of Apple profits come indirectly from in app advertising for apps related to in-app-purchases. You know, those annoying adverts in free games, that are mostly nothing like YouTube adverts, because the highest payout for the adverts is by advertising gambling and pay to play games. The adverts pay well because the in app purchases pay developers well, and Apple takes their cut from that.
Note that Apple do not provide a clear breakdown of App Store profits compared to iPhone sales profits: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-profitable-is-apples-a...
With that logic you could say that nearly all Apples profits come indirectly from advertising as they trigger people to buy hardware, apps and services.
If people spend x hours and $10 a month on in-app purchases on their favourite game and that game was taken away, many would just spend the time and $10 on another game - ie Apple will always get their share, the ads just help decide which app developer gets the rest.
I am curious what your take on this is:
https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...
The article has multiple mentions of an upcoming broader Apple network? Is there any solid information on that?
They could win big $ if they rolled out a universal ID and controlled the infra/bids. Similar to their login button, it could be a more privacy focused UUID that users can revoke or maybe partition. Would love to see their marketing sell this as groundbreaking privacy lol
It's tied to China instead, an outstanding example of human rights. Yay Apple :)
While these may seem like totally different markets, Apple and Facebook are directly competing for the same dollars here.
Whatever. As long as it's damaging Facebook it's a net win for society.
Giving the users the opportunity to make an educated decision feels the opposite of icky. This in itself is unambiguously good. Now, other aspects of Apple’s behaviour are less great, but let’s keep some perspective: asking for user consent should be the legal bare minimum.
EDIT: just to clarify, I 100% agree it's a great change, it's just that "right thing for the wrong reasons" situation. But it's a very good change and I hope it continues.
Oh, right. Sorry, I misread :)
Apple isn't holding Facebook hostage, it's simply allow FB users to relinquish giving Facebook their usage patterns for free.
For example, Facebook offers you to pay to "increase the reach" of your posts. This happens for example when you try to post a message to a Facebook group. If you want to make sure all members see the message, you have to pay.
This is a way that Facebook monetizes without tracking (targeting is based on people who opted in to join a group) and the users pay directly in the app (allowing Apple to get their 30% for the in-app payment).
With Apples changes, Facebook (and others) might focus more on strategies like that.
That actually sounds incredibly cynical, and criminal
Edit: Would the person who downvoted me within literally a minute of posting this please explain why?
If you wanted to send a letter to all of your friends in the traditional post, you’d have to pay 58 cents per person to do so, the business model hardly seems unusual.
Facebook tries to show you the most "interesting" posts. If you are a member of many groups, there are probably too many posts in your groups to show all of them in your newsfeed. So Facebook just picks whatever they think is interesting.
Or the poster can pay to have everyone see the post.
Anyway, I prefer this monetisation strategy to creepy tracking.
FB is also an easy target at the moment, so Apple can use them to sell the "privacy" of their product.
That and I think Tim Apple has a bone or two to pick with Zucks.
That is simply, objectively, untrue.
There are so many falsities with your statement I don't know where to begin.
Lets start with money transfer. I often use applepay right in iMessage to split bills between parties right at the table. I iMessage them the bill and their portion, and right there through iMessage they reimburse me through apple-pay, right to my bank.
During the last major Hurricane in FL, iMessages would send while SMS and all TEXTING would not. Cellular services were down. Texting was down, but iMessage worked just fine with a WiFi connection.
My interactions on iMessage are saved to iCloud. Prior to switching to Apple devices, in 2016, my work phone was damaged beyond repair at a construction site. All of my texts were saved on device, and not recoverable. This does not and cannot occur on iMessage saved to iCloud.
This is all just off the top of my head, and these are features that are desirable and utilized in iMessage, and not available through sms.
Objectively speaking, your statement about iMessage is just plain wrong.
As anyone who has ever switched from an iPhone to an Android device will tell you, iMessage makes the process extremely painful, and in totally unexpected ways. You get your new Android phone set up, and suddenly find that you're not getting messages from any of your friends that have iPhones... because those messages are being routed over iMessage instead of SMS.
So you do a bunch of Googling or contact support for your phone manufacturer or wireless carrier, who directs you to an Apple tool for de-registering your number from iMessage. You go through that process, but it takes days/weeks for your de-registration to finally make it through "the system" to everybody's iPhones so that messaging with your friends on iPhones finally starts working again.
Did Apple do this intentionally? No, probably not. Could they solve this problem? You bet they could. But why solve something that makes switching to Android a nightmare?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...
