Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14(facebook.com) |
Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14(facebook.com) |
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-26/house-ant...
Push the person until they crack, then call for discretion and dialog about the 'problem' so you don't get what's coming to you.
But that would probably conflict tremendously with the corporate interests that inform our public education system.
Also, Devos is publicly in favour of eliminating public schools in favour of private schools / voucher systems and has attempted to drastically reduce her own portfolios budget; so the malice is openly on display here.
Or unions.
While teachers unions have been great for teachers, they've been lousy for teaching.
User consultation is more critical, but Facebook doesn't really have "users", per se - they have products.
Apple Store apps might well be sandboxed from third party store apps, but there are no guarantees apps within a store ecosystem would provide the same privacy, that would be up to the store provider and Apple would have no say in it.
The forced-to-accept "welcome" screen (which shows up before the main desktop and disregard every single accessibility option the user might have (even the mouse scrolling direction!) starts with:
> "Apple's ad platform is designed to protect your information ..."
A few interesting things. First, I doubt any Advertising platform was or will ever be designed "to protect you information". They are designed to generate revenue by ensuring people see Adverts.
Second, I think it is the first time the words "Apple's [Advertising] Platform" was ever shown to Apple's end users.
Lastly, what's up with using "ad" on a somewhat legal document you are forcing me to accept? It is not a word.
'Ad' sure seems like a word to me :)
I actually think there are more people that would prefer contracts, terms and conditions, and legal documents be written more in plain English, not less. Things that reduce friction of being able to take in that information without reducing clarity seem to me like a net positive.
I've been to a few thousand school board meetings in my day. There are a lot of unmined topics there.
And, y'know, reading past the first comma in somebody's comment to notice that multiple topics were listed. I'd love to hear what you consider to be unmined topics.
I love our European unions, which support anyone across the company, including software developers.
Want to make a slave out of me? Talk to the hand.
In other industries the stakes are not life and death in the same way, but it seems like the same principles hold. If a small percentage of employees in an industry are corrupt or negligent, and the unions defend them and prevent them from ever being fired or facing any negative consequences, they can do a lot of damage.
Also, in the US a lot of benefits that unions provide for their members go against the interests of broader society. Unions are some of the biggest opponents of nationalized healthcare, for example.
As far as the upsides, I think unions were more useful when governments were much smaller and weaker than they are today. In that world, the upsides outweighed the downsides because people had no other protections. With how incredibly wealthy the US is now, a functioning government should be able to provide the benefits for every citizen that unions provide for their members, while avoiding the downsides of the fierce "us vs them" dynamic that unions can create which has ended up dividing society in many instances.
(Obviously there's a big asterisk there on "functioning" government, but many unions don't seem to be functioning very well either as I mentioned earlier, so it's a tie on that front. If we can't get our large bodies to function better than they are these days, we're screwed no matter what).
Why should platform makers consult the advertising industry? It's not like the advertising industry consulted anybody before they started collecting every bit of data they could.
Is there no case of FB screwing over its partners? Like locking or limiting an API that they had offered in the past, etc.
One thing that comes to mind immediately is that Facebook Messenger used to be accessible through XMPP and then they blocked that.
Eventually Facebook closed all that access down and basically deprecated the concept of FB as an app platform entirely. That is a way more dramatic change than what Apple is doing to Facebook here.
So yes, it's funny to me that Facebook is calling out Apple for changing their platform when Facebook does it all the time.
One day, Facebook just killed that endpoint for "privacy reasons". Anyone can still open a web browser and visit the event page, but accessing the data programmatically is now gone.
I guess they wanted to be the only event viewer, and since everyone only adds their events to Facebook and nowhere else, there is now no way to get event info.
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/oembed-legacy
This is what Mark Zuckerberg says at government hearings.
Any given platform succeeds or dies based on its applications.
In the case of mobile, many of those applications survive based on advertising.
The idea that privacy needs to be conceded in order for a healthy ad market to exist is false.
However when app developers include libraries from foursquare or facebook, what they are doing is violating the users' privacy and selling their information to third party aggregators who will apply data analytics to build a full predictive model of your behavior and then they will sell it to anybody who wants to spy on you. Do you remember Cambridge Analytica ?
https://web.archive.org/web/20200826162402/https://www.faceb...
I love that this is a category of people. (I'm one of them.)
