Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy(growth.design) |
Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy(growth.design) |
People get soo invested in Apple's Walled Ecosystem. Imagine in 10 years, they flip on a dime and start selling your info.
1 company has health, finance, search/URL history, emails, all pictures ever, etc...
Yikes times 100.
What I'd be interested in is, if [Evil Company] (not necessarily Apple or Google or whomever) got a hold of all the data that was vacuumed up in the process... how is that going to translate into them being able to do disturbing things?
I'm not saying they can't or won't... they record and store this firehose of arbitrary data in arbitrary formats... how they make sense of it. It's not like when you open Threads, it goes "ooh there's pictures of his dog... INSERT INTO Dog SELECT 12345, 'great-dane', {base64}"... They collect all this data... But it's not well formatted or understood.
Don't get me wrong, there's an ocean of money for whomever figures out the most evil stuff to do. I'm simply curious how.
I guess the HN crowd could... disrupt privacy /s
The privacy label he showed is something Apple requires apps to do to indicate what data they may collect and what they share. Meta has basically decided that people can type in anything in a text box, the servers save the posts, other people view the posts, so every checkbox has to be checked.
I thought that they made a good point about how the Threads screen that links to the privacy policies doesn’t highlight the links very well. But it seems to me that the average social media user probably doesn’t care and would gloss over it anyway.
I liked their suggestion that the App Store use a “privacy rating” feature.
e.g. Threads may collect your financial data! But only if you give it to them, usually to purchase ads or verifications, etc.. This scary warning is over-scary.
e.g. Mastodon collects less data about you, but there's no warning for "The backend is unencrypted and likely run by a handful of humans (who are probably nice but answer to nobody)."
There is no solution other than "regulate the personal data market out of existence" - meaning going one step further than GDPR and just forbid any use of my personal data except in the context of fulfilling an actual purchase or specific request by me and for communicating with me to the extent I allow it. All other uses are banned.
No.
Apple is first and foremost a lifestyle company, then a b2b platform company, then a hardware company.
The lifestyle company ensures customer acquisition and the 'unreasonable' pricing . The platform company is the revenue, the moat and the golden handcuffs for every 3rd party company who works with Apple. The Hardware company ensures that Apple stays ahead, so no one can be the next Apple.
Apple could be an ads company too.
But ads companies bleed trust. That weakens the value of both Apple the lifestyle company and Apple the hardware company. Apple already skims 30% of your app revenue. They don't need to make money from ads, when they can make money from those who make money from ads. Apple being an ads company would spook the partners of Apple the platform company.
I trust Apple not because they're good. But because selling your data hurts their bottomline. Trust capitalistic incentives and teack records, everything else is virtue signalling.
I guess this guy thought knocking Apple for Meta's unscrupulous methods would just guarantee some nerd-kudos, but didn't feel any need to follow his own advice in practice.
You literally use your Instagram login to create a Threads account.
Consumers definitely care about this. That's why there are so many dark patterns to tric consumers into providing their data. Also: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/07/most-iphone-users-app-t...
Nailed it. I trust Apple (as much as I’d trust any giant corp, and there are none more giant) because they have a profit motive to sell me privacy-respecting products. They have a few trillion dollars to lose by burning their customers.
If Apple were good about privacy because Tim Cook is a nice guy who believed in it even if it were a financial loss, that would be one CEO change away from disappearing. That’s not the case. Their stockholders are raking in cash from it. And if there’s one thing I trust in capitalism, it’s that a smart company will do things that make it more money.
For this same reason I don't trust Apple.
They cut corners on quality and people literally died because of it(Pegasus).
I'd have a hard time trusting Apple since they have literally a black box only they have the key to. At least with a FOSS OS, you can look at the code.
But really, I can't buy iPhones because I hold a secret on my phone that is too valuable.
This is all wrong. Conditioning on goldilocks and accepting least bad solutions is not how the digital society should be built. And make no mistake this is no "lifestyle" issue. Its pretty clear that 99% of life will be controlled by some digital artifact or another and there is no opt out.
Tech should be developed and provided on a data sovereign basis by law. People should be prohibited from collecting personal data and applying algorithms that affect people except under strict regulation.
Relying on "markets" and "capitalism" to shape such vital aspects of society is political malfunction for the history books.
I can tell you from first hand experience their data trove isn't the most valuable for farming out for AdTech. They take in a lot of opt-in telemetry and bend over backwards to anonymize it. There's also very clear demarcation of PII and if you even work around something considered PII you as an engineer need to sign all sorts of extra paperwork.