Yes iMessage can be decrypted by the Chinese government. But China is a much different arena than the rest of the world, it is an almost totalitarian state by default.
And it's not like Chinese government "can decrypt". Its not encryption if you share the key in plaintext. All imessages in china are scanned by the government.
Watch as Apple rolls out "privacy compliant" ads api that will route all ads through apple.com and block out other advertisers. Apple wants to be the only Ad company on iOS.
Notice the hypocrisy of providing privacy for your internet shopping behavior while dumping your imessages to CCP without a thought as well as your albums to any government entity.
The world is also not black and white. Just because Apple is not beholden to privacy advocates, but instead its shareholders, doesn't mean it gives 0-fucks about privacy concerns. Of course Apple cares about privacy if it helps it sell more iPhones without lowering its profit margin.
Imagine if Apple had gone heavily into tracking back in 2009, as a lot of analysts predicted they would. They'd have been giants in the tracking industry. Imagine how much the detailed social graph of Apple users for more than a decade must be worth? They would have hauled in tens, maybe hundreds of billions. They walked away from all of that on principle.
Good. A company's motives don't matter. Companies are just reinforcement machines that go where they think money is.
If they release a "privacy" feature, for whatever hidden motive, and users flock to it, they will infer that there is money to be made here and continue in that direction, which is good for us. It makes no difference what their reason to move there was in the first place.
I think a lot of people saying “but ads are what let us get stuff for free!” would point to this kind of thing as an example of doing it right.
The irony of that jumps out at me.
Alternatively, this is the first time mainstream users are able at all to opt-out. I would strongly suspect users opt-out in any case, for any app, regardless of trust history.
Apple didn't hurt Facebook. Apple simply gave its own users more control over what was happening, and people acted in their own best interests, as they have every right to do.
If revealing the truth to people and giving them a choice worked out very badly for Facebook, I'd say that speaks vastly more about Facebook than it does about Apple.
> Apple didn't hurt Facebook. Apple simply gave its own users more control over what was happening, and people acted in their own best interests, as they have every right to do.
It's easier to attract allies with a narrative that Apple is attacking you than it is with the truth that 96% of apple users have opted out of your 'service.'
If FB had invested in some decent privacy switches and education - instead of trying to dark pattern everyone to just hand over everything - then they wouldn't be in this predicament, because people would already have settled on some suitable privacy settings.
If it's true that 96% are opting out, that just shows what a terrible job FB have done at approaching privacy up until now. After all, why would people opt out of tracking if they trusted the service in the first place?
Which, makes sense. The steady erosion of any control, the tiny sparks of "settings" to assuage some privacy issue brought out in the open, the behavior of Zuck in the Congress. It is amply clear that for FB to make money, it's users should have no choice.
Even the smartest, most devious minds in tech should have realized that that gravy train had a limit.
That, I honestly wouldn't have an issue with. If people choose to sell their privacy for something they actually want, that's up to them. It's the shady coercive crap that I despise.
All of Apples moves into services and many other interesting business decisions may theoretically be attributed to their surveillance of potential competitors on their devices.
I would be curious to see the scale of their internal “tracking”
You should read the requirements and the user flow for App tracking transparency. Apple prohibits the permission dialog from firing more than three times in a long window. The default big button is negative consent. The language is “Ask app not to track”
It’s ridiculous that the owner of the platform gets to suppress competition that way without regulators getting involved.
Said something not positive about Lord Steve.
In reality, Apple adopts exactly the scummy UX practices for their permissions flow during device set up that they go out of their way to prohibit third party developers from using.
They use language such as "share device analytics with Apple" which is broad amd covers pretty much everything while they have mandated under penalty of an App Store Ban, the explicit call out of every single use case of every single permission not just in the permission flow but also on the App Store page.
While here we are, with no idea about the usage of core Apple "Analytics" for the things we know about, leave alone the undocumented data access such as their "Find My" network basically giving them the real world secret peer to peer network to identify everything from all the devices in your immediate neighborhood to every single person you've met within range of their proprietary radios carrying a compatible device.
We don't know, because they refuse to have any transparency into their internal use of their data collection and analytics and id' argue, they can simply slip an update with an undocumented library that sends data off over this network even when you have everything turned off and permissions unconsented to because there is NO PERMISSION CONSENT for the Find my network as a simple example.
"Privacy" from everyone who isn't Apple isn't "Privacy", it's an exploitative commercial practice that disadvantages competitors directly and disenfranchises customers for sheer lack of knowledge of the unknown infinity amount of ways this may be abused right now that we have no way of opting out of or discovering.
