I think it's unfair to compare Facebook actively screwing us to Apple not adopting your proposed metric on their product and passively allowing a very popular app in their app store.
Not a huge fan of Apple, but they aren't Facebook.
Not a huge fan of Apple, but they aren't Facebook.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-is-an-ad-company-now
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-revenue...
> By 2022, Facebook's ad revenues had hit $135.94 billion.
$4.7B is not a small number but no where close to Facebook’s.
I think most people would agree that velocity hardly matters here, what’s been actually done is generally what gets judgement, not where you will be in some time if you do everything the same.
What you are describing is essentially pre-crime.
Displaying an app ad in the appstore upon searching for a similar term is very different than displaying ads based on your whole life, collected in malicious ways.
Do you know what has ads in settings? Xiaomi. A relative bought one and I helped him set it up, and you literally had to see an ad to listen to your ringtone!!!
What's really annoying on iOS is that persistent notification badge to "finish setting up your account" even when I choose not to use some apple services.
My personal hope is that Apple course corrects at some point that they do not need to extract the extra cash while damaging the customer experience. The company feels much less customer oriented now and has lost a lot of the premium feel. I have already stopped using their TV app because they have made it nearly non-functional with the amount of promoted content. The News app has an exceptional number of subscription only items in the feed to where I am about to go back to pure RSS. The feeling is like what Google would have done with Google Reader if it was still going stuffing in promotions.
I agree first party apps should be advertisement free if they are advertised as being included in the price of the phone. Otherwise it is a hidden bill you are paying with hours or days of your life that you can't get back.
I would pay for a service that just disabled all first party promotions advertisements. Give me the real price instead of wasting my valuable time with advertisements I would never click.
Because it's useful.
It helps users discover apps that the developer believes is relevant to that keyword.
I can't think of a better mechanism for doing this without an auction style system.
Or show a button to open separate window which shows related apps.
But instead, we always want to bring everything instantly under our attention [in same screen, close to the line of sight].
They are taking the risk of repelling their customer who paid $1k+ and still sees ads and they are entitled to the courage of their conviction to take that risk.
If Facebook were Apple's size they'd be doing 450 billion in ads.
AFAIK it also includes ads in the News app and apps that load articles from the News app (e.g. Stocks app).
Their fine print also mentions the TV app, but I haven’t seen ads there, so perhaps they’re referring to content suggestions.
This seems to be confirmed further down the line in the fine print when it says:
> We create segments to deliver personalized ads on the App Store, Apple News, and Stocks.
I’d say the main difference between Meta and Apple is that the latter doesn’t combine data from different source and only relies on their own data (what Apple calls “tracking”):
> Apple’s advertising platform does not track you, meaning that it does not link user or device data collected from our apps with user or device data collected from third parties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes, and does not share user or device data with data brokers.
It’s the only ad on a streaming service that has never annoyed me (I also like the fact that it’s not targeted). Zero ads are better but their implementation on tv plus is the least irritating I’ve experienced.
A news paper ad? A builtin board? I think advertisements that hijack your attention are always unethical. You should have to look for ads to see them.
Our society depends on advertising for promoting new services, gaining new customers, and building trust. I would call it a social necessity which makes it very ethical as long as it is truthful. The hijacking that occurs is consensual as you should not visit sites if you disagree with their advertising habits. Even with the App Store almost never open it directly.
The ones that cannot be avoided are in the outside world. I would celebrate if every billboard, postal mail item, and other real world advertisement were banned completely as that is the part I have no direct control over.
Disagree on this one. Blogs, media, social, word of mouth, etc. would still exist without advertising and would serve the purpose of all of those things. PR teams would become as large as marketing teams, things would get exploited (they already are), but we wouldn't be subjected to distraction and manipulation.
I don't think ads are the most evil thing there is, but society would be fine without them and you would probably see a much smaller imbalance of power in wealth and companies. I'll take 1000s of small forums compared to one big Meta.
The Verge? Nops. Techcrunch? Also not. AnandTech or Business Insider? No and no. Hackaday? Dead. NYT and Bloomberg? Maybe, and likely not. And what about your top 20 favorite YouTube creators? The majority would be gone.
Sure, the long tail of quirky small bloggers would be unaffected -- they don't really make any money today from advertising. But a lot of them are bottom-feeders; they consume content produced by others, and re-hash to add their own takes.
And we're not even talking about the second order effect -- all the ecommerce companies that would be wiped out without qualified leads and traffic. Go to any site - The Verge, Hackaday, Daring Fireball - and see the ads. Most of those companies would disappear.