Yes they would certainly prefer a "UN of ad-tech" that doesn't do anything rather than Apple's unilateral action.
https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1291730115253145600?...
Notably, it omits the line saying they won't use the prompt in their own apps (which they'd be required to do whether or not they used IDFA) and omits the advice that implies their customers should figure out other ways to gather identifying information
nice
(sarcasm, in case it wasn't obvious)
Previously, Apple and third-party tracking were both controlled by the same opt-put setting. Using your power as platform owner to turn your competitor’s ad tracking off by default while keeping yours on? Sure seems abusive to me.
It's not of the app market or the mobile phone market, there are strong viable competitors in both.
No one says Toyota is a monopolist of Toyota cars and yet Apple is called a monopolist of the App Store, iOS, and Apple phones.
Facebook is playing in Apple’s garden here. Remember when Facebook made their own phone and app store, and nobody wanted it?
Translation: The iOS changes are making the platform more like a printed newspaper. So please continue to spend your ad budget with Facebook because we have X monthly active users and we’re the top in social media.
> We expect less impact to our own advertising business, and we’re committed to supporting advertisers and publishers through these updates.
Translation: We will do everything in our power to track users and collect more information from our already invasive apps. While we’re happy to keep making money here, please continue to advertise with us on our platforms because we have X monthly active users and we’re the top in social media. Innovation is at the heart of what we do. Did you see our TikTok clone in Instagram lately?
If it came to destroying advertisers or free open computing I want free computing.
There are hundreds of phone manufacturers who are more than happy to take your money.
But if you buy an iPhone you need to understand that you are in the minority i.e. that most of us want Apple to make changes like this.
That all ship one OS.
I'm all for bashing Apple for some of their more restrictive policies but what about THIS decision is making you uncomfortable?
You never had control of ios devices to begin with, the iphone always has been everything but "free computing"
Seems like Apple is really backing up their rhetoric with real action. Awesome news for anyone that values privacy. Kudos to Apple.
Sometimes it’s hard to communicate tone through text alone, but I really think you managed it there. Looking forward to more of your witty comments.
Thank god.
https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/news-and-insights/p...
Translation: Facebook will find a way.
Facebook is getting scared of the prompt (shown by Apple) saying FB will track you, and whether you would like to opt-out. More importantly, they are putting the opt-opt right below the opt-in (yayyy!)
Almost every app will have to ask this kinda prompt now. Not just FB.
Good move by Apple
Sure removing IDFA will help protect user privacy, but let’s not kid ourselves that there will not be collateral damage. Being a third party publisher will be that much harder and walled gardens (FB, Google, Instagram) will be further cemented as the only viable business model.
Mind you; I don't think Facebook is less evil, just that they seem to have understood better than Google that users need to be treated with some amount of respect, at least for now.
I mean, I can see a viable anti-trust action for the Hey.com/Epic fiascoes and the ongoing 30% app revenue fees...
On the browser side one company has really been using their market position in a different market (ads) to outcompete at least two commercial browser engines while the independent open source one has been reduced to fraction of what it once was.
right for people? by people they mean shareholders and zuckerberg not users
Google, FB, et al would love it if these shitware ads disappeared because fewer people would feel the need to block ads. But there's really nothing they can do about it without being shouted down (or worse) as being anticompetitive, regardless of whether that's true or not in this case (and there probably is some truth to it).
How is that so many anti-Apple comments in this thread? Are we already in a stage when giant Ad Corps are intentionally distorting public discussions?
As to your last question: Of course, why wouldn’t they?
At first, I thought it was a long-game strategy of chipping away at Google + Facebook while developing a walled-off user base that only Apple (and their affiliates/partners) can monetize. But there has to be something more substantial.
Assuming it costs $X to develop these adtech walls, Apple must require $Y in return... where is this $Y going to come from?
Of course, while it's possible that Apple can keep themselves away from those "free" services but it means that they also need to give up a part of their control on customer relationship. Since it is the core part of their long term strategy, I don't think they can easily give it up. I think they will eventually foray into the advertising business rather than giving up user control.
Here, the only major advantage of their services is platform control. The major disadvantage is their perception of privacy-friendly company, so their options on ad network level optimization are significantly limited. The only relevant ads service from Apple is app search ads because this is the only area they can get user information without privacy troubles; this clearly demonstrates their strong and weak points.
