Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs(thebigtech.substack.com) |
Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs(thebigtech.substack.com) |
Facebook has billions of users on several different apps. And people log into these apps to use them. FB, Instagram, Whatsapp. Cross-app tracking is not a big deal, they already know who you are.
The big hits are going to be a reduction in data collected by other apps fed to Facebook, and in measurement and attribution (like app install ads). If anything, it can actually strengthen their walled-garden data moat when advertisers realize that it's still the most efficient way to reach users. Their last earnings report shows significant growth and is the opposite of a struggling business.
Google Plus may have "failed" as a product, but a lot of data joining happened in that effort.
The web saw ad blocking, tracking protection, and privacy regulation which eliminated 3rd-party cookies - but apps were overlooked for a long time. Apple and Google finally added more API permissions and removed this device ID meaning that apps are now in the same place as websites. FLoC is just a way to solve for targeting by creating interest-based cohorts within your browser that don't reveal personal details.
However none of this affects 1st-party tracking. The more you share with an app or site, the more they know, and if you login then they obviously know who you are. They can also still share that data with Facebook (subject to regulations). The major change here is to stop tracking in anonymous situations (like app installs that won't know which device clicked on an ad and then installed on app), not to stop all data collection.
It helps when governments have given out huge grants specifically earmarked for social media advertising in an effort to help struggling brick and mortar business through the COVID landscape. It will be interesting to see if those earnings continue when businesses are back to paying for their own ads. In my business, which received one of those grants, I'm not sure the payback justified the spend, to be honest.
True, but do the small business know you? No. Facebook helps match other advertisers with you, and earns a good commission out of it.
Now, with these sweeping changes, Facebook would no longer be able to effectively connect marketers with you.
>Their last earnings report show significant growth.
True. But the changes weren’t live back then. Apple released the App Tracking Transparency framework update with iOS14.5 in mid April.
I’m not a veteran in the ad tech space like you. Neither I claim to be one. What I wrote are just facts mixed with my thoughts. None of the things are misleading.
It’s easy to make such sweeping remarks in the comments section. Maybe write an article on your thoughts over this, and we’ll discuss someday
Why not? What does small business knowing you have to do with anything? Marketers can target using demographics, interests, behaviors and tons of other factors to get new customers, or they can upload an emails or other profile data to retarget existing users. Nothing has changed here.
> "But the changes weren’t live back then"
IDFA has had a global opt-out for years and 30% in the US have turned it off. The new change is to allow the opt-out on a per-app basis after install.
> "It’s easy to make such sweeping remarks in the comments section. Maybe write an article on your thoughts over this, and we’ll discuss someday"
It's "easy" because I've built multiple products and companies over a decade, and earned my knowledge and experience in the industry. I never said you were misleading though, but that's the 3rd incorrect statement you made in your reply after the two above.
No article needed, my comments already cover everything. This is a discussion forum though so go ahead and discuss right here if you want.
They gather tons of my information from third parties, often through data sharing deals.
For instance, when I bought a car, the manufacturer somehow linked it to my Facebook account (without my knowledge or consent, and I don’t have a car app installed on my phone).
However, the vast majority of their profile on me is from cross-app sharing.
This change only stops easy syncing of a profile based on a stable device-level identifier, often used in (semi-)anonymous situations (like app install ads). It doesn't mean companies can't share data ever again.
The targeting should only work in a following way:
- I sell car tyres, therefore to find my consumers I'll buy an ad on the Facebook car group.
Instead of:
- I sell car tyres, find anyone who asked their friends about where to buy car tyres, who is between 20-40, Caucasian, has a good credit score and has autism and is into rubber jokes.
"Only yesterday, Google announced its plans to make advertising ID an opt-in feature."
A few paragraphs later:
"Google’s opt-out ad-tracking popup isn’t on the forefront like in iOS. Instead, it’s buried deep in the Google Play Service settings — which could be difficult for the non-tech savvy user to find out."
And this opener:
"Facebook has a market evaluation of over 930 billion dollars today."