Even if any individual manager or director decided they wanted to leverage PII they'd quickly run afoul of Apple's extremely legally conservative legal department. Because of this data is sanitized and anonymized before it's collected and then further after it's collected.
There are thousands of services where you use the account of one service to create the account of another, and you can still delete those accounts.
Dunno about all of them, but I can confirm that at least some of the big-tech companies treat PII as nuclear fuel that is never to be touched and placed behind the strongest locks the company has available.
Every company gets a little bit of information, where as, I'm suggesting that in this particular case, 1 company gets everything.
Even if not, you are still running a browser on their platform. Why not scrape financial information from another source such as disk storage or by monitoring network/crypto API?
If the platform vendor turns malicious, why presuppose they will only alter the behavior with respect to their own apps?
So it may very well wind up being 'just' setting a flag to false, starting a selective deletion and informing the user that the deletion may take several <units of time>.
It isn't a different platform, specifically because they didn't want to build up yet another social graph from scratch. Your graph in the Instagram app is your graph in the Threads app. This is somewhat akin to how Messenger isn't a different platform from the rest of Facebook.
There may be a future 'downgrade' function, but removing those orphaned threads posts amounts to a partial deletion of your Instagram account. The text that Meta is investigating this is actually in the slide show, but I don't know if they have said anything about what level of commitment they have given, or timeframe they are shooting for.
There’s no intrinsic reason it has to be this way other than they built it to be as easy to join as possible.
You are hypothecating a LAMP-style stack where they just need to add a flag to their database table and update all their SQL to ignore data from flagged accounts.
I'm hypothecating architectures where it is substantially more difficult than that, such as heavily cached, event-driven microservices with geographic distribution, data locality, and which attempt to comply with various data retention and privacy regulations.
Not a huge fan of Apple, but they aren't Facebook.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-is-an-ad-company-now
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-revenue...
So why not keep it that way? I understand the temptation of veering from the path of 'do no evil' but Apple are not exactly short of revenue?
Apple, Google and Meta are currently all three sides of the same coin. Take your pick but don't claim any virtue for doing so.
So tracking might not be their business but they can very easily start a big business.
the way i see it, the worst case scenario is you get an Ad for something you might actually like...
It was the service that validates the application certificates which is fundamental to the security of the platform.
Not a Fan of Facebook, but Facebook never claimed to be the defender of Fundamental Human Right or the Guardian of Privacy.
Some people like to label them as evil or the less of evil. I like to label them as evil and hypocrite.
“Our Commitment to Human Rights” https://about.fb.com/news/2021/03/our-commitment-to-human-ri...
> or the Guardian of Privacy.
“Upholding Our Commitment to Protecting Your Privacy” https://about.fb.com/news/2023/05/upholding-our-commitment-t...
https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...
Then there is their scanning of iCloud backups for CSAM without being forced to do so by law, something Meta hasn't done with WhatsApp, and obviously not Signal either. CSAM today, messages critical of the powers that be tomorrow, they breached a fundamental ethical line in end-to-end encryption and they are thus now completely untrustworthy on encryption.
Apple's marketing is very effective, but the idea that they are any better than the other Big Tech firms on privacy is just that, marketing fluff without substance if you dig but a little. None of them can be trusted. At this point the only way to really protect your privacy is to connect to the Internet using a MiFI or similar router running open-source software and implementing an outbound firewall blocklist like Jordan Geoghegan's unbound-adblock:
Signal does not support any cloud backups and WhatsApp uses iCloud so this seems like a flawed comparison.
Google is currently trying to sell additional ways to spy on users built into the newest version of Chrome as a "privacy sandbox".
> all of Google's documentation about this feature feels like it was written on opposite day, with Google calling the browser-based advertising platform "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...
I don't think they were comparing. They were basically saying that Apple is complicit to what Facebook (and others) are doing with regard to data collection.
Shaming Apple might work. (I think we already know that shaming Meta will have no effect.)
They aren't?
They're saying Meta is screwing us and that Apple could do more to protect us. That they spend a lot of time and money talking the talk but they don't so much walk the walk. They sure do a bit, but they could do a lot more. Article definitely isn't saying Apple is as bad as Meta and Meta is 100% the "bad guy" in the story. It's just that our castle walls (Apple) are shiny but not strong. The Great Wall isn't so great if it isn't keeping the Mongolians out and you definitely shouldn't be advertising it as such when it doesn't.
Like why do they allow access to the health data stored in the phone?
It's almost like they need facebook to be the devil so they can say how good they are.