The only logical conclusion that can be derived from this situation is utilizing their platform control to "level the playground"; even if Apple cannot use the same user data, they can force others to give up. This will neutralize Apple's disadvantage while retaining their platform advantages, which likely give them some time to catch up their competitors in service businesses as well.
Yet their rhetoric is "tracking is great and people love it! they're going to be so sad once tracking is gone!"
I would not characterize Facebook's post that way. Facebook's post doesn't mention the impact on/reaction from the end users at all.
My interpretation of all this is that no reasonable user would consent to the tracking anyway and the marginal benefit of users who do consent is outweighed by users who are creeped out and decline the tracking.
I can't think of any basis on which they wouldn't be quickly dismissed, though.
What could go wrong if we give them another spot at the table?
I mean, PRAM has already released so many good plans, like... a mission statement. But that counts! I mean, come on, it has 'Responsible' right in its name!
And then Google found a loophole in the P3P syntax, and abused it to bypass it entirely. Fun times.
Left the guard clause in, in the end, because of some misguided need to "do the right thing". It's just dead code. I'd just get rid of it now.
Despite online Internet attention, users don't care about this stuff so long as it's wicked fast (response times < 20 ms) and doesn't interfere with the thing they want. They want the thing it enables and they'll happily pay the price.
People online who talk about all this stuff visit whacky sites, get angry at being infected with god knows what from some shit Forbes.com or some crap or some porno site and then flip out at "Google for tracking me" or some crap.
Glad I'm not in that industry anymore. No one outside it knows what it does or enables.
My guess is that this partnership is very similar to a hypothetical Foxes’ Partnership for Responsible Henhouse Interactions
I mean, still in iOS 14, Google can use your data from e.g Google Maps / Chrome to target ads in the Youtube app on the same device without requiring any accounts by using identifierForVendor [0]. AFAIK this wouldn't require them to show the scary pop-up either, since they are only sharing the info with themselves?
But yeah, even without "tracking" the users, the ASA is of course in a privileged position, both in its prominent position in the (only) App Store, and by the possibility to charge per e.g app install. Doing reliable app install tracking without IDFA is next to impossible. Taking it further by restarting iAd now would be highly problematic imho.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidevice/162... [1]: https://searchads.apple.com/privacy/
You'll love this: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-h...
The big money at stake in this particular change is ads promoting the installation of apps. Facebook’s current tracking allows them to show that a particular ad FB displayed resulted in spending on an app. Apple taking over this business with their own ad service is just another aspect of their efforts to capture an ever-expanding chunk of commerce that occurs on every iOS device. Keep in mind the context that Apple is banning apps for allowing users to use subscription services without paying Apple 30% of the subscription revenue.
For what it’s worth, Google is guilty of some of the same issues on Android. I hope any regulation cracking down on these abuses will be equally applied.
>Yes. Apple has a detailed answer but essentially says that's not so, and is a misreading of its policy.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/22/apple-ios-14-ad-tracking/
> All publishers (news sites, indie games, etc) are going to see huge drops in CPM. It could easily be a business ending shift.
Your second statement might not imply the first. It could be that publishers are going to see business disrupting shifts in CPM, and we are aware of that fact, and still support the changes.
"Why is everyone praising this? Don't they realize that it will make it harder to track them?"
At the same time, there's something really telling that after all of the years of the advertising industry talking about how users actually want to be tracked and targeted, they are nonetheless terrified of something as simple as a prominent opt-out button.
If advertisers sincerely believed that users wanted what they were offering, then they wouldn't view it as an existential threat for users to have the ability to turn the offer down. If the take is, "users having control over their own data will be devastating for the advertisers", then honestly that's kind of a big signal that the advertising industry is out of control and needs some business disrupting shifts.
I actually gave it a chance. The problem was during that time the ads (from Google) were more irrelevant.
Back in the old days you could often see how ads were relevant to the topic of the web site you were visiting or the topic you searched for even if they weren't always relevant to me (e.g. selling expensive software while I was a broke student, living outside the US).
The next years - sometimes after the Double Click acquisition it seems - I started seeing almost only irrelevant ads everywhere.
I don't have anything against companies making money - in fact I liked it when Google were earning good money before Double Click. But when they add invasive tracking and the quality goes way down at the same time something has gone wrong.
