Secret talks that could have prevented the Apple vs. Facebook war
wsj.com
wsj.com
SOL citation: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2011-title15/html...
Are you suggesting that Apple and Facebook normally have these kinds of discussions in public? Because that is not at all the case.
Possibly there is something nefarious going on here. But the fact these talks were secret means nothing, since all talks between companies are secret by default.
It seems part of a larger campaign to force apple to drop tracking protections by making these efforts appear not as privacy protection, but rather an anti-competitive strategy to boost their own ads sales.
HN is falling over themselves in the process. Anyone that tells you that tracked ads are just about matching your preferences is lying to you on purpose.
Even though I am glad this whole Anti-Ad thing is finally receiving some push back, I do agree and I am slightly suspicious of some PR push behind it. But I will give them benefits of doubt because it could also be people finally waking up to Apple's insane Hypocrisy.
For both it’s the same faulty arguments that are built around a false equivalence that all types of data collection are the same and aggressively downplaying the harm of tracked ad networks. They also happen to be full of technical mistakes that are incorrect enough to be intentional lying.
Also if people were injured by this and are just finding out about it now the clock probably just started.
How do you reach this conclusion? Businesses working together to increase each of their profits is what every business relationship to strives to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
That's generally the threshold, and without saying as much (in fact, the author of the article seems to miss this), the article suggests that the talks in question came close to cresting that boundary.
It is not being used literally. Of course FB & Facebook are not 'literal' monopoloies
Your pedantry does not detract from the point being made by the comment above
Did you perhaps mean to respond to a different comment?
I wish we could do the same thing to Google.
That 2/3 of users opted out of being tracked suggests Facebook has no similar reasoning for their business model.
They are against building specific profiles of people while tracking them across 3rd party sites without consent.
Here's Tim Cook talking about it: https://www.webpronews.com/tim-cook-were-not-against-digital...
Oh. The magic of PR.
Tim Cook came out to say they are not against Ads precisely because everyone thought they were against ads. Including the Ad industry. That piece, along with dozen of other interviews, during late 2021 or early 2022 were all about damage control. The Ad industry were absolutely pissed.
Why didn't Tim Cook said anything in 2019 when they started their war against Ads? The PR against Ads, from Mainstream to Social Media. How their Business Model were not to Sell Ads? How recording customer interaction at your own shop is still Apple's definition of tracking? And Apple somehow doesn't do any of that.
Yes, you may be right. Apple didn't said any of that by the strictest definition. But the market received it as such. And that is the beauty of their PR and marketing.
Edit: Just read this thread alone, suddenly people are coming out with First party data collection being different than third party data collection. Did we even had that discussion in 2019? May be that is the wrong question to ask, were we even allowed to have that discussion in 2019?
If you are asking if Apple has personalized ads using data from within Apple, then yes; but Facebook has that too and isn't banned from doing that.
I think it's very strange people keep equating the level of Apple's and Facebook's data collection. Facebook tried very hard to track you across the entire internet. Apple said you need consent to do that. Then people say "Apple tracks you too". Yes so does every other app out there that installs an analytics library. But you know what I can do? Just not use apple products. However with Facebook, you'd find that the Facebook SDK is installed on every app that didn't even have a social integration and Facebook would build shadow profiles on you, with no reasonable way to opt out.
Apple has defined themselves as party one or two in any interaction with the device, so the data they touch is not “third-party” data. That’s a masterful work of lawyering and whoever came up with that strategy is a genius, but we shouldn’t accept the definition and repeat it.
Let’s be clear about what is actually happening: Apple sees that other companies are making money on iPhones (in part, through data), and they are using their platform ownership to collect all that money/data for themselves.
Advertisers want to know if you’ve bought shirts from Banana Republic or if you’ve been searching for a washer and dryer recently.
https://www.appsflyer.com/blog/trends-insights/app-install-a...
It’s actually an extremely lucrative market. The major players usually don’t bring this up, because nobody wants to talk about how much of their business is Clash of Clans whales.
Everybody talks about targeting, but conversion measurement is the elephant in the room. You don’t really need fine-grained info to target Clash of Clans ads, but you definitely need to track conversions to get credit for the whales.
One way to think about this is that advertising revenue allows Apple to effectively increase the size of their 30% cut on digital goods.
There’s a lot of collateral damage, and other markets to pursue in the future, but this pot of gold is what Apple is going after first.
However you're saying Apple is blocking Facebook. No one is blocking anyone. Apple is saying you have to ask for user consent before gathering that data.
For Apple to use their own first-party data to personalize the App Store, you have to give them permission - they ask you for consent upfront.
Apple talking about how users who reject personalization in the App Store convert at the same rate, according to Apple’s tracking of their conversions: https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/11/ios-15-users-opt-out-of-perso...