It may help reading the whole comment. The analytics logs on device are not the complete picture of device information sent back to Apple servers and used for intelligence on device use.
While Apple doesn't allow others to track users across apps, they themselves can do it because they have a monopoly on app store so it doesn't count as third party data.
That's shady....
Also: There is a HUGE difference (in my opinion) between Apple recommending me other apps based on the ones I already have installed vs Facebook tracking my presence and activity everywhere around the internet.
Personalized ads in Apple apps such as the App Store and Apple News help you discover apps, products, and services that are relevant to you. We protect your privacy by using device-generated identifiers and not linking advertising information to your Apple ID. Turning on Personalized Ads increases the relevance of ads shown by letting us use data like account information, app and content purchases, and where available, the types of News stories you read. Apple does not track you or share your personal information with any third parties.
Then a button that says “Turn On” and one that says “Turn Off”.
“I don't think that Tim Cook is this benevolent privacy person,” said Kelcey Lehrich, CEO of 365 Holdings, a company that owns e-commerce brands and advertises extensively online. “They're making strategic decisions that affect the market cap, not practical decisions that serve their customers or serve their users,” he said, speaking broadly of the Big Tech companies.
It's funny how this is described clearly shows how it is viewed by the writer/speaker. Attack is definitely not neutral.
What does this mean? Some agencies and brands spend MORE because there's no clean data telling them their spend isn't working. They're just shooting in the dark. Over time, you can in aggregate tell which campaigns and ads work and which don't, but the iterations and experiments take longer and are more expensive.
I don't know how long that's sustainable. But traditional advertising has been doing that ruse for decades.
Also the article missed a few big points.
1) There’s really not much you can do in diversifying your channel mix - this change affects any paid platform.
2) what you can do is spend more on Android, which hasn’t (yet) lost the tracking
3) Facebook is working on work arounds, like a conversion API, where the data is matched on hashed PII. Other platforms without that rich, accurate PII will struggle a bit more.
People never stopped to consider that FB would be fine with the changes and was genuine in their pleas for small businesses.
When asked what he would do if he were currently faced with the problems confronting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Cook said: “I wouldn’t be in this situation.”
...
Cook said that Apple has never believed that detailed online profiles of people should exist. “We can make a ton of money if customers were our product. We have elected not to do that,” Cook said.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/28/tim-cook-on-facebooks-scanda...
Just want more people to be aware of the human implications of this change.
Hate FB or not their ads work well and this article is spot on from my experiences, though words like 'attack' have clear bias.
I run direct response ads raising money for non profits and political campaigns on FB. This month has been a big struggle.
While I can't quantify how much is due to limited iOS targeting, I know that we get lots of value from targeting donor lists which is harder now and ios users donate more. Doesn't help FB reported a 15% discrepancy bug which would effect optimization.
I used to be heavy bull on FB based solely on the ads I buy and the ROI/value they provide. But I this has been a scary month. The bid market will eventually level out but if the targeting value loses say 25% effectiveness that will kneecap a ton of businesses who advertise there with thin margin.
BTW thanks for sharing this format I love Axios and this looks like a great tech focused 'smart brevity'-style
Hope everyone enjoys having the same of everything!
Apple has only given users the chance to say no to Facebook they haven’t stopped them saying yes.
The abuser is Facebook here.
Fact : Apple is providing an authentic choice to users regarding sharing of their data.
FB Spin : Apple is attacking us and hurting our business.
"This site may share your email address with Facebook".
Is there any win for the tracked people, or were they just getting served ads for inferior products from companies that spend more on advertising instead of quality? I really hate reading these pieces without this information. It's really useless.
[0]: Tracking and profiling based ads as FB offers
[1]: Just show me a laptop ad when I'm reading a review of laptops, or shows me the latest Trek MTB on an MTB site.
Age, location, profession, combined with the content of your posts and the stuff you share should be more than enough to do efficient targeting of ads.
The main issue that Facebook might face, in my mind, is that they oversold the value of the tracking of users across the web. So their customers now see a much hyped feature disappearing, so they slow down their ad buying, even though they could get the same results.
The business that are going to be hurt the most a the agencies who honestly don't know anything about good advertising, but who just knows how to click around in Google Adword and Facebook Ads. Those people now need to learn a little more about targeting.
It's each of our choice how to interpret that and respond to it, whether with "who cares" or "that's terrifying" or "bury gold" or whatever.
But it's important to recognize that, at the core, this mandatory tracking question is curtailing the business of an entire category of startup that we've mostly forgotten. DoubleClick.
I didn't understand that DoubleClick would lead to this nightmare of being stalked by hawkers. I do not like where we have ended up. May their business chip and shatter.