Is this really the web you want to live in? A web with only a handful of publications with large followings who can command premium subscription (read: The Information, NYT, Stratechery, etc), and the top x% of privileged wealthy folks who can afford paying for a bunch of subscriptions?
Yes, I would call advertising a social necessity. It's like a multi-dimension version of prisoner's dilemma - it may not feel you're winning, but the alternative option is much worse.
I've actually found furniture I'm looking for on websites I didn't know existed on Instagram. Why is targeted ads a bad thing?
Years ago it was google fanboyism with 'don't be evil'. Now it's the unbearable apple privacy fanboys and the insufferable tesla/spacex cult members.
Apple doesn’t.
It’s really that simple.
Displaying an ad next to search results based on the search query for example is similarly benign.
Enough with carrying water for a megacorp that makes money from selling advertising services.
On the other hand, I very much await sideloading to be forced out of Apple by the EU.
This is true, but many criticisms are valid. Apple News is user-tracking adware that cannot be uninstalled on MacOS. You cannot install an app on any of the iDevices without telling Apple. You cannot get your GPS location on an iDevice without telling Apple. Apple is spending considerable resources growing their ad business, so expect this to grow worse over time; and combined with Apple's inclination to deny user control, there is no way to opt out without opting out entirely of iDevices.
So Apple's privacy perspective is way better than Android's. Could it be better? Of course, and I'm fine with trying to pressure them to do more for protecting our privacy, but between the 2, it's not even close, Apple is WAY more private with your data than Google will ever be.
The difference is you can avoid the tracking easily. This is a direct result of prioritizing user control. You can install apps without telling anybody, you can get your GPS location without telling anybody, and so on. Apple, by denying user control, makes privacy worse for users who care, and it will only get worse as Apple ramps up its services business.
Many of the same people who see no issue with this mock and insult Microsoft for promoting Edge etc., in Windows. And will pretzel themselves into explaining how "that's different".
Billboards still require tracking. If you had the option of putting a billboard up in 1 of 2 neighborhoods and it would get 10k impressions in either location which one would you choose? The optimal strategy is not to pick randomly. The optimal strategy is to predict the conversion rate of both locations. In order to do that you need to investigate who is likely to see your billboard and learn about their interests to see if they would be likely to be interested.
I don't doubt that billboards are placed with some careful thought, but tracking is certainly not "required" - some aggregate stats about an area should work, especially as there isn't much feedback on who saw the billboard and bought a product etc.
What billboard is tracking individuals?
Billboards that identify car types are still legal AFAIK.
https://www.bmediagroup.com/news/vehicle-recognition-billboa...
I haven't seen a billboard that would follow me around before. Placing them at popular location depends on existing data (or often just plain-ass thinking, like obviously a hub in the middle of the town will have more people see it compared to the middle of nowhere), and only very very indirectly generates any sort of new data (e.g. if you only place a single ad in a specific place and can correlate that placement with an increase in product sales.. but that is thoroughly unrealistic and I only write it to be nitpicky with myself).
I've never seen a png file follow me around either. It's the people who are selling the advertising space that are doing the tracking. They want to show how valuable of a location they can offer you.
> Starting in iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, and tvOS 14.5, users are prompted to decide whether to opt-in or out of IDFA sharing before apps can query it. This choice can be altered in Settings.[2][3] In May, 2021, Verizon-owned advertisement analytics company Flurry Analytics reported that 96% of US users opted out of IDFA sharing.[4]
And since you brought out the opt-out option, one can also block Facebook's trackers through uBlock and/or DNS filters.
The defaults are what matters. From the same Wikipedia article,
> Users can opt-out of IDFA via the "Limit Ad Tracking" (LAT) setting (and an estimated 20% do).
80% users never change the defaults.
Apple’s own apps don’t need to display the prompt because as per their privacy policy they don’t collect or use information for tracking purposes (which is also visible in the privacy labels of their apps in the App Store).
This is the privacy policy [0] of an example of their app, Apple News. I quote:
"Advertising
In order to deliver great content to you from leading publishers, Apple News is ad supported. If the Personalized Ads setting is on, Apple’s advertising platform may use information about your account, the topics and categories of stories you read, and publications you follow, subscribe to, or turn on notifications for to serve ads that are more relevant to you. We may also use information about your subscriptions to personalize your ads on the App Store."
