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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

I just can't imagine ever buying something like this from Facebook. I know everyone shits on about Google being bad and whatnot, but the things I buy from Google aren't really part of their advertising business. I pay for Workspace and Google Cloud Platform, and those things don't advertise at me.

I am more likely to cruise around already logged into Google as a result of using those things, which obviously plays into their ad business, but those products that I pay for aren't vehicles for advertising and I don't think Google would ever try to make them that.

Likewise, Apple does obviously advertise some of their own services (like iCloud backup) in mildly annoying ways through their devices, but by and large I'm buying a thing from them and only to the extent that I am engaged with one of their Apps (like TV+ or Music) do they try and advertise at me.

In neither case are their platforms inherently about advertising.

Facebook just strikes me as a fundamentally different company. Even if I were to pay them for these glasses I would have no confidence that it wasn't just a gigantic suckhole being fed into their slush fund of data.

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Agree with the sibling commenter here, this stance baffles me. Google have been caught breaking the law on data collection enough times at this stage that there's absolutely no reason to ever assume they aren't being as invasive & insidious as they can be in their products.

I think people seem to give Google a free pass because so much of their presence in our lives is implicit/invisible but they are so much more embedded than Facebook could ever be.

I take a totally different position than you do. If I can't think of a technical reason Google can't get data from something, I assume they do. Why do you think otherwise? Google's full of exactly the same rapacious MBA types that Facebook is, and has the exact same obligations to its shareholders. They're essentially the same business (trap users in your services to mine their data and show them ads). I honestly see very little difference.

I find the MBA hate on HN so weird. The founders and leaders of these companies are technologists first. We need to look in the mirror - there's no dodge that software developers, not MBAs, have built these invasive, addictive, misleading, and dangerous products.

The MBAs tell them to build invasive, addictive misleading and dangerous products and they have to do it otherwise the software developer gets replaced with another one that will do the job.

MBA's are almost never first-time founders. You can find them circling above these companies and positions only after a company has become successful, looking to extract more "value" out of an already-existing (and usually captive) userbase.

Sorry if "MBA" is distracting, rapacious is what I was hoping would be the main thing.

That is kinda like saying "I pay for FB ads and WhatsApp business, and these things doesn’t advertise at me".

Google has "build an ad profile about every human being" in their DNA just like Facebook, employing similar creepy tactics with Gmail and Chrome.

Guess what? Most people who end up buying this product won't care about any of these.

(P.S. Apple is much worse than you think. Look up Apple's first party tracking.)

There is always a comment saying Apple is much worse than people think compared to Facebook or Google. But there are never any Sources. Google and Facebook track you wherever you go on the internet. You can't get away from it. Apple only shows ads in their App Store. And you can turn off Apples tracking in their Settings. How is that "Much worse than you think"?

Nitpick, but the comment said Apple is worse compared to what people think of Apple.

I don't think that's a nitpick, that kinda voids their point entirely.

Apple is a lot worse then most of their users believe - but even at their worst, they're leagues more privacy focused and less invasive then Google, Facebook and Microsoft are.

But they're still getting worse every year, and the time when they were actually torchbearers for privacy have slowly faded over the years as MBAs have strengthened their hold on the company and Steve Jobs influence waned.

It's still of value to have companies that have different incentives even if they will still try to prey on you, if only because you get to spread your digital footprint among competing companies rather than allies.

Going back to Apple, their stance on privacy is more geared towards their internal consumption (abuse?) than towards privacy violation-as-a-service for sale. That's not great but I'll take anything I can get.

I know what I'm sharing with Apple is up for grabs by them to use "against" me. And I know the same is true for Google of Facebook, so no real difference here. The problem is the next level, where what I share with someone else is up for grabs by Google or Facebook, or the other way around. This huge web of data collection and sharing is the big problem, not the posts that I'm volunteering to give to FB or the emails I choose to host with Google.