I received a letter from Target that by default they’ll sell my information to unaffiliated third parties and I have to call or write a letter to opt-out. I’m sure I agreed to that at some point (and anyone signing up for a loyalty program that doesn’t cost anything should realize that’s what they are agreeing to, even if they are not explicitly told that), but perhaps they should be required to explicitly list the actual costs to the customer along side the benefits.
Last week I was picking up a prescription at CVS. In between confirming name and address and signing for payment or receipt of Rx they slipped a marketing agreement that I stupidly agreed to before realizing that it wasn’t an agreement related to the prescription purchase. So in someone’s compromised medical state (assuming), when you just want to get medicine to get back to normal they hide an agreement to sell information.
None of this improves my life. I just want to transact money for items and end the relationship until it happens again. I don’t need every advertiser knowing every one of or even habitual purchase I make.
If you work in ad-tech or are responsible for these front-end schemes to collect more information:
1: screw you
2: it’s super creepy and even if you’re not creepy, the stuff you’re working on and the people you are working for are
3: seriously, it’s really disgusting, immoral, and deceptive to find all manor of ways to trick people into agreeing to sell personal information that they assume (rightly) is private (even when done in public)
4: start leaking information on schemes, tricks, & loopholes so something can be done to destroy invasive ad tech
Have you gone through Apple's onboarding flow recently? The process of creating an Apple ID and setting up an iPhone is pretty similar, and has similar click-wrap terms to allow endless data use, including [1], [2], [3], [4], and [5].
Apple has done a very good job of marketing privacy. But they engage in pretty much all of the same practices they call others out for.
Also, Threads didn't launch in Europe because of DMA data separation requirements between products. It has nothing to do with the invasiveness of the data collected per se as is implied here [6].
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/pdfs/apple-privacy-polic... [2] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-id/ [3] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS16_iPadOS16.pdf [4] https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/ [5] https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/
[6] https://www.theverge.com/23789754/threads-meta-twitter-eu-dm...
"There it is again. That funny feeling."
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...
>please stop supporting them
>"https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342..."
"...there's nothing wrong with a bit of data collection."
Our alternative is currently android.
So instead of meta slurping up all your shit, google vacuums it all up and then some, and lets even more of it trickle in to meta.
This duopoly sucks.
Anyway, in the decade of using android, I am not sure what privacy has compromised. I havent received any custom ads from just using my phone.
If I search stuff on the official google search, yes I do, but if I use incognito, I do not. (For instance, I like seeing sports scores occasionally, but if I search it with google, I'm bombarded about sports).
Google search isnt Android though.
Now perhaps that our software model doesn't make it very convenient, but blaming Apple is completely honest and understandable.
We should stop seeing our computers as uncontrollable machines that must leak data, they are human made
All credibility was then swept away by "Sign up with Google" to the mailing list on the last page. Hilarious.
Stay offline for your safety.
This is obviously unrealistic for many in the modern era. So now the question is - regardless of how much or what is collected, which companies are least likely to sell you out, by any means? By pretty much any criteria Apple is near the top of that list. Though, they're not the very, very top. Companies like Mullvad offer services in a way such that nothing is collected at all, and since you can pay cash in theory no way to come back to you.
Personally, for me - it's more important to think about whether or not you trust the organization you're dealing with, than whether or not they're collecting stuff or not. Of the big tech companies I'd say I trust Apple the most from their track record, but I am not under any illusion that I have absolute privacy while using Apple products, and neither should you.
If you understand my intent well enough to post a passive-aggressive note telling me how I should ask to move to the next part, you understand me well enough to just skip to the next fkn part.
Edit: Just launched Minecraft Legends to confirm details and that it still does this. Apparently it's changed a bit but still pops up "Press [left mouse button] to start" on the splash screen and, if you hit space, changes to "Press [picture of enter key] to start" so I feel my point stands.
Edit2: Oh and when a cinematic starts... if you hit Esc it pops up a similar tip saying "Press ␣ to continue." WHAT DID YOU THINK I WANT- ugh I'm over it.
I did just try it on my mobile (Firefox, Android) and this format definitely doesn't translate well. I put it in landscape and it just shrink down the desktop site to fit. I feel like they should either encourage people to read on desktop or have an alternative mobile version.
Ballot measure to replace the “right to be forgotten” with the “permission to be remembered”, that need to be renewed every, 1-3 years. If companies fails to obtain permission in 3 years, then it must remove your data. Such permission is non transferable, meaning that if you started an account with Good Company, Inc. and it was acquired by Evil Corp, Inc. The latter need to get a new permission under the new name. Oh, and data brokers can’t have your info, unless they ask you for permission.