In this case, you're referring to "Data Linked to You". "Data Linked to You" is based on the account you used to sign in to the News app + your activity within the news app - to create suggestions within the News app.
This does not allow Apple to track you from the News app e.g. access the IDFA of the device, sharing it with third parties or other apps.
They claim they do not share this data with other third parties but they sure as hell use it for their own advertising ecosystem.
Trust me bro.
If it's so clear that users don't want to be tracked online, why don't we just ban it altogether? It would solve a lot of problems.
Apple doing it unilaterally on their platform might invite anti-trust concerns.
There has been a setting to turn the IDFA completely off for well over a decade.
Previously, apps on iOS or Android had access to the unchanging hardware ID number of the device.
> Apple notes that it will be phasing out access to the unique device identifier, or UDID, on iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads.
This is a big deal, especially for any mobile ad networks, game networks or any app which relies on the UDID to identify users.
https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/apple-ios-5-phasing-out-ud...
Apple replaced the hardware ID with a random number (the IDFA) that could be reset by the user at any time, or turned off completely.
Google eventually followed suit, although any app that received the. READ_PHONE_STATE permission was immune to the protections.
> READ_PHONE_STATE is one of the Android permissions categorized as dangerous. This is because it “allows read only access to phone state, including the phone number of the device, current cellular network information, the status of any ongoing calls, and a list of any Phone Accounts registered on the device”.
... it is often requested and misused by other types of applications that do not have any reason for needing it, including malware.
https://file.scirp.org/Html/1-6101658_80235.htm
The recent changes at Apple were to make the IDFA opt out by default and to track the permission to use it per app instead of per device.
Facebook on the other hand, creates a grand central repository of everything there is to know about you and sells it to whoever wants to pay. Just like Google.
So why not keep it that way? I understand the temptation of veering from the path of 'do no evil' but Apple are not exactly short of revenue?
Apple, Google and Meta are currently all three sides of the same coin. Take your pick but don't claim any virtue for doing so.
Because capitalism incentivizes unsustainable growth at all costs.
Maybe if you had an already rich individual keeping his company private and making an active effort to not be evil. But come on, let's be real...
That's like asking "This company's stock is doing well. Why not dump everything you've got into it?"
Apple is diversifying their income stream, and leaving money on the table if they don't take it.
That ceiling number varies according to how well they can target.
On the other hand, Apple has some amount of iPhone et al. sales that occur because they respect privacy.
Eventually, increasing the former will decrease the latter. I think Android shows us the link is weak (because most people don't care, if tracking is hidden), but it exists.
My impression would be that right now, Apple is targeting far less than their customers would allow (while still buying equivalent amounts of hardware).
The issue is +5 or +10 years, when Apple has a few bad product launches and needs to find a revenue stream, and selling a piece of their privacy soul to juice revenue is an easy bargain to make.
Google's central evil was allowing ad revenue to metastasize and dominate the company, which in turn meant that ad execs have more pull than is healthy.
the way i see it, the worst case scenario is you get an Ad for something you might actually like...
I Myanmar fingerprinting helped the military find dissidents, the the US Cambridge Analytica managed to get enough data to influence an election, and there’s many more examples.
Besides, if a private company can sell access to you through ads, less benevolent actors can use that access for other more nefarious practices.
It is 2023 and you don't need ads to influence people. E.g, TikTok not acting on dangerous trends.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/6/1/23742757/kia-hyundai...
That's hardly the worst case scenario when there are countless stories like "Facebook Allowed Advertisers to Target Users Interested in “White Genocide” — Even in Wake of Pittsburgh Massacre"[1].
There's also the time Facebook's targeted ads were used to facilitate genocide in Myanmar[2][3].
[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/02/facebook-ads-white-supre...
[2] https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/r...
[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
What's wrong with that? The more interests available the better ads can be targetted.
>There's also the time Facebook's targeted ads were used to facilitate genocide in Myanmar
The article doesn't mention ads were used. It just sounds like Facebook was connecting people based off a common interested people shared.
There are more important things in this world than money. Surely we can all agree that "better ad targeting" isn't worth human lives?
Data is also shared with data brokers (Acxiom and the like) which collect unknown quantities of data about you, linked to your actual identity. That data can then affect whether you get a loan or a job.
Most importantly, we don't know what's done with the data and have no control should we want it to be forgotten.
2) Someone following you around writing notes about everything you do doesn’t stop being creepy-as-fuck harassment just because it’s online and “at scale”. And actually a lot of this transcends the Internet and gets connected with real world activities, blurring the difference even more. It’s wrong when someone does it to a single person for some personal reason, and it’s even more wrong when a megacorp does it to everyone to make a buck.