Versus the conclusion:
"Clearly, this chain of events is about to trigger an irreversible slump in Facebook’s advertisement business — making their ambitions of becoming the fastest trillion-dollar tech firm a far-fetched dream."
Is it really a far-fetched dream when the stock price only needs a 7.5% bump from its current level?
I think moving forward the term “Substack Journalist” will generally be used to refer to the authors of this low quality and factless reporting, that gets dangerously close to misinformation.
The same way that “Soundcloud Rapper” refers to the low quality and amateur rappers that upload their music to Soundcloud (although the latter seems to have some outliers).
> Instead, a lack of effort in developing their own operating system a decade ago might be Facebook’s biggest regret. And this has come back to bite them today.
Crazy that it came to this.
Apple has allowed users to reset their advertiser ID to a new random value as often as they liked since 2012, and has allowed users to go into the settings and turn off access to the advertiser ID (so that every app will see an advertiser ID of all zeroes) since 2018.
It wasn't until Apple made the Advertiser ID something that you actively had to opt into that the freakout began.
Here's a link speculating on the impact of Apple's IDFA deprecation on Facebook, from January: https://mobiledevmemo.com/facebook-may-take-revenue-hit-from... It carries strong parallels to what is in-process at Google.
A few ad experts I follow say that Facebook and Google will claim increasing dominance in the ad space. Their logic is that as each ad vendor loses third party information, comparative advantage will favor companies with strong first party information. This will drive more ads toward Facebook as a relative share, even if they are still losing overall. I have no information to judge to what extent this claim holds.
This is just plain stupid. Yes Facebook is a Big Evil Corp but they created a ton of value through original product development, not just “shrewd acquisitions” and ripping off other products.
Didn’t read past this point, author blew their credibility here.
Facebook must be ruing spending time on Oculus instead of developing their own mobile hardware ecosystem.
As others are pointing out, people sign in to Facebook apps. As soon as they do, that apple & google device ID are kind of redundant. The only place where these ids are useful is when users use other application to access content and the analytics for that somehow end up in Facebook's data lake. That is indeed something they've been doing as well but also something that has been getting harder due to increasing restrictions both technically and legally (e.g. GDPR).
Facebook might huff and puff a little but they'll be fine. What this will accomplish however is decimating the competition that lack their own walled gardens from which to gather tracking data and are very dependent on Google and Facebook telling them who is who. Which is also why Google is doing this.
And of course the latter two have had a strategy of strengthening the walls around their walled gardens. This will likely push more content providers inside these walls. I'm hoping the EU and the US might be able to force tearing these walls down a little. Google trying to monopolize news has been something they've been fighting for a while. And of course both Facebook and Google are creating a bit of a privileged/exclusive situation for themselves here.
Of course it will be years before most of their users get to play with Android 12. So, it's going to be slow process of this gradually getting harder for companies to work with rather than an overnight cut off. Unless of course they roll this out to older versions as well.
The issue has always been that Facebook is tracking you on non-Facebook websites and apps, even if you don't have a Facebook account. From a user's perspective, they never told Facebook what products they were looking at on Etsy, so Facebook collecting that data feels like a violation of their privacy. Things like GDPR and Apple's new IDFA policy do neuter this considerably.
It seems that Facebook might have a much stronger case against Google here, since it's using its success in the smartphone OS market to hobble its biggest competitor in the digital ads market.
I feel the same way; very little chance Google stops this unless it doesn't affect them at all (either by having determined these identifiers aren't particularly effective, or by having cooked up some new scheme.)
Google wants exclusive root on the web the way it has it on the phones they rent to you.
> And that’s how Facebook still manages to stay free of cost today.
I enjoy articles that explain to the layman how the sausage is made. I've always wondered: if enough people know they're the product and know how Facebook makes money, would they delete their account in a fit of rage or continue to use it, knowing that they're victims of surveillance capitalism?