Right to “opt-out of sale” needs to be replaced with “option to opt-in”. Basically meaning you opt out by default and companies need your explicit permission to sell you data.
The ability to record and post a video is effectively baseline functionality and requires those permissions.
Certainly Meta is doing shady things here but not all of the permissions are necessarily sketchy. (I would agree that much like position data more specificity would be good for permissions)
Also, "they just use fingerprinting" is a myth. Fingerprinting is never ending cat and mouse game between Apple and data collecting companies. In short, fingerprinting is not working reliably if you not actively improving it non-stop while risking App Store ban.
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The rumour is that Threads couldn't launch in the EU due to upcoming Digital Markets App. Which is also a good thing: https://ia.net/topics/unraveling-the-digital-markets-act
I would argue that there is something wrong with a bit of data collection. Just take credit score for example, there's never an ethical reason for a social network to ever ask for or know my credit score.
edit: the author implies that collecting this kind of stuff is OK as long as companies are transparent about what they're doing and why. I don't think there's any level of transparency that makes collecting this user data OK.
Still apple is not your friend and is actively working against your interests in all kinds of ways.
i worked at a large health co. that had a partnership with apple to publish an app (which apple wrote the code for, designed, etc.) under health co.'s name. the purpose of the partnership was to promote use of HealthKit on apple devices and increase sales/adoption.
much later, i took over technical ownership of the partnership and while i was getting up to speed, the value of the partnership didn't make much sense to me from apple's perspective -- it seemed to be incredibly beneficial to health co. and ostensibly not very much so for apple, health co. got a free, polished health app for its customers and apple got… not much of anything? a small boost in sales at most. yet, it was clear it was a priority for apple based on how they managed the partnership (very responsive, helpful, etc.).
suddenly, a few months after i got up to speed, apple informed health co. that they were terminating the relationship on a near future date (a couple months at most). this was surprising given the seeming importance of the partnership to apple in the past, and we weren't able to get convincing reasons as to why apple's attitude had changed.
but then, once it came time for apple to transfer ownership of the app to use, things got a bit odd.
* at first, they told us they'd be fine with handing over non-sensitive code and assets (e.g. removing apple internal libraries, etc.).
* then, they said instead of handing over code they'd do a technical overview of the architecture and the code but couldn't give us the physical code.
* then finally, they reversed course entirely and informed us it was impossible to de-instrument their sensitive "telemetry" from the code and couldn't share any information about the code with us at all (mind you, this was an app that was published by US that we were legally responsible for).
this led me to suppose that their code was doing something they didn't want us to see. given the purpose of the app, the most valuable, nefarious thing you could do was vacuum up massive amounts of user health data about all of health co.'s users -- not only that, but being able to do it at one step removed, not legally AS apple (not their app, after all).
this speculation was reinforced when i realized the date of termination of our partnership was one day prior to the change to the App Store's privacy disclosure guidelines -- they made one final update to the App Store (probably removing the telemetry, etc.) and didn't have to make a disclosure about data usage. any subsequent updates would have had to have made this disclosure.
Now you'll get some ads that recommender systems think they should show you, based on your shopping experience at CVS, that could be potentially embarrassing if you have anyone over, or have someone else using your devices.
I was able to guess a family member's previously private medical condition based on the ads they got while I was at their place.
As long as people get "free stuff" people won't get fed up.
The harsh reality, despite what privacy pundits might say, is that people... just don't really care. And that's fine? It's great Apple lets me tell an app not to track me. But if they didn't? It doesn't make material difference to me. Okay I bought cat food and now I see cat toys Instagram ads that I may or may not buy... okay?
It's not like insurance companies are able to use the data to deny you health coverage or something (yet, anyway). It's just used to support more consumerism atm. When that bridge is crossed then people might care, until then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had to visit the site of whatever service provider they use. I had to login with 2FA and accept their terms. The terms allow third parties to send me targeted advertisement based on my medical history. (They are very explicit about that. I guess that's progress... This is in Europe.)
So the stuff I get "for free" when I sell my medical history is the right to view my own medical bills. If I don't agree, I just get charged some random amount via my health insurance. I could bother them to share their copy, but by default they don't.
As long as they continue to make shiny new i devices - nothing.
I wonder this every day. I got fed up years ago. Now, I'm simply enraged by it all. And, worse, it's an impotent rage since there's nothing I can do about it.
I already block as much tracking as possible, avoid giving money to companies that engage in these practices (or that make use of the services of companies that engage in these practices), pay in cash in physical stores, avoid online shopping as much as possible, etc.
And none of it is enough. Ad companies are at war with people, and are winning.