They don't build extremely targeted data profiles with every piece of personal information possible and they don't track you across 3rd party apps and websites across the internet generally.
Apple's view is consistent with their actions. They do the bare minimum level of data correlation to deliver a useful feature - personalization. They also ask you before they do it. And they make it extremely easy to opt-out.
Again, they're not against personalization. They're against data practices that are dishonest/sneaky, don't ask for consent, or collect/store way more data than is necessary.
But I agree that as Apple moves toward advertising they will lose the loyalty of their base (myself included).
But as someone working on my own Internet hyperbole problem, I’ll gently suggest that rabid-sounding hyperbole is just going to turn off the zillion employees at those companies who are also HN users and might be able to do something about it.
“Third-party cookies” === “spying”, a bit of a reach in 2022. “Grandma” knows about cookies now. It’s not an absurd argument, but it’s a bit extreme.
FAANG is “catalyzing the downfall of the world”? We’re in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” territory.
SSO is an exception but a minor one
HN remembering that I'm logged in is unambiguously not spying. The Five Eyes dumping all my phone calls into a giant complex in Utah unambiguously is spying. Everything else is somewhere along that line.
Like most users on this forum, I have control over when and how I'm cookied and/or tracked bounded only by my "give a shit" factor, it's not technically advanced to send unwanted cookies to `/dev/null`.
Likewise, because I live in the US, all my basic demo information is a matter of public record because I've like, bought a house and interacted with the police and been born and stuff.
I know that the ad-supported Internet is extremely unpopular around here, but jump over to Reddit and people are flipping their shit that Netflix went from $10/month to $15 (or whatever it was): it's not hard to see why there's a certain skepticism that people will pay for Google in large numbers so it could be ad-free. I'd pay 50 or 100 bucks (or more) a month for Google because I'm a computer programmer and it saves me literally hours every day, but I'm demonstrably in the minority on that, and it would be a little narrow of me to project my preferences onto Internet users at large.
It also unambiguously doesn't require third party cookies :)
> Reasons why cookies get dropped exist along a gradient. I like that Stripe knows who I am and only needs my CVV to buy something. I like that I can make a StackOverflow account with my GitHub. Within limits, I even like that the ads I see are relevant to me at least some of the time as opposed to the statistically roughly never that they would be without some basic demo stuff.
A lot of these things don't need third party cookies. Stripe can remember who you are with a first party cookie if the page just refreshes to them.
But we do have a different viewpoint yes. I don't even see ads as I block them all and I never make exceptions. I never ever use the 'log in with <big tech company>' options and I avoid the services that don't bother to offer an alternative (eg pushbullet). But note that this is the SSO usecase I already mentioned. I do pay a membership for the sites I use a lot by the way.
I'd never pay for Google even if it were possible. But I'd pay for another search engine. I just lost trust in Google so badly that I'll never be able to come back from it. I've been trying kagi but it's not good enough for me yet.
All the free software and privacy activists needed was Edward Snowden to leak the illegal harvesting and collection of user data done by the NSA and with Big Tech helping along quietly with the PRISM project.
Ever since they were all caught in the act, they are now screaming about privacy all of a sudden as they pretend to care about it whilst they waste resources and burn up the planet with their broken deep learning models in tens of thousands of data centers on user data only for surveillance.
Little to nothing has changed. Despite these regulations, Big Tech is still getting bigger and pushing for more surveillance and aiding the existence of another digital dystopia.
And why is the ultimate responsibility, which lies with the legislators and executives who put together these FISA kangaroo courts and NSL procedures, like a parenthetical on the way to blast Silicon Valley?
If, like me, you're deeply concerned about NSA/FVEY overreach, there are far, far more pressing issues, present day concerns than Google or Meta or Microsoft most likely having knuckled under to a bunch of NSLs rather than send their CEOs to Leavenworth in like 2009 or whatever when the Obama administration was collecting scalps from everyone with a datacenter who didn't play ball.
And what in God's name does the Federal government's energy policy have to do with it? You want clean energy (nuclear) take it up with the NRC and EPA.
Certainly we should call for them to be broken up too, but we already did it to AT&T once and it got better. And it seems a little old hat compared to the new FAANG big tech giants that have arisen in the current generation.
>I wish we could do the same thing to Google.
You’re assuming Google’s core business would not exist without spying on users and I disagree. You can run a search business and still protect privacy, this is DuckDuckGo’s whole model. This is a fundamental difference between a search product and a social product.
By far, the best targeting is to show an ad as I explicitly search for something and that's not going to go away for them anytime soon.
You talk like that’s the only way. Instead of fitting the ad to users, we could fit the ad to the content, like we’ve always done. Tracking users isn’t necessary.