In other words, when you talk to me alone you choose to give me the information, you're aware I will use it in some way to shape my actions. If you tell me your phone broke, I'll offer to sell you my spare, and you won't turn red that I used the info. But if a stranger shows up at your door a minute later to sell you a phone we're suddenly having a different conversation. Same if you go to a pharmacy on the other side of town to buy some medication and the moment you make the payment I send you a text offering my regrets for your illness.

"A lot worse" can mean very different things if you talk in relative or absolute terms, or if you think some practices are just as bad as others.

I have a simple (simplistic maybe) way of ranking the tech giants for privacy: how much of their revenue is ads. Facebook is the worst (98% I believe), followed by google (~90% last time I checked). Apple is in the “least worst” category by this metric for now, but they are slipping.

Don't get me wrong. Apple definitely has problems. But the thread was specifically about facebook and ad tracking networks. And to conflate different arguments that have nothing to do with tracking into just "Apple Bad" lacks a lot of nuance.

The problem with ad companies is not that they show ads. But that they are trying to paint a perfect picture of you to sell you stuff. And they are painting that picture by spying on you and your peers.

I hope that you can see the difference between spying on your users and selling that data to advertisers and using telemetry in some product. If you ever worked in software you will know that having telemetry can lead to massive improvements in the product. That said, that data has to be confined to the applicable use case and has to be anonymized.

If you really think there is no difference between ad tracking and telemetry you are right. Apple is a lot worse than people think, but better than Google/Facebook.

But if we are talking just about ads, than Apple is definitely not worse than people think. Because they hardly even have an ad network and when they ask you if you want to be tracked you can just select "No".

Apples main advertisements are the app store placements.

You're vastly underestimating the significance of that, as this is personalized too. It's also been shown that you cannot actually opt out of everything, only some things.

At the end of the day, I still consider my Apple devices to be less intrusive then the android and Windows devices I use, but you seem to have an outdated view of Apple's business practices - at least from my perspective

It reeks of the same "both sides"-ing going on in US politics right now. I have an iPhone, and I refuse to install any Google or Meta apps. Am I being tracked? Of course. Is it still an order of magnitude less tracking than the former companies? I'd wager it is.

> There is always a comment saying Apple is much worse than people think compared to Facebook or Google. But there are never any Sources

I'm not sure about much worse. It may depend on your own threat model. But here you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41184153

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40006508

https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26644216

One of those links is a self-described conspiracy theory and another flat out says Google is worse.

Personally, I don’t think Apple is bad at all relative to Google/Meta and I’m probably technically “wrong” but those links don’t do much to prove it.

Perhaps you should be more specific about the links, then I could reply to you.

> and another flat out says Google is worse

This one I can guess. Google is worse indeed, except they do not advertise themselves as "Android is privacy". This is why Apple is worse.

Did you not read your own links before posting them lol?

> Mind you, this is definitionally a conspiracy theory; please don’t let the connotations of that phrase bias you, but please feel free to read this (and everything else on the internet) as critically as you wish.

https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...

I will admit that this sentence was easy to miss, hidden deeply at the start of the second sentence of the piece.

These links are just all Apple Does A Thing HN Dislikes and I just don’t think any of those things is particularly bad.

This is a conspiracy theory in terms of the Apple's intent. Everything written in the article is true and verifiable.

> I just don’t think any of those things is particularly bad

If it's fine with you that Apple sends info about every file you open on you Mac to their servers, read the corresponding discussion. The comments explain well why it's a serious privacy breach.

Yes, there are plenty of thing in my life that I think about more than what Apple knows about the files I open. I can’t change it and it doesn’t help me to get twisted up in knots about it so I don’t worry about it.

> I can’t change it

Switching to Linux worked for me.

Good point. I should say that I have no interest in putting in the effort to change it since I really like my MacBook Air, iPad Pro, and iPhone.

>Google and Facebook track you wherever you go on the internet

I wonder if everyone's porn habits will one day leak

Does Apple buy my transaction records from Mastercard to cross reference against my chat and email logs? (Serious question, I hope not though.)

they don't need to buy the transactions. they have apple pay that integrates your cards into their system. then they push apple pay everywhere both offline and on. eventually they will own all the data

Apple says that they don't tie transaction data to you personally. But that they do use it for marketing purposes alongside the obvious fraud prevention.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-pay/#:~:te....