Of course this isn't a solution and we should resolve the issue, but it is at least a partial stop gap.
https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
"Before an image is stored in iCloud Photos, an on-device matching process is performed for that image against the database of known CSAM hashes".
Thus the scanning is done by your device against the unencrypted image before uploading it to iCloud. The fact they abandoned the plan is irrelevant, by considering it in the first place (and to a very high level of engineering R&D as evidenced by the document), they set a precedent and forefeited any trust. It's CSAM today, it will be mentions Winnie the Pooh mocking Xi Jinping tomorrow, and of abortion in Texas the day after.
Now, the only way I'd trust an Apple-mediated encrypted messaging service is if the clientapp is third-party and thus can't be backdoored retroactively if Apple feels it expedient to do so.
They’re collecting ethnic status to sell to Cambridge analytica to steal elections.
Exactly! and yet the threads app doesn't actually request that access. Hence my scepticism
I'm personally against ads in my mail, billboards, and pretty much everywhere else where my default context is not to buy something. If I go to a pet store and get cat ads--even based on my preferences shopping there--then I think that would be fair. But ads are currently way too aggressive and essentially stalk us everywhere.
Another aspect is how misleading and/or manipulative they are. Why aren't ads more reasonable with a tl;dr about the product and then some pros/cons of it over alternative options?
> They're doing users the favor of letting them know what information apps can collect so that users can make informed choices.
The whole point of the article is that this information is hard to find and hard to understand. The author is suggesting Apple find a better way to present that data. That would help consumers make a more informed decision. Many people don't realize just how pervasive that tracking is. Perhaps surfacing that data would help consumers pressure bad actors into being better citizens.
Moreover, I'd argue they should also use their platform to rein things in. It'd be nice if they used their position to improve the privacy of their users. It's their walled garden. It's their platform. It's their APIs being used. The App Store already has a bunch of rules, most of which benefit Apple, so I don't think it's a huge leap to add one that protects consumers. And a lot of the current privacy issues are a result of Apple and Google building a new platform that gives apps unprecedented access to personal data. I think they have a responsibility to clean up that mess.
If that means apps like Threads aren't viable, so be it. But, I suspect Meta would be able to find a way to make a social media app that doesn't need to track so much.
Also, CP scanning was deliberately proposed as a way to actually enable e2e icloud - but they just didn’t want to be liable, as storing CP encrypted on their servers may also be problematic. So, I don’t see them malicious against privacy at all, in fact that is a core selling point of theirs, it would hurt them greatly to cheapen it out.
Apple provides a backdoor into Chinese citizens' iCloud to the Chinese government, while praising itself as the bastion of privacy.
Doing so because of money is all the more hypocritical.
Sure, on a local moral compass it is no good look, but if Chinese people are forced by their governments into that -- is really a private company from another country supposed to fight with them over it? In any other case I think you would agree that private companies should STFU about local laws, right? That fight is on the Chinese people.
This is also exactly how the US operates WRT state surveillance, so it confuses me that you don’t see the relevance.
Most recent examples that come to mind:
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/341111-tax-filing-websi...
https://gizmodo.com/sat-college-board-tells-facebook-tiktok-...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/27/nhs-data-bre...
https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/12/13/out-of-control-d...
A: "I will write an article about Apple's and Meta's privacy practices." B: "But what about Google???"
That's like asking "This company's stock is doing well. Why not dump everything you've got into it?"
Apple is diversifying their income stream, and leaving money on the table if they don't take it.
That ceiling number varies according to how well they can target.
On the other hand, Apple has some amount of iPhone et al. sales that occur because they respect privacy.
Eventually, increasing the former will decrease the latter. I think Android shows us the link is weak (because most people don't care, if tracking is hidden), but it exists.
My impression would be that right now, Apple is targeting far less than their customers would allow (while still buying equivalent amounts of hardware).
The issue is +5 or +10 years, when Apple has a few bad product launches and needs to find a revenue stream, and selling a piece of their privacy soul to juice revenue is an easy bargain to make.
Google's central evil was allowing ad revenue to metastasize and dominate the company, which in turn meant that ad execs have more pull than is healthy.
Because capitalism incentivizes unsustainable growth at all costs.
Maybe if you had an already rich individual keeping his company private and making an active effort to not be evil. But come on, let's be real...
Exactly what Twitter, Microsoft and Amazon do too.
> as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...
I Myanmar fingerprinting helped the military find dissidents, the the US Cambridge Analytica managed to get enough data to influence an election, and there’s many more examples.