I hope every company that makes a living by trying to spy on me goes out of business.
And what is it that you publish that helps humanity?
Maybe with time there can be a shift in the economics, but I would not bet on it. I can’t imagine people will start paying for email, search, music streaming...
Business models come and go. This one isn't as bad as slavery or child labour, but but I'd happily tap-dance on its grave.
Privacy has always been a core tenet of Apple's value proposition. They ask for more money, and in return you get assurance that the system you're using values your privacy more than other ecosystems.
I don't necessarily think there needs to be anything more to it than that. Apple knows it can win privacy conscious people and monetize them in ways Google can't, and that's what it does.
I would say maybe you could take comfort in knowing that you essentially sponsored someone who wanted to help produce a world of clean, adaptable code, but the truth is I’m just another mid-rate dev producing immense value to an ironically named faceless org.
Anyway, no thanks for ads and surveillance tech but at the same time thanks for keeping me employed and thanks for keeping the viability of these pursuits going I think?
There are Android phones sold in the developing world at low price points where ads appear on home screen, notification bar etc. with tracking deep within OS.
Then, there are phones like Pixel where with recent versions you have control of what is shared and you need to authorize access(single/multiple use) for things like location. Like iOS, not much can be collected unless you give Google/app permission to.
I probably shouldn't have mentioned Android at all because it's not about phone brand so much as it is my right to tell advertisers no.
And there are pure Linux phones as well.
Why would enforcing a standard of quality (to keep user's trust by not showing them shit ads) be considered anti-competitive? Google already bans entire industries from advertising and are fine with that, why would enforcing a level of quality (and raising prices to offset the cost of human review) be anticompetitive?
Truth is that neither Google nor Facebook care as long as they get paid.
A privacy option that's not allowed to be turned on by default based on user data and likely preferences isn't a real privacy option. Advertisers are the kings of trying to guess what users want, did they really think that browsers wouldn't be allowed to do the same with request headers?
This argument comes up a lot, and I'd debate it, but I also think behind the surface-level objections, the heart of the argument basically boils down to, "we didn't realize that people were going to use this thing."
The advertising industry was happy to have an opt-out as long as not too many people used it. Once it started getting turned on by default (because of course a user who's installing antivirus or privacy tools wants DNT to be enabled), Microsoft just became an excuse to abandon the whole thing.
If Microsoft had never turned DNT on by default, but the majority of users had sought out the option and turned it on, then advertisers would have come up with an excuse. Their participation with DNT was a compromise: "you can have a few of these users that probably run adblockers anyway, and in exchange, we want you to get off of our back about everything else."
For these people, respecting DNT always depended on it not being adopted. And that's why trusting them to talk about "responsible ads" or "consumer choice" is a waste of time. They know what they want the consumer choice on privacy to be, and they will only offer that choice as long as the average consumer chooses what they think the 'right' option is. If advertisers discover that the average consumer doesn't want to be tracked, then all of their talk about sitting down and having a dialog is going to go away.
It was a younger version of me that gave them a chance.
They failed hard.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/22/apple-ios-14-ad-tracking/
I think the purpose of this change is to redirect the revenue from FB to Apple.
The real purpose of this change is to continue to drive home to Apple users, who are increasing aware of privacy issues, that Apple has their back. Anything else is gravy.
And the fact that people still flock to consoles means that users want a safe, curated, vibrant, affordable gaming platform. Which would be destroyed if you (a) stopped Sony making a profit of games and forcing them to make it from the hardware and (b) stopped Sony from blocking crapware, malware and counterfeits.
Is it because it's a manufactured problem by this scummy industry where they try to consider anything a "conversion" like "we showed this guy an ad 2 years ago and now he finally happened to look the right way at our client's shop while walking past it, this is definitely because of our ad and we should include this in our conversion stats"?
DNT is based on a flawed assumption that ad tech has good faith. In the real world, though, you don't ask for privacy, you take it.
Every time we see these voluntary initiatives about how advertisers are going to be responsible from now on... they can't. The industry will never be responsible, left to their own devices they'll use DNT as a tracking mechanism, and then justify it by saying that they need to remain competitive.
There is no such thing as a responsible advertising industry, it doesn't exist. They've demonstrated over and over again that they have to be treated like malicious actors, they are incapable of self-regulating.