I never used IG but I was on FB. I'd frequently see 'unbelievable' ads. I mean I see ads offering me latest iphones selling at 100 dollars. What do you think what'll happen if I order one? Anything except getting a genuine iphone. So much for relevant ads.
Tracking doesn't stop at showing you relevant ads. It also affects what is shown to you in content. Facebook manipulates your news feed. And when your internet browsing is mostly limited to Facebook, your world view is essentially controlled by it.
And how much information do they need to show me relevant ads? My entire list of family members, relatives, friends, colleagues, ex colleagues and everyone I have exchanged numbers? My entire location history? My every interaction? Every financial transaction? My entire medical history? My entire photo collection? Even my sex life? Facebook will simply not stop until it collects every imaginable piece of information about you. Although I deactivated my profile 5 years ago, I still think FB is somehow collecting information about me.
The worst part, they 'trick' you to expose every data. They collect these data absolutely by any means possible. Illegal? Unethical? Spying? Doesn't matter. Imagine a random person asking you some personal questions. You wouldn't feel comfortable.
Besides, companies like FB have no morals. They will sell your data to just about anyone that throws enough money. You think that is a good thing?
Unless you think they are being mismanaged or mismarketed now?
The only recent saving grace is that I'm seeing more photographic content, the problem is that's from other photographers who are promoting their work via paid ads - they're not going to grow their following that way and TBH a lot of it is pretty mediocre.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/01/27/instagram...
People just love to hate facebook. I've heard predications of it's demise since before it IPO'd.
I know this is contentious, but IMO this has been the strongest evidence thus far that we need regulation or antitrust to break up companies that own a platform and also compete on said platform.
Side note, I don't tend to view Facebook as some inherently evil corporation as many commenters seem to. I hope that by eliminating certain unsavory practices (like predatory tracking), Facebooks interests will better align with its users interests, and we will see a better Facebook for it in the future.
Facebook certainly has the intellectual firepower and motivation to pull this off, if it can be.
It will take a couple of years to see how much of FB ads (amongst others) have shifted to Apple.
Facebook would lose their ability to publish a native app for iPhone.
They’re like a tobacco company.
Recently they knowingly sat on information that showed that changes to Instagram were damaging teenage girl’s mental health.
If they could track users and non-users in a more invasive way the will do that anyway.
They're just being proactive about weeding out the competition from their platforms.
But Apple using that as an excuse to punish a competitor should equally terrify us all.
Apple has made it clear that they prioritize “privacy” as long as it aligns with their profit making interests with actions not least including the attempt to scan on device content recently and their move to have different standards of compliance with the regime in China.
They are consolidating significant technical power over people’s lives and it’s amazing how little concern there has been to them rolling out their own private network between devices without consent or opt out.
I think hurting Facebook is just a huge bit of serendipity.
This cut is a business relationship between Apple and the developer. Apple's developer contracts mean that Apple is entitled to a cut of revenues even if a different payment gateway is used. So it's not like the consumer could be offered a lower cost payment option anyway. This was affirmed by the Judge in Epic v Apple recently.
I've often bought something off Amazon (or even in a physical shop) and had it come with a flyer for the manufacturer's own site, or a catalogue for ordering accessories from them directly. Plenty of hotels make a point of saying "this is what it costs if you book with us directly".
> So it's not like the consumer could be offered a lower cost payment option anyway.
Then why are Apple so scared of letting customers know the facts?
I doubt Apple would have had a problem with developers noting the 15/30% store fee if it wasn’t being done for such obviously disingenuous purposes. It’s all well and good to argue the reasonableness of such allowances in theory, but here, context is everything.
What's disingenuous to you is remarkably a standard business practice for a tax or a fee of any kind. Buying an airplane ticket? If there are fees and charges , guess what? They get called out so you have a choice.
Buying an iPhone in most parts of the world? Guess what happens when you go to check out? You see the "Includes Tax of xx%" there so you have the information.
This should not even be an argument in this day and age, but unfortunately, here we are. Market conditions and rules of engagement around competition should NOT be dictated by large companies. There is a line in the sand where Apples platform ends and the real world begins. It's ridiculous that they have been allowed to get away with saying "If you do ANYTHING on our platform, you agree to hamper your business voluntarily in EVERY OTHER PLATFORM you choose to participate in". Do it, or don't do business with us. That's anti competitive and has been finally called out by at least one judge so far in the Epic case.