Besides, if a private company can sell access to you through ads, less benevolent actors can use that access for other more nefarious practices.
It is 2023 and you don't need ads to influence people. E.g, TikTok not acting on dangerous trends.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/6/1/23742757/kia-hyundai...
2) Someone following you around writing notes about everything you do doesn’t stop being creepy-as-fuck harassment just because it’s online and “at scale”. And actually a lot of this transcends the Internet and gets connected with real world activities, blurring the difference even more. It’s wrong when someone does it to a single person for some personal reason, and it’s even more wrong when a megacorp does it to everyone to make a buck.
3) It harms the function of markets. Massive nearly-impossible-for-a-small-business-to-attain data-moats protect monopolies and discourage competition. It adds to the already-harmful-to-market-function information imbalance between individuals and companies.
Data is also shared with data brokers (Acxiom and the like) which collect unknown quantities of data about you, linked to your actual identity. That data can then affect whether you get a loan or a job.
Most importantly, we don't know what's done with the data and have no control should we want it to be forgotten.
If someone showed up at your house with a folder about a loved one, turns out they had been following them around town, tracking their movements, taking pictures, reading their emails, etc. I don’t think you’d be two thrilled, but hey they’re only going to use that info to target ads…pinky swear…
What's the worst that could happen... sheesh why don't we not find out for a change.
Watch the 10hr long interview documentary called Shoah and listen to how trains, buildings and institutions were used to do 'the deed'.
It was impossible to tell what was going to happen ahead of time for the victims, they assumed they were heading to a labour camp and being assigned a block of soap and sent to the showers was a good thing...
Why does this even need to be said! Do we not know our dark european history?
Conserving the known good we have, is not an 'immediate fail', as many futurists would indulge in saying...
At least you know now where you can discover one reason (of many) as to why some people are wary of collective control.
That's hardly the worst case scenario when there are countless stories like "Facebook Allowed Advertisers to Target Users Interested in “White Genocide” — Even in Wake of Pittsburgh Massacre"[1].
There's also the time Facebook's targeted ads were used to facilitate genocide in Myanmar[2][3].
[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/02/facebook-ads-white-supre...
[2] https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/r...
[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
What's wrong with that? The more interests available the better ads can be targetted.
>There's also the time Facebook's targeted ads were used to facilitate genocide in Myanmar
The article doesn't mention ads were used. It just sounds like Facebook was connecting people based off a common interested people shared.
There are more important things in this world than money. Surely we can all agree that "better ad targeting" isn't worth human lives?
Your question is either super naive or you have a stake in facebook or apple.
the things I don't want getting into anyone's hands are things like: financial info, address, phone number, social security, my middle name, birthday, etc. none of those things are stuff I share with a social network.
The only way to protect against this is to not let them have that in the first place. Once they have it, it's impossible to guarantee it won't be misused sooner or later.
It's literally benign by definition.
benign
adjective
a: of a mild type or character that does not threaten health or life
b: having no significant effect : harmless
All absolutes are wrong. I can play that game, too.
I suppose that’s the loyalty pact customers are agreeing to. They agree to continue patronizing a business after that business flies behind their back to tell everyone what, when, and where they’re doing in their store.
However, if they’re not tracking you with a loyalty card, they’re still tracking you with your normal CC (Walmart has some messed up integrations with third parties around media purchases). Cash, privacy masks, sporadic gate changes, faraday bags, and gloves may be the only way to get around tracking at the moment ;-)
But ... it's not really free since the ad will just make products more expensive, since now you also pay for the adtech that's involved (besides paying with your personal data).
You can see this with the rise of ultra specialty online stores we’ve seen in the last decade thank to targeted advertising.
Yes, ads make people buy more stuff.
Is that a good thing? My comment doesn't say anything about that.
But anyway, my guess is no, because it leads to overconsumption, and exhaustion of natural resources.
Also:
> 96% of US users opted out of IDFA sharing
Meaning that users really do not want to be tracked.
Closest thing I know is companies who sell "foot traffic" data, of who walks in front of your store. But that's done with phones pinging wifi networks passively as you walk, not anything as fancy as facial recognition.
This is also presupposing the Google doesn’t get its Web Environment Integrity (WEI) initiative foisted upon us allowing the banks to do the same sketchy attestation that they can do with apps from the browser--meaning they could deny you from running an alternative OS, disabling TPM/Pluton/Secure Boot, to having admin/root access like they block it on phones for dubious reasons.
