Apple’s privacy changes hurt Snap and Facebook but benefited Google
wsj.com
wsj.com
> "As a result of the data drought, many brands have shifted their ad spending to Google because its flagship search-ad business relies on customer intent"
This also goes directly against all the doomsayers who said there was no money in context-based advertisement.
This is completely backwards, no? Businesses want invasive tracking aka attributed ad spend. Apple's new rules prevent Instagram/FB and Snap ads from tracking / attributing properly. So those businesses just go to Google (Web, Android) to buy invasive tracking.
The interesting followup question is whether businesses will need to start making budgets for non-invasive iOS FB/snap ads to be able to reach people, or whether Search/Chrome history tracking on iOS is good enough.
Also, if the user clicks an ad in the Apple store, then makes a purchase in an app, Apple will happily charge the advertiser for that conversion without ever showing the user a cross-app tracking permission prompt.
Facebook and Instagram are products that make me more unhappy as I use them. According to Facebook's Internal research, I am not alone in that. The privacy trade-off is not worth the net negative value.
(I deleted Instagram within of two weeks of joining, and Facebook many years ago.)
I shop on Amazon like I eat steaks. I get individual value out of Amazon and the steak, but at macro scale, Amazon is harming other businesses, and my steaks increase carbon emissions (amongst other things).
Same price / more + $6.50 in postage arriving in 4 days time. And you are going to harass me with emails because now you have it...
It's the exact opposite here in the Netherlands, where Amazon has only recently started to gain some ground.
My preferred boots have a catalogue number. It's printed inside the boots, it's printed on the box they come in, it has remained the same for many years and it clearly identifies the exact model of boots and foot size.
If you type that number in to the manufacturer's own retail web site they're confused, what can this possibly be? It's unclear to them apparently, maybe I want er... women's boots? [What even are women's boots? Answer: The same boots, but limited to small foot sizes. I actually have size 10 feet.]
When I type the same code into Amazon, unsurprisingly it matches a product advertised by a seller, because the sellers have a strong incentive to advertise codes that result in sales. I get the exact product I want, admittedly it still doesn't auto-select the correct size but at least I'm on a page showing the product I want, one drop-down away from buying my boots.
So, Amazon gets the sale and the manufacturer misses out on what's presumably a considerable gap between their wholesale price and the retail price I'd have paid on their own store.
So you are knowingly paying more than MSRP because you can’t be bothered with using keywords to search the manufacturer’s website instead? Weird. How often and how many boots are you buying that this would be worth the trade off?
Then I go to the big box stores’ websites that do not have 3rd party sellers or offer the ability to filter them out.
And then I might go to Amazon. Amazon prices are notoriously high for any liquid or household product bought regularly, Costco and Target and Walmart are way cheaper for those.
It’s unfortunate, because free postage is a complete myth that everyone now expects. A company the size of Amazon can afford to burn money for years and years until they’re at the point where they have their own logistics network and make the numbers work.
There are very few companies that can do that—or that should, really.
Take hassle free returns and credit card points. Both features look like pro-consumer policies but end up forcing all online retailers to bake the cost into their prices. At the end of the day consumers just get no choice on this cost.
I think the core point is probably true, but I wouldn't be 100% confident about this statement. The research seems murky.
This statement assumes that Google services are of high quality because they exploit users' privacy. I don't think that trade-off is necessary. Google could offer its services with high quality and without violating users' privacy.
This is just one example. I find personalized search and suggestions rather good, and I regularly use location history to remember where I was on a particular date. This is of course a byproduct of data collection for monetization purposes, but I like the fact that you can get something useful out of it.
Also, Google does a rather good job of not leaking your personal data. I am not talking about state actors level threats, but unlike with Facebook, it doesn't have a tendency to show pictures of you getting drunk to your boss.
A simple one time parse with creating a calendar event and notification based on a Google Maps lookup should be sufficient.