I know for me, I cancelled my account after looking at the 'interests' page and discovered how strangely accurate it was. They really can get to know you on an intimate level. The more you engage with the app, the bigger and more accurate the profiling. More people need to visit that interests page and decide if they want to continue using Facebook.
And Facebook already launched a phone of sorts, with HTC in 2013. Huge flop.
https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopp...
> Now that Google is pulling the plug by making GAID almost obsolete, Facebook is about to stare at a bigger loss. If their loss from iOS 14 was in the range of $80bn, Android the more dominant platform will only increase their losses and woes.
Almost obsolete? This means users have to OPT-OUT of tracking as opposed to OPTING-IN to tracking on iOS.
The two "solutions" could not be more different. I hate all of these new articles saying that "Google joins Apple" in restricting FB. Apple is restricting FB 95%, Google is restricting it maybe 5% at best.
But perhaps Facebook will eventually find a new way out anyway.
It feels like Substack authors got started in an ultra-competitive world where they knew clickbait journalism was the norm, so they’ve gone all-in on saying whatever they think it takes to grow their subscriber base. I’ve tried subscribing to many smaller Substacks in the past year but the majority of them feel similar to this: A lot of exaggerated sensationalism and recycled material, but little actual analysis. The exceptions have been professional journalists who were already good at writing before joining Substack.
The sensational articles with exaggerated headlines do play well on places like HN where headlines get upvotes before many read the article, so the trend will continue.
Think about all the "Sources say" articles you've read at 'respected publications' over the past few years. How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?
Journalism is probably at its lowest ever point.
Surely the majority of ads Facebook sells are displayed on Facebook's properties (Facebook, apps, IG, etc), where they'll have the logged in user's details already and don't need the user's device mobile advertising ID. That's not to say this won't impact them at all, because it will, but it's not exactly the sky falling.
> Through shrewd acquisitions, blatantly copying the exclusivity of rivals (read: Snapchat, TikTok), Facebook managed to become an integral part of our lives in less than a decade.
Maybe some of that is true? Facebook has been "an integral part of our lives" for longer than a decade. I remember returning home from college in 2008 and seeing my small town papered in facebook usernames for just about every business that had a sign. That was well before Snapchat or TikTok existed, and I don't think they'd done any acquisitions of note up to then. This guy's not completely wrong here, but the framing is myopic enough for me to look for another source of information about the advertising change.
That it might doesn't absolve the fact that Facebook has been essentially kicked about by the Big 2 that dominate the smartphone market. Remember that Apple and Google aren't exactly covered in glory as far as privacy is concerned. They want consumer data for themselves, and that's "private enough" in their eyes.
There's a reason Facebook (and Amazon) has a devices division and is betting on AR/VR.
Things will get interesting from here on.
Apple is using user behaviors for advertising within Apple's ecosystem, but that's not something I really mind. Once my data/behavior exists the company I've entrusted it too, I get very uncomfortable.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
Which undermines the whole premise of the article.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality...
AR... maybe. My personal opinion is the needed electronics (and especially the battery tech) aren't small enough yet, if we're talking AR glasses.
If we're talking AR on phones, where's the killer app? Pokemon go?
This is particularly evident when considering Apple's lead in silicon, which will allow Apple's AR products to be lighter, faster and longer lasting than their competitors. Apple's vertical integration means that there should be more AR "apps" and better software integration than any of their competitors. Apple's pro-privacy push means that consumers will be far more willing to strap Apple branded AR glasses to their face all day.
Facebook might be able to out-compete Apple in VR (silicon performance and efficiency is not as critical for VR), however VR likely will not have the same mainstream appeal that AR will have.
It's really a surprise Facebook was so blindsided by this, they should've known better.
When FB released its first “phone” it was still unwilling to take mobile seriously. They left the head of mobile position open for a very long time. Zuck himself has said he missed mobile.
With the IPO around that time, making some major strategic investment in tech was not an option when the company was likely under a lot of pressure to make the stock price only go one way.
You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it.