> Starting in iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, and tvOS 14.5, users are prompted to decide whether to opt-in or out of IDFA sharing before apps can query it. This choice can be altered in Settings.[2][3] In May, 2021, Verizon-owned advertisement analytics company Flurry Analytics reported that 96% of US users opted out of IDFA sharing.[4]
If it's so clear that users don't want to be tracked online, why don't we just ban it altogether? It would solve a lot of problems.
There has been a setting to turn the IDFA completely off for well over a decade.
Previously, apps on iOS or Android had access to the unchanging hardware ID number of the device.
> Apple notes that it will be phasing out access to the unique device identifier, or UDID, on iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads.
This is a big deal, especially for any mobile ad networks, game networks or any app which relies on the UDID to identify users.
https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/apple-ios-5-phasing-out-ud...
Apple replaced the hardware ID with a random number (the IDFA) that could be reset by the user at any time, or turned off completely.
Google eventually followed suit, although any app that received the. READ_PHONE_STATE permission was immune to the protections.
> READ_PHONE_STATE is one of the Android permissions categorized as dangerous. This is because it “allows read only access to phone state, including the phone number of the device, current cellular network information, the status of any ongoing calls, and a list of any Phone Accounts registered on the device”.
... it is often requested and misused by other types of applications that do not have any reason for needing it, including malware.
https://file.scirp.org/Html/1-6101658_80235.htm
The recent changes at Apple were to make the IDFA opt out by default and to track the permission to use it per app instead of per device.
Apple doing it unilaterally on their platform might invite anti-trust concerns.
And since you brought out the opt-out option, one can also block Facebook's trackers through uBlock and/or DNS filters.
The defaults are what matters. From the same Wikipedia article,
> Users can opt-out of IDFA via the "Limit Ad Tracking" (LAT) setting (and an estimated 20% do).
80% users never change the defaults.
Apple’s own apps don’t need to display the prompt because as per their privacy policy they don’t collect or use information for tracking purposes (which is also visible in the privacy labels of their apps in the App Store).
Trust me bro.
Apple doesn’t.
It’s really that simple.
Displaying an ad next to search results based on the search query for example is similarly benign.
Facebook on the other hand, creates a grand central repository of everything there is to know about you and sells it to whoever wants to pay. Just like Google.
AFAIK it also includes ads in the News app and apps that load articles from the News app (e.g. Stocks app).
Their fine print also mentions the TV app, but I haven’t seen ads there, so perhaps they’re referring to content suggestions.
This seems to be confirmed further down the line in the fine print when it says:
> We create segments to deliver personalized ads on the App Store, Apple News, and Stocks.
I’d say the main difference between Meta and Apple is that the latter doesn’t combine data from different source and only relies on their own data (what Apple calls “tracking”):
> Apple’s advertising platform does not track you, meaning that it does not link user or device data collected from our apps with user or device data collected from third parties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes, and does not share user or device data with data brokers.
A news paper ad? A builtin board? I think advertisements that hijack your attention are always unethical. You should have to look for ads to see them.
Our society depends on advertising for promoting new services, gaining new customers, and building trust. I would call it a social necessity which makes it very ethical as long as it is truthful. The hijacking that occurs is consensual as you should not visit sites if you disagree with their advertising habits. Even with the App Store almost never open it directly.
The ones that cannot be avoided are in the outside world. I would celebrate if every billboard, postal mail item, and other real world advertisement were banned completely as that is the part I have no direct control over.
Years ago it was google fanboyism with 'don't be evil'. Now it's the unbearable apple privacy fanboys and the insufferable tesla/spacex cult members.
I've actually found furniture I'm looking for on websites I didn't know existed on Instagram. Why is targeted ads a bad thing?
> By 2022, Facebook's ad revenues had hit $135.94 billion.
$4.7B is not a small number but no where close to Facebook’s.
Displaying an app ad in the appstore upon searching for a similar term is very different than displaying ads based on your whole life, collected in malicious ways.
I think most people would agree that velocity hardly matters here, what’s been actually done is generally what gets judgement, not where you will be in some time if you do everything the same.
What you are describing is essentially pre-crime.
If Facebook were Apple's size they'd be doing 450 billion in ads.
Facial recognition has been deployed to combat shoplifting [1][2]. Amazon Go is a store built around not needing to check out at a register at all. Microsoft offers Azure Kinect [3] as a way for retailers to track people moving through a store. There's no shortage of companies purporting to use AI to analyze in-store video in real-time to analyze customer behavior [4][5]. There was a video shared on this site a few weeks back showing a coffee shop tracking both customers and baristas [6] (more discussion there, including some skepticism).