None of that even requires Google to retain any personal identifying information.
the problem is when governments ask google access to data which otherwise they could not obtain. in this recent case, the idea was to access gmail or google drive because that contains "unencrypted" whatsapp backs. so all the e2e and a thir party managed to be the achilees heel.
I replaced Google search with Brave and DDG, Google Docs is not so useful for me (bad support for math formulas) and Gmail is just a default service I use from a client
I don't happen to see much value in the product you mention. The main reason I use them is because of inertia and the need to jump through hoops with my Android phone to use alternatives.
And interestingly I see Facebook and Whatsapp as very valuable for keeping in contact with people I am physically far from.
So I guess my experience is sort of the opposite
Unfortunately I think Facebook's incentives will compromise the product's quality. It's why many move to signal and telegram.
Have you found equivalent services to gmail and docs without the privacy risks? it wouldn't be too bad to spend a dollar or two a month for something with less privacy tradeoffs.
Im confused by this claim. Is it really that difficult to avoid Google search? It seems to me that it just requires going to bing.com, or changing the default search in your browser.
Also, Brave Search uses its own index, not google results.
It's the same with facebook, nearly everyone else is already there, so if you want to connect to people that's where you go. They just hit critical mass first.
The word monopoly gets thrown around as though it just means 'big and bad'. It's wooly thinking that's polluting the debate by obscuring what's actually going on. Missing the mark like that just detracts focus from actual pertinent criticisms of the harm these companies actually do, or what needs to happen to resolve those issues.
Y'all needy to either be way more pedantic, or back off a bit, but staying at the level you're at is completely missing the point most people have taken to referring to with the word ’monopoly'.
I’m a little uneasy about Facebook owning WhatsApp, but I can’t see any concrete way they are able to use that to significantly exclude competition.
I just don’t see how Google is leveraging its other properties in significant ways to exclude say Bing or DDG. I use Google docs and gmail, but what has that got to do with whether I use Google search or Bing?
What anti-trust action do you think is needed, and what is it’s desired outcome? I don’t know what ‘breaking up Facebook ’ really means, except maybe making them sell WhatsApp. What would that achieve?
When you start to see all eggs start to get destined for one basket (Facebook, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft), and especially in Google's or Apple's case of buyout and extinguish, you have a problem.
Amazon is also right on top of that precarious position as well; sitting on top of and utilizing third-party sales data to front-run. It's not just about harm to the consumer, it's harm to the market as a whole.
The case of Tech in particular is fascinating, because what their service offerings enable is apparently highly destabilizing to the very authorities that would regulate them.
And no, Tech isn't the only sector on my sh*tlist. Media consolidation has gotten rather out of hand as well in my opinion. Walmart has also started to devastate the dairy industry for everyone but the industrial ops as well after buying out one of the big packaging outfits.
I still don't know what "break up Google" or "Break up Facebook" actually means and how that would help. There are bits of them you could forcefully spin off, but so what?
Walmart took control of pricing in the dairy sector causing small operations to no longer be able to compete, propped up by income from other revenue streams. Google has basically set up a value desert around itself as far as advertising goes. As a knock on, it's extinguished potential competitor/disruptor after disruptor. Facebook has absorbed and integrated personal info on a gargantuan scale with the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions.
Action items off the top of my head: Alphabet gets dissolved. Facebook calves off Instagram/WhatsApp. Bare minimum.
Start an investigation into how vertical integration of brick and mortar grocers and packaging Industries effects actors in that space.
Murdoch I'd have to do more research on, as he's a relatively recent arrival on my list.
Amazon gets to decide if it's going to be a logistics company, or a platform for the sellers, or it's own "brick and mortar"-like. If marketplace, no using third-party seller for order flow analysis and front running. AWS gets calved, period.
The bigger you get, the more regulators take a stake in shaping your growth, to the breaking point. Thems the breaks. Stay small if you want to do it your way. Risk becoming national infrastructure/utility as the numbers of M&A's increase.