> go in your account and disable targeted ads
Those are not the same thing.
In comparison, Google and Facebook both operate actual, for-profit ad services that are used across almost every website and app in the world.
I agree about Apple being too strict on the App Store. But it's not really what I'm talking about.
The biggest market for Facebook’s ads on iOS is for apps. Apple is cracking down on that with this change, so Facebook won’t be able to show attribution for app purchases. It’s hard not to think that this change is an effort to take over the market with their competing app advertising service.
My claim is that this is part of the larger effort to take a bigger cut the economic activity that happens on the phone. The 30% app cut expansion to cover more services is part of that. Capturing the advertising revenue for apps is another. The only way for Apple to keep growing as a two trillion dollar company is to take over more of the economy, and this is part of that effort.
I envision a future where, if they can get away with it, Apple takes an expanding cut of every Doordash delivery, every Uber ride, every Amazon purchase, and any other good or service that they can obtain sufficient market power to capture.
That is, goods on Amazon, Uber rides, food prices all will be more expensive to iOS users and then maybe Instagram and TikTok can start charging iOS users $50/yr as well. At the end of the day a mobile platform needs third party services as much they need the platform otherwise Windows phone would've survived.
There is a danger of FB manipulating things on its own but they didn't sell the data to any third party including Cambridge Analytica, it was harvested because of poor API policy(your friend auth giving access to some of your details) which was fixed in the future. The behavioral profiles were built by Cambridge Analytica on its own by the data it stole.
Why would FB in any instance even sell your data? I would argue it is in FB's interest to keep the data for itself, not letting anyone have it and be the gatekeeper.
The right thing to argue is, whether you want FB/Tiktok itself to have the treasure trove of data or not, and whether you want to allow them to use that to do precise targeting.
Sure, it's not a selling of the raw data record but with advertising and targeting an advertiser can get pretty close.
I just have an issue with hyperboles like "sold individual user's behavioral profile to Cambridge Analytica" being thrown around in articles related to tech when in HN of all places, you can argue without resorting to that.
Is there any evidence that it was actually fixed?
[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/
But if you believe they don't still provide access via substantially similar APIs to "trusted partners", I have a bridge that may interest you...
As it is, the efficacy of targeted advertising is a myth. Google claimed in a blog post that their own internal study showed over a 50% benefit in targeted advertising for publishers... but an independent, academic study showed a difference of about 4%.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/disabling_third-pa...
(Google has suggested, of course, that their wildly different outcomes are because you know, Google has data nobody else has, and obviously Google would never manipulate it's exclusive access to all that data to make studies look like what is best for their business.)
Adtech giants need advertisers to believe they need targeted advertising, because targeted advertising relies on mass data collection only they are capable of getting. If people realized the necessity of using Google and Facebook's mass user data was... a complete lie... any old ad firm could compete with their businesses.
Targeted advertising is as old as advertising. Why do you have cloud companies advertising on the billboards in San Francisco, but not in Beatty, Nevada? Why do you have coupons? Why Cosmopolitan has different ads than Linux Format? Why NBA games have different ads than The Bachelor?
Why do companies spend more and more money with companies that do provide better targeted advertising? Do you really believe that P&G spends billions of dollars on advertising, without understanding which forms of it are effective?
There's a valid discussion to be had about scope, allowed sophistication of targeted advertising that should be allowed, and regulations about it, but claiming it doesn't work just shows lack understanding of the topic.
Thanks, but no. As an end user, my preference goes as:
no advertising >>>>> targeted advertising >> untargeted advertising
And I am not just speaking hypothetically. Google has a switch in your account settings where you can flip a toggle to turn off all targeted Google advertising and make it un-targeted. I couldn't last more than a day with this and flipped the toggle back on.
While with targeted advertising, most ads were useless, they at least were somewhat relevant, and a few even piqued my interest. With untargeted advertising, I was getting absolute trash that was actively annoying me.
You're thinking too small. Targeted advertising deserves to die in a grease fire, but a proper solution is to universally make an individual's personal data their property and require companies to cough up compensation every time it is used in commercial form. Any attempt to sidestep the compensation must account as fraud.