Apple is a lot more hotel-booking-like than retailer-like IMO: approximately no-one is browsing through the apple "store" (though people might use it as a search mechanism), it's more or less just an aggregator of a bunch of third-party products. People don't go there because they want to get something from Apple, they go there because it's the only way to get an app onto their phone.
> I doubt Apple would have had a problem with developers noting the 15/30% store fee if it wasn’t being done for such obviously disingenuous purposes.
That's completely backwards - Apple is being far more disingenuous. They keep their cut secret because they know the users would - quite rightly - feel they were being ripped off.
I don't know who you are, but the level of defense you're mounting for Apple makes it clear that you are not a neutral party. This is the first time i've heard someone argue in good faith that _any_ market gets to dictate to independent sellers how they display their price breakdowns.
All Apple did was incorporate a snitch notification for when an app pasted from clipboard.
Contrast that with their approach to permissions and privacy in developer documentation which gates sensitive functionality behind dialogs that let users “Allow”, “Allow while using” or “Don’t allow”
No criticism, nothing. Even the change is not very helpful if it doesn’t explicitly prohibit the abuse, only throws a temporary pop up when abused.
No no, its a definite move to kneecap a competitor.
Facebook has _the_ corner in high value mobile advertising. Apple wants some of that.
People don't like facebook, so will cheer when Apple does anything too them. They are doing the same thing to the maker of fortnight.
The problem for the wider computing populace is that Apple is currently the best experience for users. It doesn't mean they are the best for competition. People have seen that Apple can get away with a semi curated capricious ecosystem, and will copy it.
The future is apple shaped App stores. I'm not sure thats good for everyone.
Steve Jobs in 2010 being asked how Apple's view on privacy differs from Facebook's view (right after one of the early Facebook scandals)
>Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly. That’s what it means. I’m an optimist, I believe people are smart. And some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.
Do i support a users ability to opt out? Of course.
I could pose the same question to you: Do you support a users ability to opt out of Apples tracking in the same way they opt out of App tracking?
The App tracking guidelines mandate that multiple apps owned by the same developer still need to ask for permissions EVERY SINGLE TIME. Contrast that with Apple only asking for a soft share permission once during device setup and extending that across a wide swath of apps within a category like "Device analytics" which covers everything from what apps you're using, what networks you're connecting to, your use of the one device radios etc.
App tracking transparency also forces the big default button in the permission flow being the "Ask App Not to track" link. While, for their own permission requests, Apple has a big blue button that opts users in. This by itself causes an opt-in rate of <10% for external apps and near 90% for Apples internal dialogs. Lets place the same UX requirements for Apples own internal tracking dialogs please.
And we haven't even begun to discuss the undocumented services or APIs that have no permissions gating them. The "Find My" network? Do you know how Apple uses data of nearby devices? Isn't that EXACTLY what they're claiming to clamp down on from the likes of Google And FB cross device tracking while doing it themselves for a different end outcome seemingly justifying it?
You don't need any subscription, just install uBlock Origin or whatever blocker works best and if you want to provide financial support those FOSS projects mostly accept donations.
And that’s after removing the ads
> Centralization is required to capture profit. Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by way of capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be designed to capture profit. [..] But servers require upkeep. Operators need to finance hosting and administration. As the Internet grew beyond its relatively small early base, Internet service came to be provided by capitalist corporations, rather than public institutions, small businesses, or universities. Open, decentralized services came to be replaced by private, centralized platforms. The profit interests of the platform financiers drove anti-disintermediation.
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...
It is when you capture information across multiple contexts without a user relationship or user consent that Apple decided they needed to step in.
Google's reaction to Apple changes is to move tactically to get users to log in for more base services. Facebook's reaction has been significantly less composed.
That is, this action by Apple should have remedied some consumer harm. While de-anonymyzation of advertising data could reveal, in some cases, identities and geo-behaviors, this seemed proof of concept more than actual impacts.
In looking at my own iphone use, the blocking has not resulted in any improvement in ad frequency, relevance, or enjoyment. My android ads on my tablet have also not shown any measurable improvement. The businesses I help are not benefitting from this change.
So, other than the satisfaction of "job well done, privacy is preserved", has anyone found any direct improvement to user experience from this action? I know none was really expected, that wasn't the point, but just wondering what the HN community has experienced so far.
That doesn't do to justify tracking, however.
Fun thought experiment: suppose that Facebook served fewer ads to those who clicked to allow tracking, on the basis that the ads are worth more, and served more ads otherwise. Which do you think consumers would prefer to choose on average? This isn't rhetorical, I genuinely wonder because I don't know how much people actually care about tracking versus just picking "don't track me" as an easy win.