It's not all stick though. A company can do a strategic "merge-and-release" whereby for a short period of time, a company can acquire another, help it scale, then calve off after a period. After a certain size point, this is the only arrangement by which consolidation can happen. Calving off of industrial verticals is required for further permanent merger activity to continue.
The end goal of this doctrine is to keep network effects at bay. Once you start getting snowball effect, your shareholder's needs take second place to stakeholder's needs. Period. It is insane how effective a one way wealth funnel our system can become once we stop trustbusting.
Oh, every telecom merger in the past 10 years gets audited, and gets subjected to a public review. Any found to have not significantly increased in the benefit delivered to the end user gets an asset auction, loses eligibility for bidding on municipal projects, all last mile municipal ISP bans are nulled.
I'd throw in a day in the stocks as a target of rotten vegetation in the town square for lobbyists that have been intentionally obtuse, but I really don't think that's within the realm of possibility.
All of this is liable to change if someone would be interested in hiring me for a reasonable sum to map it all out full-time complete with authority to engage in legal discovery to get what info I don't have access to that'd actually make anything in this post more than frustrated pontificating.
How does spinning off google's non-search businesses address the dominance of Google search? I don't see how gmail or docs makes any difference to that. I don't see how making Youtube a separate company benefits youtube users.
How does spinning off Instagram and whatsApp from the facebook social network make any difference to anything? The facebook social network would still be dominant. It would make no difference to their ability to collude with google on ads, those are completely orthogonal issues.
I'm not saying these companies aren't dominant in their market segment. They should not be allowed to abuse that dominance through e.g. coluding on ad placement. Regulation and enforcement is needed. However nothing you have suggested would make any difference to the dominance of google search or of the facebook social network. I also don't see how it would benefit users.
Can anyone who buys the idea that google search is a monopoly, or that facebook social network is a monopoly, tell me how they would end those monopolies, why they would do it, and what the benefits would be?
YouTube? Society gains by not having a company ultimately accountable to the same exact people. The virtue of the Free Market is that regression to the mean makes sure the system remains healthy since you've got a larger sampling of capital allocators. When you start seeing the same faces over and over again leading most of the big names in Tech when you track the actual corporate hierarchy, you have a problem. We're also coming out of a period of huge pushing into n young people to get a college education to prepare them for dealing with non-trivial issues of balancing the nuances of a healthy business through whatever specialized vertical they have. You don't need more consolidation. That's the opposite of what you want unless you are literally trying to get entrepreneurial talent to pursue other directions; a task made more difficult by hyperoptimization contagion created by having to compete with overly consolidated market actors.
Spinning off WhatsApp and Instagram rips out large chunks of social graph from Facebook, or would if you enforced the split up to include a cleansing of their dataset of any data acquired through those acquisitions. To be clear, I am not a nice understanding trust buster. If you've attracted my attention to the point these companies have, this will hurt. I don't care how impractical or unfair it seems.
I've thought about this for quite a long time actually. Impractically so. It's not exactly something anyone ever comes and asks you about though.
I kinda wish more people would. Older I get the more fascinating these types of dynamic systems are to think through.
I dint see how you can split off Google search from advertising things. Would you split up a newspaper and the business function that sells ad space on it? How? I suppose ads do make it less useful, but honestly it’s still the best by far, even if some others are now mostly good enough.
I’m with you on preventing the buying and elimination of competitors, but there are already mechanisms to do that. All acquisitions have to go through regulatory review.
However between the two of them they collectively control about 51% of the online advertising market. They’re the heavy hitters for sure, and do dominate some market segments, but is two companies each having about 25% of a market a monopoly? Google’s market share has been declining for 5 years. Amazon’s share is rising fast. Is a triopoly a thing? Even if it was, we don’t have one anyway.