That's one of those little white lies. Sure, they don't "tie your transaction data to you personally", but they absolutely do. Every purchase you've ever made on the internet has been deanonymized to a globally unique "Device ID". The companies that manage those device ids absolutely have your entire online interaction history, everything.

It only takes about 30 bits of entropy to perfectly deanonymize everyone, and I know of many companies that have been doing it for at least a decade or more.

And it works very very well.

> they have apple pay that integrates your cards into their system

A feature which they've loudly and publicly said many many times they can't use for tracking your purchases, as they anonymize the data before it gets to them.

Apple has a long history of not using user-generated data for their own use, sometimes to their own detriment.

have they explained how they can deal with customer service requests on individual transactions without being able to see the transaction itself?

As far as I know Apple’s first party tracking allows it to

1. Show ads for apps in AppStore

2. Show ads in the News app.

What else are you thinking of?

Almost every single website and app in the world has some level of first party tracking.

There is nothing at all wrong with it since you are a direct user of the product or service.

They do use it to show ads in App Store and News though?

Not FLOSS apps.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...

How to turn off the opt-out thing in Firefox 128 which gathers data on your browsing and sends it to third parties.

Technically, Firefox is not FLOSS, according to FSF.

This statement would need more details. Firefox is in the repositories of most Linux distros' main repositories, most of which only allow free software.

With this option enabled, unfortunately.

Now, even if technically true for the official distribution (because I don't know, the DRM part, or something like this, although technically, I believe it is not part of this distribution, it is downloaded by open source code on first use), this seems like a weak rebuttal.

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html

At this point, I know this link almost by heart. This is not useful. It doesn't mention Firefox at all. It doesn't contradict at all what I'm saying. It doesn't hint at you being right neither.

But okay, let's dig in anyway. PureOS, a FSF-approved distro listed by your link, has a FSF mirror and this mirror contains Firefox [1]. Mistakes (to be proven) aside, this makes for quite a strong endorsement from the FSF itself, actually.

Now I expect some more substantive argument or I won't answer anymore. I'm a friend, I'm heavily biased toward FLOSS, it's not like I'm trying to downplay your activism around free software, but we need strong, convincing and correct and kind, gentle and respectful arguments if we want this to work. It's not even like I'm trying to defend Firefox at all cost, I don't like some recent moves from Mozilla including this one.

[1] https://mirror.fsf.org/pureos/pool/main/f/firefox-esr/

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You are right in principle that FLOSS apps can and do have telemetry/surveillance included. In practice, it's much, much less frequent than for any proprietary apps. If we go even further and make the FLOSS definition as strict as it gets (i.e., stick to FSF), then such problem almost disappears.

Does any other FSF-approved distro include Firefox? I guess Firefox should not belong to PureOS. If you read the criteria for the free distros, you will see that anything that downloads or even mentions nonfree software should be excluded. Even Debian was excluded for this reason, including one with only "main" repository enabled. Firefox mentions DRM and downloads it in just one click. AFAIK PureOS didn't include Firefox in the beginning, but the users demanded it.

From the above link:

> Use a version of Firefox without the EME code

Oh, I found that Firefox in PureOS doesn't include the DRM part: https://forums.puri.sm/t/not-possible-to-enable-drm-content-....

> You are right in principle that FLOSS apps can and do have telemetry/surveillance included

Note that I was just replying to your "Firefox is non-free" statement, not to this. I do agree that the tracking story is way better when using free software in general (but that indeed, it's not a guarantee, especially when using official installers from sloppy software editors).

----

Code that is under a free software license that downloads (and runs) non-free software is still free software.

This can be seen as an anti-feature, F-droid would call this one "Non-Free Addon" [1], but this is a separate matter.