This isn't true in my experience. When I was an affiliate marketer in a past life, it was extremely profitable to promote health and fitness products on generic search terms such as "basketball" and "football scores". User demographic data wasn't required.
Unfortunately, Google decided that they don't like affiliate marketers.
Google's revenue comes from people searching for queries like "good traffic ticket lawyer", and from competitors bidding up each others' brand names. It would probably work just fine without targeting.
They could be working on so, so many more interesting and important problems.
They'll just go wherever the largest dump-trucks are offered. Because they already did that, and it made them relatively wealthy, and yet there they still are.
Sell computers with chrome preinstalled with a good adblock extension.
You could with Chromium, but that's problematic and annoying in minor ways. (Some of the things consumers value involve Google integrations).
And to answer your last point. Apple are already doing it to Google. Apple collect $10+ Billion per year from Google just to be the default search engine. Squeezing Google left and right, partly forcing Google to increase the amount of Ads around the web.
> If you took the same ability away from Apple, they would be fine, because most of their business model is actually trying to provide something of value to the world
Sure, they make money hand-over-fist by exploiting Uighur labor for your shiny metal laptop. Bettering the world is just their nature!
Pragmatically, though, none of these companies will ever champion true privacy. What's the point of even arguing over this stuff when every one of these corporations is compliant in PRISM? Here on HN we love to white-knight for multi-trillion dollar companies and quibble over whitepapers, but everyone has lost. Privacy is unattainable. Security is feasible, but privacy? It doesn't matter if you're on iPhone or Windows or MacOS; you're not in control of your data. Period.
Not buy their products?
PRISM = subpoenas. It’s not an illegal spying program. You don’t want companies to answer subpoenas?
your case would be stronger if you don't overreach .. overall component assembly business is race-to-the-bottom for worker rights, in China now.. that ethnic cleansing you mention is horrible but not exactly the same thing, and intelligent readers may know that. From my point of view, it is the Tibetans to be concerned with, not Uighur. And that is possible a more potent insight .. that Apple knowingly profited from race-to-the-bottom worker conditions, orchestrated under a government responsible for Tibetan cultural genocide. But, it is not the Tibetans that did the assembly, nor to my knowledge the Uighur.
Just for a limited time when the purposely made their phones unusable through OS updates.
I upgraded from an iPhone 4 to X because it worked fine for so long. This summer I updated my mom’s 8 year old Macbook Air to Monterey and it works great.
And I’m starting to think about upgrading my 2018 iPad only because of memory issues with 3rd party apps dumping context when multitasking.
There was no slowdown of devices; what happened is the devices didn’t randomly turn off anymore.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne4a8d/apples-iphone-slowdow...
Nevertheless, the "slowdown" is in fact faster than the alternative, because if your device turns off the task never completes.
[1] https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
I have relationships with Apple and Google. The line around what data usage is appropriate with those companies somewhat nebulous, and also somewhat a personal decision.
For instance - the paper you site shows that Apple and Google send location data from devices to the server. Those devices also both ship with functionality for things like mapping and local weather. So for iOS, you have to approve sharing location data (even for the built-in weather app and maps app) on an app-by-app basis. Android has gotten better about this over the years, but I don't know current state.
Facebook is (was) correlating detailed profiles of users who had no relationship with Facebook, through interactions with third parties that were not part of Facebook, and without disclosure. That is a much simpler line to draw.
Even then, Apple gave the user choice - and the users almost universally chose not to give that capability.
Interestingly, Apple puts tracking for its own apps behind another setting that ignores the global setting.
Unlike its competitors, Apple does not give users a choice about whether to send location data to Apple (if you want to see your location at all) or about whether to send app install and search information to Apple. Apple's devices are worse on privacy on every axis when you consider whether they give users a choice.
b) How would the App Store even work at all if they didn't store your purchases.
b) Most of the apps I use aren't purchased. Why should Apple know which apps they are? Apple's privacy-respecting (in actuality instead of in marketing) competitors don't require this.
b) I’m not sure if developer installs are being tracked by Apple. Are they ?
b) Developer installs on iOS are even worse for privacy than App Store installs, requiring an up-to-date payment method to associate with your device instead of just an email address or phone number.
I can't disagree with this more. User privacy is user privacy.
But that's not privacy at all. Any additional confidant besides the sender and the recipient is a breach of privacy.
You wouldn't let it count as respecting privacy either if the post office read all your letters and stored the texts.
Facebook is impacted by third-party tracking - such capturing information and generating profiles for people, even those without Facebook accounts. They would do this via Facebook javascript and Facebook native app SDKs.
Apple's solution was App Tracking Transparency - a user consent on whether to provide a handy identifier to use for correlation across apps, and App Store rules which ban tracking using other mechanisms (such as IP address correlation).