Sure there is cartel like behaviour going on. That needs to stamped on hard. I’m not against action where it’s needed, I just see a lot of vague uninformed and inaccurate comment on this issue. Uninformed outrage is a dangerous combination.
you sound like an employee with a vested interest in the company, or someone living in a bubble
> "google has a secret deal with facebook called "Jedi Blue" that they knew was so illegal that it has a whole section describing how they'll cover for each other if anyone finds out > - google appears to have a team called gTrade that is wholly dedicated to ad market manipulation"
from the antitrust lawsuit underway;
https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205394002405785...
Oooh, insulting my motivations. Nice move!
There's cartel like behaviour going on, no question, I said as much elsewhere on the thread, and that needs to be stamped on hard. It's part of the harm they are doing I referred to. That's not the same as any one of these companies being a monopoly.
"Privacy-preserving Brave Search Replaces Google as the Default Search Engine in the Brave Browser"
The first part of my comment ignores the existence of Brave Search, saying that it's not "hard to avoid" Google Search when all it takes to do so is changing your browser to point to Bing.
The second part of my comment that references Brave search was a response to the question of whether brave search uses Google under the hood.
I've been using Brave's new search engine for the last three weeks and it is extremely good. This is the first time a non-Google search engine has made it a week in my daily workflow (software development + own multiple businesses).
That's the real danger. Not what kind of advertisement you prefer.
You are assuming that no one else would have provided the same stuff with less intrusion, killing competitors (will come home later to roost) etc.
The web is just so much more usable and beautiful without ads...
You can also use ddg with ! to search on google, never did it myself.
I gotta say it sucks! OneDrive isn’t syncing properly. Working with people outside your org is hell.
We’re going to switch to Google soon enough.
I'll agree the Sync isn't as good as Google, but I find the Microsoft Office 365 apps so much better if you need to spend lots of time in them every day. I've used the google alternatives and there are always limitations you end up hitting (As an example, I was working in google docs the other day and was pretty surprised that I couldn't even choose a custom page size and in order to set a custom page size I had to download an add-in - this sort of thing means the products just don't feel as built-out as the Microsoft ones).
Never found an issue sharing things with clients - you just drop the files into a folder and send them a sharing link (and decide to allow them to edit or not).
I dump files on my computer and they don’t end up on my colleagues laptop. So we end up resetting OneDrive on his Mac, which sometimes solves the issue.
I have shared links with clients but then they suddenly can’t access the folder any longer. So I share it again.
I agree that the apps are good, but only in the desktop version. The web apps have still a long way to go.
If you have more of a desktop publishing mindset, the Microsoft suite has way more options.
Personally I have zero need for WordArt or custom page sizes, but rely on the collaboration features in docs to hammer out designs, share analyses, and put together presentations. Nothing I produce is meant to be printed out.
It's a strange beast - you think it's for note-taking, but it's capable of so much more. It doesn't try to do the abstractions of the office productivity suite like Documents and Presentations.
Instead, it works with new abstractions, like 'Data Types' and 'Templates'. I could see this becoming the norm going forward - but you have to shift your thinking to their model.
* Google Maps - great navigation and place accuracy, in exchange for your real-time geolocation and social media posts tagging places
* YouTube - free video hosting in exchange for your data being fed to ML algorithms, which make them billions; also now a great source of disinformation
* Google Photos - free image hosting also in exchange of your enabling of their billion-dollar ML-based businesses
I think I'm making the point in the above examples that they're making more money than what we're turning over, but please feel free to tell me--what other great value do we derive from Google products do we derive from our data?
Maybe now. Maybe Today. But what about your privacy in the future? That data is now totally out of your control. Maybe you will feel differently in a few years. Maybe the laws will change and your past browsing history will be googleable by your ex wife. Data is forever. It should never be handed over solely on the basis of current promises.
1. Gmail: Vivadi Mail (free), Fastmail, Protonmail, Tutanota etc. (Best look for an IMAP provider to make migration easy).