It’s taken major investment over many years to get that app sorted out and it still needs a lot of work.
I think FB did know better they just had a competing problem of revenue growth that was at odds with laying claim to the future.
If anything, I think FB is making an ongoing strategic mistake in lack of any obvious work to establish an Alphabet structure.
FB can recover by building a social network that monetizes via payments and subscriptions. This could be hooked up to a new fortnite-seeded metaverse and run exclusively through oculus.
The opportunity for a FB-parent Corp that distinguishes a new, private network away from the damaged brand of FB is still there.
Leadership just has to be way more daring now in what it’s willing to do.
It really has to or the ruling metaverse social network will be built by someone else for Apple hardware.
Facebook can go die in the grave they dug for themselves.
Enter the iPhone/iOS and ChromeOS. (Android and Windows still have an escape hatch, and are still plagued with malware. macOS's escape hatch is basically irrelevant at this point, to the point of nonexistence.)
In those circumstances, if you aren't publishing the OS and holding the secret keys to the certs in bootloaders, you are only a sharecropper, and your access to the namespace of programs that are allowed to run on end user devices is entirely outside of your control.
Your milkshake is now someone else's. Epic and Facebook are upset about this, understandably.
I personally believe that people should be able to run Facebook spyware on the devices they bought, even if it is worse for them and the world. We aren't free if we aren't free to act against our own interests.
Similar to factory farmed meat. I'm sure if you worked there, you'd be more likely to avoid eating it.
I'd love to know what FB thinks I'm interested in, but I'm nothing more than a shadow to them - no account, never used their apps - so there's no way for me to know. I think this is one of the more horrible, insidious outcomes of their way of working: If you're signed up for their abuse, you can at least find out something about what they know of you. If you've opted out of their surveillance platform, you have no way of finding out. And that's iniquitous.
People know. They just okay with it. If they aren’t, they would have stopped using it by now.
If anything, the general public seems to think that Facebook and Instagram’s tracking is more pervasive than it really is. How many times have you heard people insist that Instagram showed them ads based on a verbal conversation they had where their phone was nearby? The idea that your phone is listening to every word you speak is obviously a myth, yet many people believe it and continue to use those apps anyway.
Outside of privacy centric tech bubbles like HN, targeted advertising isn’t viewed as a violation and free products are understood to come with advertising tradeoffs. HN isn’t uniquely enlightened about the “you’re the product” trope.
Yeah and most of the time this is recency bias. You know: when you learn a new word and suddenly see it everywhere.
[0] https://www.gizchina.com/2021/05/26/researcher-found-a-secur... [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/25/researcher-accuse... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2014/09/04/creat... [3] https://www.wired.com/story/macos-malware-shlayer-gatekeeper...
Demography, interests and behaviours are the exact things that what won't be possible without the user's choice now. Coming to your question: small businesses won't have that much first party data to target new users accurately.
>"IDFA has had a global opt-out for years and 30% in the US have turned it off. The new change is to allow the opt-out on a per-app basis after install."
The opt-out feature was buried deep in the settings. Most user never knew it existed. Or aren't tech savvy enough to figure how to disable it
Also, you have a source for this: "global opt-out for years and 30% in the US have turned it off".
I don't think most users even knew that feature until iOS 13. Alright, even if they do, a shift from 30 percent to over 80 percent with a single software update is huge. Still, would love if you could share a source.
Also that IDFA opt-out doesn't do anything for logged-in identities as I said before. That's why walled-gardens are so powerful and why privacy regulation has strengthened them even further. There is a big difference between independent adtech, 3rd-party data collection, and anonymous tracking compared to the first-party data moats that Google and Facebook have.
Do not install apps, unless absolutely necessary.
Let's suppose you use Google or Facebook to discover an e-commerce site, and then you visit that site "anonymously", and then put something in your cart. Maybe you even convert.
If the site has a "log in with {Google,Facebook,etc}" pop-up, then Google/Facebook (even if you do NOT log in) can join your visit with whatever else data they have. (I think Faceboook says, or said, something in their TOS that they won't but I wouldn't trust that-- they're recording the hit to their pop-up after all).