3) It harms the function of markets. Massive nearly-impossible-for-a-small-business-to-attain data-moats protect monopolies and discourage competition. It adds to the already-harmful-to-market-function information imbalance between individuals and companies.
If someone showed up at your house with a folder about a loved one, turns out they had been following them around town, tracking their movements, taking pictures, reading their emails, etc. I don’t think you’d be two thrilled, but hey they’re only going to use that info to target ads…pinky swear…
What's the worst that could happen... sheesh why don't we not find out for a change.
Watch the 10hr long interview documentary called Shoah and listen to how trains, buildings and institutions were used to do 'the deed'.
It was impossible to tell what was going to happen ahead of time for the victims, they assumed they were heading to a labour camp and being assigned a block of soap and sent to the showers was a good thing...
Why does this even need to be said! Do we not know our dark european history?
Conserving the known good we have, is not an 'immediate fail', as many futurists would indulge in saying...
At least you know now where you can discover one reason (of many) as to why some people are wary of collective control.
Your question is either super naive or you have a stake in facebook or apple.
the things I don't want getting into anyone's hands are things like: financial info, address, phone number, social security, my middle name, birthday, etc. none of those things are stuff I share with a social network.
So tracking might not be their business but they can very easily start a big business.
Most recent examples that come to mind:
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/341111-tax-filing-websi...
https://gizmodo.com/sat-college-board-tells-facebook-tiktok-...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/27/nhs-data-bre...
https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/12/13/out-of-control-d...
The only way to protect against this is to not let them have that in the first place. Once they have it, it's impossible to guarantee it won't be misused sooner or later.
I don't need to convince anyone of this. History will repeat itself as it always does.
You can choose to ignore it. That's your prerogative. But what I'm saying is not a lazy generalization. It's backed by what happened and continues to happen in our current day and age.
Almost no company starts as an evil entity. But they definitely end up there once they grow large enough.
That's exactly what it is. You're pretending you can predict the future with confidence about specific business decisions a company will make regarding its data and assets. You must be a billionaire with your ability to play the stock market by predicting the future.
No, I can't predict the future. I can, however, look at our world and its incentives. Look at similar companies and how consistently they change.
Right now Apple is using privacy as a marketing strategy. One day that can change - in reality it will inevitably change, it's just a matter of time. Profits will forever be the one and only motive for a company to exist. Once privacy costs more than it brings in, it will be compromised.
It's not rocket science. It's basic logic.
Now let's assume your argument is true: we can't predict they will change. Why is that a reasonable thought? Have they never changed before? Is there anything that prevents them from changing?
Your argument falls flat: change is constant. Everything changes. Your argument is that "no, for this company, it won't happen". It makes no sense. Whether you believe in this company or not is irrelevant.
If instead of doing ad hominem attacks, you'd really consider how certain we can be of change, you might even change your mind.
What won't change is the ultimate goal of any company: profit above all else.
This is not something you can retroactively deal with. Once that data is collected its completely outside of your control.
You can choose to ignore it and believe they will act on good faith for long enough, but it's still a bet.
Maybe for you it's a conscious bet. But in my view, most people don't realize this at all.
It's literally benign by definition.
benign
adjective
a: of a mild type or character that does not threaten health or life
b: having no significant effect : harmless
All absolutes are wrong. I can play that game, too.
It was the service that validates the application certificates which is fundamental to the security of the platform.
Not a Fan of Facebook, but Facebook never claimed to be the defender of Fundamental Human Right or the Guardian of Privacy.
Some people like to label them as evil or the less of evil. I like to label them as evil and hypocrite.
“Our Commitment to Human Rights” https://about.fb.com/news/2021/03/our-commitment-to-human-ri...
> or the Guardian of Privacy.
“Upholding Our Commitment to Protecting Your Privacy” https://about.fb.com/news/2023/05/upholding-our-commitment-t...
https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...
Then there is their scanning of iCloud backups for CSAM without being forced to do so by law, something Meta hasn't done with WhatsApp, and obviously not Signal either. CSAM today, messages critical of the powers that be tomorrow, they breached a fundamental ethical line in end-to-end encryption and they are thus now completely untrustworthy on encryption.