For a distro to be approved by the FSF, it needs to only include free software, and also match additional, more restrictive criteria such as, indeed, not promoting non-free software. But this doesn't qualify some specific software, it qualifies a distribution.

In addition to DRM, Firefox also has other issues, including these:

- it allows non-free addons on its extension repository, and even recommends (promotes) some of them (also Non-Free Addons)

- it includes features that depends on non-free services, like pocket (Non-Free Network Services [2])

I don't like them, but that doesn't make Firefox proprietary. Worst case, it isn't suitable as is for a FSF-approved distro. Which, again, goes beyond the quality of being free software.

The fsf.org blog post you link to (which I'm also familiar with) shares concerns (which I mostly share, indeed), but doesn't state that it makes Firefox non-free software. There's one point that I would debate from this link:

> We agree with Cory Doctorow that there is no meaningful distinction between 'installing DRM' and 'installing code that installs DRM.'

The distinction is meaningful, because embedding the DRM code in Firefox itself would make Firefox non free. However I agree that it makes Firefox promote horrible software without even warning the user, which is not great at all.

tl;dr: The concepts of FSF-approved distro and free software should not be mixed up. They are both useful but separate concepts. I could even see someone being full pro free software but thinking that FSF-approved distro goes too far.

[1] https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeAdd

[2] https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeNet

> But this doesn't qualify some specific software, it qualifies a distribution.

I never thought about it. Why wouldn't it be the same for any software? A distribution is nothing else but a (large) set of software. Do you think one could find a software that downloads something nonfree in the FSF Free Software Directory? I do not expect that.

Nowadays, in our connected world, it doesn't matter if the software nonfree or it downloads a nonfree piece. It's effectively the same thing.

You could extend the criteria for fsf-approved distributions to extensible software, it would make sense.

Then you'd have free software, and then fsf-approved software, a subset of the former.

I guess they defined criteria for distributions specifically because they needed to provide guidance to people building distributions. You have to be specific to be clear and useful, many things are probably irrelevant to general software.

> Nowadays, in our connected world, it doesn't matter if the software nonfree or it downloads a nonfree piece. It's effectively the same thing.

Well, for me a line is definitely crossed between the proprietary code never reaching my computer or the code sitting here. I'm personally comfortable with an option to download proprietary software that is disabled by default.

I'm quite comfortable with Debian offering me to install non free firmware as long as it's optional and clear. I'm fine with its documentation mentioning non-free software as long as it's clearly marked as well (and done reluctantly). Of course I would not be happy with Debian's wiki recommending proprietary software left and right. But I think forbidding to share some knowledge goes a bit too far (it is borderline censorship), and is not even practical: even Purism recommended a way to upgrade the Intel microcode when spectre and meltdown were discovered and mitigated [1]. Although they claim that the patch isn't part of PureOS, they are the ones maintaining the distro, it feels close enough and quite artificial for an update of something that's already running in the CPU anyway.

I believe that it was quite clever of RMS not to try to put those restrictions in the free software definition.

> Do you think one could find a software that downloads something nonfree in the FSF Free Software Directory? I do not expect that.

Typically, Firefox with the non-free extensions.

We need a pure message from the fsf, but I don't believe the fsf-approved distro criteria help a lot, they are so impractical (and borderline undesirable imho for the censorship part) that if free software oriented distros like Debian and Fedora respected them, the free software movement would probably be weaker, with way fewer people being able to switch to a free distro. It would possibly be counter productive, because there would probably be fewer people helping other switch, and working on free replacements.

It's a tradeoff: too many compromises dilute and weaken or even cancel the message. Too few makes the message irrelevant to too many people. And I don't believe discussing solutions based on proprietary software is compromising if done correctly. You at least need to know what to reverse engineer to produce a free alternative. Convincing people that free software is the right way to handle computers is important, and it is far more effective if it is within their reach. Migrating from windows or Mac to a (GNU/)Linux distro but with non-free firmware is already a net win. If the alternative is to just stay on windows, that's possibility way fewer people convinced that free software is the right way to do stuff, and possibility fewer people working on getting rid of proprietary software.