Google / Facebook will already record your click that lead to the site. Now, you might not be logged in to Google or Facebook on the device visiting the third party site, but if anything else on the local network is logged in, then they derive data from your visit even if it's "anonymous." Even the regional impression gives them value.
So here's the deal though: that e-commerce site "owns" that session and impression. At the very least, they paid to serve it. What FLoC and this Android change do is make it harder for Google/Facebook competitor (e.g. Amazon ads, Microsoft, Verizon/Oath, AT&T, etc) from finding something that can join the user visit to whatever data they already have. That makes the impression to the e-commerce site less valuable because now only Google/Facebook can derive data from it.
Moreover, Google / Facebook are going to target ads based upon that visit. Maybe not ads delivered to that user, and maybe not delivered on that e-commerce site (or for them), but they're going to derive targeting value nevertheless. So if the e-commerce site ever wants to run ads, FLoC and this Android setting should in theory make competitors to Google weaker.
So there's a lot of discussion about privacy here, but in the macro I can't help but see FLoC and this Android change as a way to protect Google's monopoly, and Facebook's moat over their own space.
When it comes to mobile, though, I thought there was already so much fragmentation between browsers / quirks, display settings, other User Agent meta, and IP addresses that fingerprinting without cookies was a lot easier than on the Desktop. And by now, many users have transitioned from Desktop to Mobile, making any other previously joined fingerprints more valuable (something Google or Facebook could do, but maybe not ATT/Verizon). So the Android opt-out really only hurts new properties or ad providers who are starting fresh, right?
However most sites, like in your example, also include their analytics tools and directly send them data. Ecommerce stores will often report conversions with your email address to G/FB so that you can be targeted for ads as a return customer. A lot of the data collection is done like this where other businesses do the actual collecting and sending.
Mobile is much worse with privacy. The web has to deal with constantly changing security rules, limited APIs, and purged data. On mobile, most usage is in apps which have strong identifiers that never change, and access to far more system level data and APIs. They can - and do - leak far more data. That's why you have expose articles that show that people were tracked by location for entire weeks at a time, which is not possible at all with websites.
FloC is only for anonymous situations. If you're already logged into G/FB and are on their sites, or accessing their resources as a 3rd-party, then they already know you are. FLoC and similar tech is used for when you identity isn't known, and then your browser provides rough categories of interests based on what sites you saw before. Remember the ultimate control over privacy is you and what data you willingly send. Many people login and post everything themselves, thereby being their own worst enemy when it comes to privacy.
Some would say this is the entire point of Apple blocking cross-app tracking.
Allow me to provide just 3 of the countless example of fantastic journalism that still exists today:
- Many of the journalists covering the Portland protests literally risked life and limb to uncover policing abuses.
- Data journalists at the Covid Tracking Project were compiling and producing such high quality data that governments were using them to forecast local covid health trends.
- The OSINT journalism that Bellingcat does: https://www.bellingcat.com/
There are certainly some good journalists out there, but any big media institutions are way too far gone.
I think Zuck, having taken the market from Orkut, Friendster and MySpace, decided he will not let anyone take it from him, no matter what.
E.g. Skype was still on every phone in 2014; it’s not about install base - it’s about potential to become a social network, which WhatsApp had, and Skype didn’t.
WhatsApp is a social network because of groups. I think I never had a group with Skype. I don't even know if they are a thing there.
I'm currently using WhatsApp and Telegram groups to chat and exchange pictures and links with groups of friends and colleagues. I'm trying to move from WA to Telegram starting with the most technical friends (as always has been with new things.) I'm basically not using Facebook anymore. I appreciate that those apps let me partition people in groups with well defined boundaries. I believe FB has something like that but the UI was more about posting something and let all contacts see it.