Apple's marketing is very effective, but the idea that they are any better than the other Big Tech firms on privacy is just that, marketing fluff without substance if you dig but a little. None of them can be trusted. At this point the only way to really protect your privacy is to connect to the Internet using a MiFI or similar router running open-source software and implementing an outbound firewall blocklist like Jordan Geoghegan's unbound-adblock:
Signal does not support any cloud backups and WhatsApp uses iCloud so this seems like a flawed comparison.
https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
"Before an image is stored in iCloud Photos, an on-device matching process is performed for that image against the database of known CSAM hashes".
Thus the scanning is done by your device against the unencrypted image before uploading it to iCloud. The fact they abandoned the plan is irrelevant, by considering it in the first place (and to a very high level of engineering R&D as evidenced by the document), they set a precedent and forefeited any trust. It's CSAM today, it will be mentions Winnie the Pooh mocking Xi Jinping tomorrow, and of abortion in Texas the day after.
Now, the only way I'd trust an Apple-mediated encrypted messaging service is if the clientapp is third-party and thus can't be backdoored retroactively if Apple feels it expedient to do so.
Google is currently trying to sell additional ways to spy on users built into the newest version of Chrome as a "privacy sandbox".
> all of Google's documentation about this feature feels like it was written on opposite day, with Google calling the browser-based advertising platform "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...
Exactly what Twitter, Microsoft and Amazon do too.
However the fundamental difference is that their model is being an hardware company.
All of these companies deserve their due scrutiny. Specifically around the illusion of privacy though, nobody has further to fall than Apple.
Remember what their advertising clients disliked about Apple's ad platform compared to the likes of Facebook and Google?
> A new report on Advertising Age has revealed what advertisers think of Apple's arrogance when it comes to its mobile advertising platform and its tight grip on user data.
"One person familiar with the situation exec said Apple's refusal to share data makes it the best-looking girl at the party, forced to wear a bag over her head," the AdAge report read.
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/3568/20140222/apple-cares...
This is a for-profit company. It will always do what is more profitable, even if they don't do it right away.
There is an interesting lesson you can learn from history: Google Maps vs Apple Maps.
Google set up their system to track each individual's location history forever, even if the user turned off the setting that Google said would stop this behavior. This data can be handy when you're trying to keep map data updated.
However, you don't have to track each user's location constantly to get the benefit.
> “We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B.
The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones.
Because only random segments of any person’s drive is ever sent and that data is completely anonymized, there is never a way to tell if any trip was ever a single individual.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
I'm sure we could find great examples of other companies that made similar privacy aware decisions, only to then turn around and throw all that out of the window for increased profits.
Call me skeptical, but these entities have one purpose: profits. Why would I trust they won't ever misuse my data?
A bit more history.
A shareholder once berated Tim Cook for doimg things for reasons other than profit.
Tim Cook's response:
> When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI [return on investment]. When I think about doing the right thing, I don’t think about an ROI.”
If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.
> as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...
Also, CP scanning was deliberately proposed as a way to actually enable e2e icloud - but they just didn’t want to be liable, as storing CP encrypted on their servers may also be problematic. So, I don’t see them malicious against privacy at all, in fact that is a core selling point of theirs, it would hurt them greatly to cheapen it out.
This is also exactly how the US operates WRT state surveillance, so it confuses me that you don’t see the relevance.
Apple provides a backdoor into Chinese citizens' iCloud to the Chinese government, while praising itself as the bastion of privacy.
Doing so because of money is all the more hypocritical.
Sure, on a local moral compass it is no good look, but if Chinese people are forced by their governments into that -- is really a private company from another country supposed to fight with them over it? In any other case I think you would agree that private companies should STFU about local laws, right? That fight is on the Chinese people.
I don't think they were comparing. They were basically saying that Apple is complicit to what Facebook (and others) are doing with regard to data collection.
Shaming Apple might work. (I think we already know that shaming Meta will have no effect.)
They aren't?
They're saying Meta is screwing us and that Apple could do more to protect us. That they spend a lot of time and money talking the talk but they don't so much walk the walk. They sure do a bit, but they could do a lot more. Article definitely isn't saying Apple is as bad as Meta and Meta is 100% the "bad guy" in the story. It's just that our castle walls (Apple) are shiny but not strong. The Great Wall isn't so great if it isn't keeping the Mongolians out and you definitely shouldn't be advertising it as such when it doesn't.
Like why do they allow access to the health data stored in the phone?
It's almost like they need facebook to be the devil so they can say how good they are.
Exactly! and yet the threads app doesn't actually request that access. Hence my scepticism