Holding on to user data needs to be a painful liability. The cost of such micro-accounting alone should incentivise companies to keep hold of as little information as possible, so as not to incur excess processing costs. The aggregated cost of payment processing on top of that will provide a secondary cost vector and further discourage using such data. Combine with GDPR and CCPA like power to demand companies to divulge their full accounting details of your data, and all of a sudden the pain becomes real. Not to mention very expensive.
It's my phone, not the developers, not the advertisers, mine.
If you want a device which is subsidized by and encourages advertising and tracking, you have Android or Amazon's devices.
Are you willing to extend this argument to Apple as well? Do you also think that it is not Apple's phone, and that you should be able to do what you want with it, if you choose to?
Because right now Apple does not really agree with your opinion that it is your phone, that you can do what you want with.
If you give dangerous tools to users, you will have a few cool things and lots of tech-illiterate users screwed over.
Privacy advocates often preach solutions like the fediverse, without understanding that the fediverse is a privacy disaster for the tech illiterate. Cambridge Analytica wouldn't even be preventable on Mastodon, and it would have far worse consequences. Nevermind admins snooping on messages of their users, for i.e. romantic or financial reasons and poor people having to pay for their own services instead of seeing ads.
Yes, Facebook is horrible, but all currently known cures are worse than the disease.
I was able to download tons of user data. I think the guide was to only take what you need and you were not supposed to store it longer than 48 hours.
But that was def an honor system thing and I’d be surprised if people were purging data back then. It was (still is?) the Wild West with consumer tracking.
I will definitely miss the ridiculous TC fueled by the ad-laden web, but at least maybe I won’t work alongside physics and math phds on optimizing clicks....
There's absolutely now reason why these services can't all fit in a 5-10$/month allowance. E-mail is already ~2$/month with Office 365, and if everyone starts paying economies of scale would make even cheaper plans profitable.
Some of these services can just as well be provided by the ISP, like e-mail was back in the days. A lot of ISPs are indeed scum but there isn't technically anything forcing the users to use them (you can pay for a third-party) and I think the move away from e-mail being centralized around a few giants like Google (GMail), Microsoft (Outlook), etc would be a good thing.
By comparison, paid services would cost $30/month. You might be willing to pay that, but many will not. People already share Netflix accounts or bootleg their friend’s HBO accounts.
I think a shift to paid services is _possible_ but I won’t bet on it. The economics and market forces that brought us metered data and text usage haven’t really changed. Destroying the advertising-supported offerings will not spawn competition overnight. But in any case I think the big players are positioned to weather the changes.
And by the way, $30/month/user is an average. If you are have high disposable income you are likely netting FB et al more than that.
FB never built technical countermeasures, merely asked app devs to pinky-swear not to siphon user data.
Also facebook killed this long before the Cambridge Analytics scandal broke. It also enabled some really cool features like their graph search where you could run queries like "people in X town that like football", but it also let you run very creepy queries to stalk people, which is why it got canned.
For example, does your HackerNews app need to talk to Google? Probably not, so that gets blocked by default. Does your Newpipe/YouTube app? Yes, so you should unblock that from talking to Google. The Spotify app also tries to talk to like 9 different tracking domains, but only one category is actually required to fully use the app. Screenshot: https://dro.pm/n.png (Current version doesn't yet allow toggling per-domain in an attempt to make it easier/more manageable; but iirc allowing that is a planned change.)
The app is under active development and the dev seems to listen to feature requests, so if you have any... :). One downside is that it doesn't work alongside other VPN apps because it pretends to be a VPN. If anyone has a good idea how to solve that, the dev asked for ideas if I remember correctly.
I already blacklisted advertising domains in /etc/hosts and disabled things like broadcast listeners so certain apps don't receive the OnBoot/OnAppInstalled/etc. events to limit what they notice and can do, but with TC I feel like my privacy on Android got a substantial boost. Spotify was the last app I use with Facebook integration and I was wondering what to do about it, but I think that is not an issue anymore now.
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.f...
I don't currently use an iPhone (contemplating jumping ship as well), but my understanding is you can get similar functionality on there using AdGuard.
There is also Pinephone with pure GNU/Linux and killswitches.
we do.
Imagine if the first time you opened your IDE it asked you what language you're going to type in. That would actually be very reasonable and helpful.
Ergo that tactic makes whoever uses it a malefactor
1) Who said that games need to be sold at cost?