Anyway, everything I post there is meant to be lost. I'm backing up images, messages not so much. Definitely not on WA which is pretty much hostile to backups as it doesn't give us the key to decrypt the local databases. Maybe it is not to break E2E encryption and not let other apps decrypt messages, but I should be able to download the key from somewhere if I ask for it. Uploading to Google Drive an unencrypted database is not good.
On the other side Telegram has a kind of distributed database on all my devices. Probably bad for E2E encryption unless every devices has its own key and messages are encrypted for all of them, or another equivalent system. I didn't investigate how it works.
Also Facebook has only been top dog for a little over 10 years.
They fumbled, but that really didn't matter in the long run. Apple now has a perfectly competent mapping application. They've siphoned data away from Google and redirected it to themselves. Maps is now a key component to Apple's products and service, and has clearly become a cornerstone of Apple's AR roadmap. Apple Maps is now part of Apple's moat, and nobody can take that away from them. There is no situation in which Apple would go back to Google Maps. Sounds like a strategic win to me.
I’m saying Zuck / FB could not stomach it at the time.
They knew money came from ads and tracking and the web and the other thing did not move the needle.
Yet we continue to make the sausage.
Whenever privacy stuff comes up on HN, the comments go really weird: "Privacy is good, companies should stop spying on users. Targeted ads are intrusive and collect too much data." - said by people whose next JIRA ticket at work is to add another ad tracker to their own product! Point this out, and suddenly it's "Well, a job's a job.. We have no power over what we work on, and just do what management says." - Right next to the other HN article talking about how software engineers have a great deal of market power, company choice, and mobility due to the shortage of engineers. It's just contradiction after contradiction.
So, at the end of the day, people are willing to look past privacy issues when it comes to walk the walk. It's easy to sit back and criticize something when you don't have anything to lose. You only really know if you actually care about an issue when you're willing to sacrifice for it. And clearly according to you, pay, interesting problems to work on >> privacy. So again, a few people like to think it matters more than it actually does to a lot of people.
I find interesting the UI, the user have to "enable" the opt-out, not enable the opt-in.
It shows how crucial can be this simple switch for the ad industry immoral surveillance status quo.
I guess the opt-out is disabled by default, I think I enabled it some time ago checking the phone settings.
Can't tell what was the default option when I buy the phone (have to flash it to know)
Also, I guess the manufacturer is responsible of what is the default option of this setting? (or even the setting appear at all).
Is a Xiaomi Mi A2 lite, it comes with Android 8.1 and was updated till Android 10.
Maybe from Android 12 this is improved in some way.
So it hurts Google and Amazon more? [1]
1 - https://www.businessinsider.com/google-facebook-amazon-were-...
I'm pretty sure they're not the only ones who do that either. It's a pretty effective method to get around app sandboxes.
Unfortunately Apple and Google work extremely hard to make this somewhere between difficult and impossible.
I haven't touched iOS development in years but I believe you don't even need a dev account to publish these.
Was there a point to this, or did you just want to note that there are really terrible (but non-harmful) apps on the App Store?
The overwhelming majority have turned out to be true.
So, what now?
The faux equivalency "they're all the same" (usually pointing to a tiny, minuscule fraction of stories where something was errant) is exactly how we ended up with the rise of overtly fake news. In the same way we have normalized politicians who lie overtly and repeatedly by casting them all the same: some politician took exaggerated credit or said something that in some contexts might be misleading, ergo he's the same as the one who lies maliciously at every turn. "They're all the same"
I wonder if there's a snappy name for this fallacy that professionals are somehow responsible for the failings of amateurs. It's pretty common.
- Blogger writes poorly researched post -> "mainstream journalists are much worse"
- Crypto project is fraud -> "banks are the real scams"
Applying this logic to the tech industry, we get:
- Random Wordpress plugin is poorly designed -> "the real incompetents are software engineers at FAANGs"
I mean, it might be true, but there's really no relationship between the two and it doesn't absolve the amateur.
It's a garden variety false equivalence.