2. Google Docs: LibreOffice (if you don't care about collaboration) or MS Office or Pages.
3. Google Search: Create custom search engines on your browser for IMDB, Wikipedia, StackOverfow, Reddit etc etc. And use Yandex for the rest as it conveniently offers a link to resume search with Bing, Yahoo or Google if you are not satisfied with their search result. (Note though that Yandex is just as intrusive as Google, but its biggest plus is that it is a non-US company. A major annoyance with it though is that it often prioritizes Russian language sites).
4. Android: Saifish OS is currently the best, though apps are lacking for it. Otherwise, "Google Free" Android forks are the next best option.
5. Chrome: Firefox (even though it is becoming just as shitty) or its forks. Vivaldi browser is a distant second.
Getting back to YouTube yea tbh it would be kind of anticompetitive if Google required exclusively Gmail to use YouTube. My bad.
I set up an email server on my VPS but I went back to using Gmail after a while because it's so damn convenient. It's one of the few things that I don't see myself ever giving up.
Nowadays I pretty much only use my email server to spam my friends with funny emails that appear to come from mcafee@belize.mansion
To add to it, Google also have top notch security capabilities. Yes they have my data (privacy), but I know that my data is safe with them and will very very unlikely be hacked by/leaked to 3rd parties (security).
Current state: Apple and Google are the 'good' guys. Facebook and Microsoft are the 'bad' guys. Twitter is in the background at the moment. Tiktok is HN's absolute lovely darling. No one cares that its Chinese.
This keeps changing like a drunk game of russian roulette, mixed with some partisan politics, anti-billionairism, etc.
If it were year 2005, we would all be singing in unison to take down Oracle, IBM and Microsoft - have a startup spirit of optimism. I haven't seen that lately on HN.
Are there any collaborative office suites that are excellent?
The business model of most Google products rely on their costs to be completely detached from the consumer. And this is extremely insidious and anti-competitive because a consumer has no idea what businesses are paying Google, the business has no idea what the consumer is getting in exchange, and the information balance is totally lop-sided (Google has it all).
The cost I'm talking about isn't just privacy (which is not the focal point here at all). The cost is that they exploit our data to create a one-sided marketplace where they can extract the highest value from merchants and consumers. This creates maximum value for Google and screws over competitors, consumers, and businesses. Even if you don't click on any Google ads, you are still paying for them because many business are forced to use them to survive given that Google has a massive share of the advertising business. The businesses you interact with simply mark up all costs, and you ultimately end up paying for them. It's anti-competitive because this detachment of the cost-benefit feedback loop means consumers are no longer making any conscious choice of Google product vs competitor product, because they think the Google product is free!
FB business model happens to be much the same way, except rather than free product to get your attention they just outright manipulate you for your attention which is more obviously anti-consumer.
Being the product doesn’t mean being the victim; I don’t pay for my friendships.
Google trades getting better at helping people for helping them and uses an auction system to decide what help slots get filled with offers of help.
Tim’s going to keep thrashing Facebook till it learns to start paying up.
It’s more important than the metaverse.
The ad business is what matters to Facebook, so i think you're right.
Their ad business is ran on other people's platforms, and they're beholden to their rules, like Apples.
"Metaverse" - whatever that's supposed to mean - is an attempt at creating a new platform that they control, where they don't have to follow Apple's rules.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...
Can’t wait to see the articles about the crippling downstream effect of this change on small companies.
> As a result of the data drought, many brands have shifted their ad spending to Google because its flagship search-ad business relies on customer intent—users’ search terms immediately reveal what they are interested in—rather than data collected from app and web tracking.
It's too bad that the well of sneaky, user-stolen data had to dry up for the brands to move their dollars away from it.
If everyone is forced to drop behavioral targeting in favor of contextual one, search ads is the king because users give ad networks with the most valuable context, search intent.
Also, Google owns the widest range of ads inventory including many O&O properties. If you no more depend on fancy technologies, it becomes a fight of pure ad network infrastructure. No one can compete with Google there.