It's complicated.

[1] https://puri.sm/posts/purism-patches-meltdown-and-spectre-va...

>> Do you think one could find a software that downloads something nonfree in the FSF Free Software Directory? I do not expect that.

> Typically, Firefox with the non-free extensions.

It's not there: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fdirect...

> but I don't believe the fsf-approved distro criteria help a lot, they are so impractical

They are, but it's by design. You are not supposed to follow them as an ordinary user. They were created in order to show the one true freedom as it should exist.

Oh, I didn't realize there is a FSF free software directory. Thanks for the (re?)discovery.

> They are, but it's by design

I don't think anybody actually wants free software without any compromise to be impractical, so no, I would not say by design, it's just a sad reality.

My stronger concern is that it's likely impractical for free software advocacy.

> I don't think anybody actually wants free software without any compromise to be impractical

This is not what I meant when I said "by design". I meant that in today's world, striving for the true, pure freedom is very much expected to be impractical, so do not be surprised that the FSF-endorsed distros are unusable. Nobody wants that but it's expected. This however serves as a goal, so not completely useless. I guess we agree.

> I guess we agree.

Yep, I believe so :-)

> Facebook just strikes me as a fundamentally different company. Even if I were to pay them for these glasses I would have no confidence that it wasn't just a gigantic suckhole being fed into their slush fund of data.

I agree, and to that I would add the way they've been contributing, if not actively engaged, to push reality-denying propaganda from hostile third parties, including state actors.

Data collection is not only bad because of advertising; that's the most visible annoyance to us, but I'd argue that the kinds of data collection that Google (and especially Apple) enable can be orders of magnitude more harmful (things like client side scanning of content, location tracking even with the phone turned off and these all-knowing AI datasets that are just a query away from learning the most intimate things about you).

> client side scanning of content

This only happens for photos that were going to be sent to iCloud where all photos are scanned server side.

It's hilarious to me that this feature which is actually a privacy win for consumers got so heavily criticised.

There is no privacy win in this feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309202

The fundamentally different aspect is also at the user end - you need fb account to run these gadgets, spend money associated with this account and when someone tries to “hack” that account (because it is public), you loose it without a chance to ever get back the account or money. There is no way how to contact any living person for support, most you can get is their faq. I cannot imagine such situation with gmail.

I wouldn't be so sure about google not being inherently about getting all your data. apple I'm not so sure.

My first thought was, “does Meta have a user base anymore that would be interested in this?” Who is their early adopter demographic?

Someday old people will use VR for escape but only when they are the late adopters. Zuckerberg has lost his damn mind. But don’t tell him that, I want the full Willie Wonka experience.

People with the Meta Quest 3 seem happy enough.

I've used Facebook for years and the worst that's happened is they've tried to show me some ads. I can live with the forces of evil knowing I've put up "hi mum, here's my hol pics" etc.

I actively avoid Facebook URLs because I don't want to see all my unread Messenger/Facebook notifications.

but those products that I pay for aren't vehicles for advertising and I don't think Google would ever try to make them that.

Advertising is 80% of Google's business. If you think those things aren't being factored into their ads model.... Idk what to tell you.

Google very publicly commits that enterprise customers (GCP, Workspace) have their data firewalled off from ads. If you have evidence to the contrary, there are many, many companies and governments that would like to know.

A lot of enterprise companies use Google Analytics and run Google Ads.

And it's always been very grey about exactly where that data ends up.

I wouldn't buy something like this that I can not control.

And yeah, I do expect that if Google sells it, there's a chance they will allow me to control it, but if it's Facebook, there's no chance at all.

But in either case, the product is too intrusive to concede control to those companies.

This looks to me like a consumer product, so it you should compare it to Google's similar products, not enterprise ones.

Does Google stop tracking you when you pay for Youtube Premium ? When you buy a Pixel phone ?

Like you, I do think that in general Facebook is an evil company, more than the others mentioned, but I don't think that if Google were able to produce a similar consumer device, they would track me any less

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