If your business model generates revenue through advertising, you are incentivized to attract attention, as we all know very well. News is no different; news publications are incentivized to write outrage-generating content to get you to look for ad revenue, whether it's CNN or Breitbart or ONN or Fox or NYT, it doesn't matter.
CNN isn't the same as Fox on this level, for sure, so it's not completely equivalent, but that's mostly because the ideology is different. But outrage on the left sells, outrage on the right sells. Those publications are different because the outrage they sell is targeted at different audiences.
You are making a false equivalence. Fox publishes outright nonsense like "Texas has 0 deaths from Covid now, showing mask mandates are unnecessary" (asterisk: for one fluke day in the metrics, so we're not technically lying, even though we know members of Congress will cite while paraphrasing into huge lies).
That's not a very convincing statement. Do you have anything to back that up?
So, in conclusion, human beings excel at pattern matching, even when the patterns aren't there, and sometimes use their pattern matching ability to validate the point of view which aligns most closely to their identity and psychological needs.
I used to follow this friend of friend journalist just to see the unnamed sources. It was funny because the articles frequently presented them as authoritative like “knowledgeable sources familiar with Mr Jackson say…” Funny because I knew the mom and she just read the same material anyone else could read.
I'm sure most hacker news folks can find the right-leaning fake news easily so here's some left-leaning fake news to balance things out. Most of these include citations as well.
Are they? For instance, Ars Technica used to be a source of high quality tech journalism for nerds, where the journalists seemed to really “get it”. There’s still some of that left, but in the recent years, I observed more and more bland nothingburger articles coated in clickbait titles popping up in my feed; to add insult to injury, the comment section was sinking deeper and deeper into tribal outrage, consistent with the rest of the (Anglo, at least) Internet. I finally unsubscribed last year. Now I know zero source of consistent high quality tech journalism.
relatedly, my neighbor was just telling me yesterday how anxious and frazzled she's been for the past number of months. she's constantly following current events on npr, nytimes, facebook, instagram, and youtube. she's having a hard time concentrating and getting things done. she's yet to make the connection between these things herself, even with gentle (and even overt) nudging.
Ars Technical in particular has been around for a long time and always as funded.
There’s something different now that is maybe compounded by only being ads.
I think the friction is between cost structures from a different revenue time and just constantly using short term tactics to hold onto declining revenue.
So the issue isn’t as revenue per se, but the bad business models associated with ads.
practically all projections of power, as a critical feature of organizations, reach for heightened exaggeration to drive complicity. in that way, i'd reject 'both sides' as a false dichotomy. rather, any side--any significant organization, as a consolidation of power--will inevitably project misleading hyperbole, news media being no exception, and political parties being explicitly designed for it.
the bit that we need to keep relearning is the intertwining relationship between media and other organizations in shaping narratives for their own benefit, in opposition to the ideal of media keeping other organizations honest by disseminating information they'd otherwise wish to keep private. we the people have to continually keep organizations honest.
I'm not making a false equivalence. My comment is pointing out the perverse incentive present in all news, regardless of political slant.
There is an audience for right-wing ideology outrage; there is another one for left-wing ideology outrage. The news sources are capitalizing on that.
Off the top of my head, some very big ideas that are being worked on: * Clothing fit without actually going to a store and trying things on. * Construction assistance (being able to know where things are in walls, being able to measure things accurately in 3 dimensions, check out the leica RTC360) * Furniture arrangements or additions in a home. e.g. use the ikea app to plop down a SÖDERHAMN to see how it would work and look in your space. * See what a room would look like with different paint. I've actually tried this with an app on my iPad recently, and it is still a little glitchy, but was really freaking cool vs using paint swatches or buying test pints of paint. * Troubleshooting and repair. I tried out this really cool app last year called inspectAR (https://www.inspectar.com/). The desktop app was mindblowing and at my last job when I did lots of circuit board repair/manufacturing adjustments this would have been insanely useful! I can only imagine how nice this would be to have on a trip to Shenzhen for troubleshooting production issues.
