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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook was one of the first big companies to implement https in a non-payment / checkout page. They also have not suffered a data breach as far as I can remember.

So your data is safe with Facebook too.

The only difference that I see between Apple and Facebook is that Apple is doing the labeling of its users on device, while Facebook does it on the cloud.

At the end the result is the same: targeted ads to specific classes of users.

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“In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising.

The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life", developed by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research in 2013. The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological profiles on users, and collected the personal data of the users’ Facebook friends via Facebook's Open Graph platform. The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles.

[…]

Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at the University of Cambridge, was hired by Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of SCL Group, to develop an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" (sometimes stylized as "thisisyourdigitallife"). Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use. However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents’ Facebook friends. In this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

Here's Zynga doing it in 2010 [0]. Obama campaign crawling the social graph hoovering up 10s of millions of users [1].

"We ingested the entire U.S. social graph," Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, told The Washington Post this week. "We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all." [2]

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-zynga-sharing-priva...

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-harnessing-facebooks-soci...

[2] https://reason.com/2018/03/23/cambridge-analytics-dust-up-re...

Facebook has had several high profile data breaches, 530 million users' data in an unsecured database in 2019, and several issues surrounding data sharing with third party apps on their platform.

> At the end the result is the same: targeted ads to specific classes of users.

Is there any evidence that Apple is using the unique identifier for advertising? Also isn’t the unique identifier necessary for users who actually opt-in to tracking?

What Apple does with all the data they collect may be one of the best guarded secrets in the world. Assuming they invest heavily to collect the valuable data and do not use it for financial or power gain does not make any sense.

According to Facebook's page for their App they share user's contact info, identifiers and 'other data' with third party companies. So no.

Emmm.. there's a facebook databreach with people's names + phonenumbers. I think it was a year or 2 ago.

> Apple is doing the labeling of its users on device

Do you have a source for this?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidenti...

Android has one too:

https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/ads/identif...

That's a device specific identifier. That's not labelling users on device.

I just opened Apple News, it has a for you page and it shows me articles that are interesting to me (tech and cars), and a nice ad below them for cheap car loans.

How did the Apple server know what articles to serve me? I never asked for them explicitly.

So I was labeled as a user that likes tech news and cars, and the server automatically sends me stuff relevant (articles & ads) to these labels.

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