For apps outside the store (e.g. web apps), the privacy proxy stuff and third-party state isolation/blocking are used to greatly reduce such correlation.
For first-party data collection, storage and sharing, there are consents for sharing information from the device (location, contacts, health information, and so on). There is also a privacy label (which App Store rules require to be accurate) on what data collected by an app used, for what purpose, and whether that use is linked to you or anonymized.
So a post office app that read the letters and stored the text would say that 'user content' was captured, and whether or not it was 'linked to you'.
Apple is playing dirty. Less dirty than Facebook, but that’s not a high bar.
That would be nearly 40% of users who are not hitting the 'Allow' button on the consent pop-over.
It's not privacy if only Apple has it, it's privacy if even Apple hasn't it
It remains an open question whether Apple itself is subject to those rules, though. If a user, via a third party app, takes an action Apple can identify, is Apple allowed to use that information to sell you ads? As of right now, it seems that they're leaning to "yes".
They haven't crossed any rivers yet, but the signs are there and we should all be worried.
The solution which will likely emerge is one of local profiling, both for native applications and at the web platform level. Advertisers and agencies will not gather user profile information, even in aggregate. Instead the profile will be something managed (or reset, or disabled) on-device/in-browser, and used to drive ad selection locally.
For example, the App Store interface might give you a set of recommendations for apps when launched, perhaps based on location information. This can be driven by downloads in your area, as well as purchased advertisements. But there's no reason that exact location needs to be shared at all - a set of coarser regional files containing the needed data can be grabbed, and the decision of what to display can be made locally.
That sounds nice indeed, but it would be a lot nicer if we got a statement to that effect from Apple Computer instead of dwaite on HN.
The reason Apple doesn't want targeted third party ads is so that they are the only ones that can sell targeted ads to their users. Their platform, their rules. For now at least.
And iOS/OSX users will still see targeted ads whenever they open their browser or third party apps.
The apps just need to either (a) ask the user for permission to track or (b) authenticate them.
If you think Apple hasn't violated that promise, you must have an extremely selective definition of privacy.
Just like android?
Calling this a “war” lays bare the views of many who believe this is only two tech giants duking it out over market territory, that the only substance here is the competition itself. It’s just like sports! We can root for our favorites!
It shows the fundamentally nihilistic attitude of many capitalists, that every commercial entity is _of course_ solely concerned with making as much money as possible, and that any talk of ethics or principles or honest benefit to their customers is smoke and mirrors. Of course, this is simply untrue. Many businesses do operate at least partly on ethical principle. Many businesses do try to do right by their customers, and not only because of the monetary rewards associated with success.
This scares the shit out of some capitalists, though, who want to believe that making money is the highest ethical good to which a commercial entity can aspire. Apple is an inconvenient example for these people. What if what Apple says is true? What if it really does matter to Apple that their customers have privacy? Then we have an example of a financially-successful business which is not operating in the most rapacious way possible, and this throws all sorts of wrenches into their late-stage capitalist fantasies.
I’m not demonizing capitalism — it works for me. But the WSJ is definitely the high priest at the altar here, and it seriously fucks with their narrative to even admit that commercial competition can be about anything other than money. Thus it must be a nihilistic “war.”
Why would we really want to prevent a war between these two giant companies?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-apple-vs-facebook-pr...
Something like FLoC, with
- The data stored-in and served-by a neutral, not-for-profit, regulated entity
- With user primacy and control of their own data (opt-out, wipe, request copy, etc)
You're never going to drag tracking out of Chrome, because Google is revenue addicted at this point. So at least you can keep it out of Google's control.
Apples tracking protections ( allow apps to track ) applies to 3rd party apps.
Apple’s tracking for ads, applies only to Apple apps.
Facebook can track people on their apps ( facebook, instagram, whatsapp etc ) if they want. Problem is about tracking with facebook SDK on 3rd party apps.
Right. Google mostly didn't mind, because they can simply push people a bit harder to log in for Youtube as well as Maps and Search, to build a first-party profile as people do searches and follow results.
This is different from building a profile as someone browses the internet, regardless of whether they have a relationship with your company.
FB can only lose money and Apple can only make more.
The best outcome for FB would be to legally deny Apple from blocking ads and keep the status quo.
The worst outcome for Apple would be to make only as many money as before without the share they are taking from FB.
They aren’t even doing that! All they are doing is saying that if an application wants to do that, it has to ask the user first. Cross application tracking is absolutely fine according to Apple as long as the user consents.
The idea that users want to protect information, particularly information held by their account, from the programs they run would probably have been pretty surprising in the days when iOS was first being dreamed up...
If your business relies on convincing your users that targeted advertising is a Good Thing, then you are fighting a war from an indefensible position.