Beyond this, yes, games are a huge potential for AR. Brush it aside as something unimportant since it isn't "useful" or whatever, but games are a huge part of people's lives at this point. I've been waiting for a company called TiltFive which basically spun out of valve to launch their AR hardware, it looks and sounds really impressive.
The list goes well past this, but AR has some serious potential.
My prediction is that Pokemon Go will prove to be by far the biggest splash to have been made in the phone AR space, and in the larger scheme of gaming it so far hasn't been more than a long-since-passed fad.
I'm pretty doubtful that even glasses-mounted AR will catch on among consumers in day-to-day life -- but there could be significant specific use cases e.g. education, certain professions, etc. On-the-job type stuff.
Having experienced VR as an owner of a Quest 2 linked to a VR capable PC -- I'm very bullish on VR in the home entertainment space -- not just games but also pre-recorded or live video content, etc. Not sure about social but I'm sure Facebook will try.
I think "nice conveniences" might move slower and get less attention, but in aggregate I suspect they're actually more important for a major long-lasting general-purpose computing platform than "killer apps." We always think of "killer apps" for smaller, narrower, shorter-lived platforms, like a particular gaming console when it launches, but less so for bigger, broader, older platforms like the Internet, personal computers, or smartphones. These huge platforms all had some things which were called "killer apps" (mostly early in their history), but I think we should attribute their longevity and ubiquity more to a massive aggregation of what could be called "nice conveniences." And my impression is that Facebook's bet is that AR/VR will be one of these huge, broad, ubiquitous, long-lasting platforms.
Agreed. A killer app is something you use daily.
That said, I can't wait for the furniture testing app. That would be very useful.
I imagine similar things were send about planes in the early 1900s. "It's not natural!"
But in all seriousness I think they'll solve this (motion sickness) one way or another.
Maybe I sound more sceptical than I am. The second they put out a VR system that doesn't make me sick (and isn't linked to Facebook) I'll be queueing for one. I'm just not sure when that will happen.
At that point, the "killer app" becomes the ability to augment your own senses and memory with, for instance, facial recognition that reminds you of who this person is, useful facts you know about them, etc. Or walking or driving directions that are overlaid directly on your view of the actual paths/streets/etc. Or even virtual tours of places—either places you're physically in, or places you're nowhere near, but have a space of comparable size you can walk around in!
The danger, as we saw with Google Glass, is twofold: on the one hand, allowing an unregulated tech titan like Google or Facebook to have access to cameras attached to people's faces; and on the other hand, the fear of allowing anyone to walk around with an always-on (or potentially always-on) camera, whether its recordings ever left the device or not.
Charlie Stross's Accelerando has a chapter where the main character is basically crippled because ... he lost his AR glasses and can't function without the info in them.
Last one is available online:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
To think they won't solve motion sickness (or N other teething issues), like it's general AI vs. a problem of incremental improvement is a little short sighted.
What do you think it's a matter of then? I guess I would add latency to the list, but those 3 metrics seem to capture the difference in visual perception between vr and the real world?
There is also focal length, which is fixed (generally at 2 meters) in VR and creates discomfort, especially when reading. Facebook has eye tracking and motorized varifocal lenses to deal with this, but they're too big and loud and they haven't been able to put them in commercial headsets.
However, I've noticed that with time my brain seems to have learned that VR is a different mode. I no longer get dizzy from it, but I feel a strange numb feeling in the back of my head. It's like my mind knows not to trust my eyes anymore for balance when in VR.
It's too bad, because I would really like to be able to do virtual walking tours of places while on the treadmill, but as soon as the camera moves anywhere but where I'm looking at the time, I want to vomit.
Maybe also a latency problem (a big part of why it's in the list above).
Remember when FPS games would never take off because they gave people motion sickness?
Maybe Occulus does it better, I'll never know though.
When I almost fell was a situation where in the VR simulation I was swinging on a rope >360 degrees around a horizontal ledge while spinning around 180 degrees with the stick and trying to aim a bow with my hands.
( Windlands 2 )