2) Who said anything about stopping Sony doing anything?
Does the fact that you can unlock Android phones mean that the manufacturers (or Google) have now gone out of business? Or that they can't curate their stores?
Just a super low effort reply.
Android manufacturers make their money from the hardware so it's irrelevant to them which apps you install.
What's the issue?
To be fair, I think I should specify "user-targeted" advertising. Targeting by content/placement location isn't privacy-invading by nature. :)
Is privacy invading targeted advertising a concern and something that needs more debate? Yes. Can it be creepy and cause harm in some cases? Yes. Should world be driven by advertisers ROI? No. Are user-targeted ads ineffective? Hell no.
But also, just because something is concerning and bad for some aspects of the life (like privacy), it doesn't mean it should be wiped out of the floor, as cheaper and effective advertising does help to grow any capitalist economy. Trade-offs are needed (same as we don't ban oil, even tho it's bad for environment), and it'll become more regulated (either self-regulated by industry, or by governments), but it's not going to disappear.
Because it really is not "your phone", because of Apple's actions.
Either you think it is your phone or you don't.
Given that this isn't overloading the user with a ton of options each time they launch an app, why is Facebook alarmed about users having the choice to opt out of tracking?
And I'll extend on that question: even if users are annoyed at a single extra popup that gets shown once when they install an app, why does Facebook care? Users will still pick the option that they prefer, they'll just be annoyed at Apple for asking. Why is Facebook alarmed that users on iPhone will have to spend a half second, once, saying, "ugh, Apple, of course I want a company to track everything I do online"?
I agree with "fewer" and strongly disagree with "worse quality."
Anyway, I don’t begrudge anyone who has worked in the ad business, but I do wonder if folks might be happier optimizing for something of real lasting value in comparison to the gambling business.
ads == worse quality
You can't in practice verify that clicks or impressions are real, as opposed to initiated by bots, without correlating them with real human behavior.
If you have an idea for how to verify a click or impression was real without also gathering some kind of data, go make ten billion dollars selling that technology.
I fully understand why advertising companies would be opposed to this, it's in direct opposition to their value prop. As a consumer, though, I don't want anyone who is not the entity I'm interacting with to know anything about me.
Track purchases coming from ads?
High-value advertising revenue generally comes from very specific brands targeting very specific users.
Of course you can do certain kinds of targeted advertising without user profiles, but I don't see how that would work on Facebook.
Maybe the problem with online ads isn't the targeting or lack thereof but that the well has been poisoned by allowing even the worst possible scum and the users reached their breaking point and learned to ignore them, while the higher quality in real-world advertising is enough to even keep people paying for advertising (in the form of buying magazines)?
Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world", just like some brands might maintain unprofitable flagship stores.
Another reason is "because they have to charge that much". Which means that if fewer companies are willing to pay that much, more classic media outlets go out of business, as they can not lower prices further.
Lastly, you can't accurately measure how inefficient these forms of advertising are, whereas online advertising makes it easy to see whether ads are a net loss or not.
On top of that, extremely course information can be gathered without tracking users. For example, you can probably get a country level location and maybe even language from the request the browser sends.
However, if you sell, say, artisanal hot sauce, you'd pay more to target an affluent person that likes spicy food, rather than some random person that may be just be googling how to make macaroni and cheese.
Classified ads were the difference between profit and loss for a lot of local newspapers. Craigslist devastated that market in a matter of years.
Commercial ads were doing fine, and I bet there are a lot of local businesses who wish there was still a local newspaper they could advertise in. But it wasn't enough.
Doesn't that show a problem with online advertising if it's considered so bad that companies are willing to pay huge premiums to show up somewhere else instead?
Facebook has a pretty good idea where I am by looking at the data associated with my connection. I know they have that, but if I don't want them to use that for advertising, they shouldn't.
I think you give too little credit to the intelligence of ad buyers. They can figure out if a web ad is working the same way they can figure out if a billboard ad is working.
I think super-precise attribution would actually kill the advertising industry. The uncertainty is what allows ad-buyers to purchase spots well below their value. The uncertainty is what leads to money being spread around and supporting the most things.
It's a little like insurance. If insurance companies could precisely target rates, you would end up paying basically exactly what your health care costs are and maybe a little more. Insurance works because of uncertainty and large pools of customers.