I'm speculating that if they can track you in the store and build a profile on you that they'll be able to track your cash purchases. I don't think it's a terribly large leap to tie into their point of sale terminals but I don't know if any retailer is currently doing that or even planning to do that.
[1] -- https://youtu.be/g5Xf9Y6-RS4?si=De7EZTyVD66BQPeG
[2] -- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/technology/facial- recognition-shoplifters-britain.html
[3] -- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/kinect-dk/
[4] -- https://viso.ai/features/
[5] -- https://twitter.com/jowyang/status/1214657642313871360
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-13/bunnings-kmart-invest...
> will just make products more expensive, since now you also pay for the adtech that's involved
That’s not generally how the economics of advertising works. If it were, advertising wouldn’t be very successful/important.
People don’t like the idea of being tracked, but my experience is that they like the results.. Especially all the extreme specialty niche products that simply wouldn’t exist without targeted ads.
What won't change is the ultimate goal of any company: profit above all else.
This is not something you can retroactively deal with. Once that data is collected its completely outside of your control.
You can choose to ignore it and believe they will act on good faith for long enough, but it's still a bet.
Maybe for you it's a conscious bet. But in my view, most people don't realize this at all.
It’s the only ad on a streaming service that has never annoyed me (I also like the fact that it’s not targeted). Zero ads are better but their implementation on tv plus is the least irritating I’ve experienced.
I don't need to convince anyone of this. History will repeat itself as it always does.
You can choose to ignore it. That's your prerogative. But what I'm saying is not a lazy generalization. It's backed by what happened and continues to happen in our current day and age.
Almost no company starts as an evil entity. But they definitely end up there once they grow large enough.
This is the privacy policy [0] of an example of their app, Apple News. I quote:
"Advertising
In order to deliver great content to you from leading publishers, Apple News is ad supported. If the Personalized Ads setting is on, Apple’s advertising platform may use information about your account, the topics and categories of stories you read, and publications you follow, subscribe to, or turn on notifications for to serve ads that are more relevant to you. We may also use information about your subscriptions to personalize your ads on the App Store."
In this case, you're referring to "Data Linked to You". "Data Linked to You" is based on the account you used to sign in to the News app + your activity within the news app - to create suggestions within the News app.
This does not allow Apple to track you from the News app e.g. access the IDFA of the device, sharing it with third parties or other apps.
They claim they do not share this data with other third parties but they sure as hell use it for their own advertising ecosystem.
This is a for-profit company. It will always do what is more profitable, even if they don't do it right away.
There is an interesting lesson you can learn from history: Google Maps vs Apple Maps.
Google set up their system to track each individual's location history forever, even if the user turned off the setting that Google said would stop this behavior. This data can be handy when you're trying to keep map data updated.
However, you don't have to track each user's location constantly to get the benefit.
> “We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B.
The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones.
Because only random segments of any person’s drive is ever sent and that data is completely anonymized, there is never a way to tell if any trip was ever a single individual.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
However the fundamental difference is that their model is being an hardware company.
Remember what their advertising clients disliked about Apple's ad platform compared to the likes of Facebook and Google?
> A new report on Advertising Age has revealed what advertisers think of Apple's arrogance when it comes to its mobile advertising platform and its tight grip on user data.
"One person familiar with the situation exec said Apple's refusal to share data makes it the best-looking girl at the party, forced to wear a bag over her head," the AdAge report read.
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/3568/20140222/apple-cares...
All of these companies deserve their due scrutiny. Specifically around the illusion of privacy though, nobody has further to fall than Apple.
Disagree on this one. Blogs, media, social, word of mouth, etc. would still exist without advertising and would serve the purpose of all of those things. PR teams would become as large as marketing teams, things would get exploited (they already are), but we wouldn't be subjected to distraction and manipulation.
I don't think ads are the most evil thing there is, but society would be fine without them and you would probably see a much smaller imbalance of power in wealth and companies. I'll take 1000s of small forums compared to one big Meta.
The Verge? Nops. Techcrunch? Also not. AnandTech or Business Insider? No and no. Hackaday? Dead. NYT and Bloomberg? Maybe, and likely not. And what about your top 20 favorite YouTube creators? The majority would be gone.
Sure, the long tail of quirky small bloggers would be unaffected -- they don't really make any money today from advertising. But a lot of them are bottom-feeders; they consume content produced by others, and re-hash to add their own takes.
And we're not even talking about the second order effect -- all the ecommerce companies that would be wiped out without qualified leads and traffic. Go to any site - The Verge, Hackaday, Daring Fireball - and see the ads. Most of those companies would disappear.
Is this really the web you want to live in? A web with only a handful of publications with large followings who can command premium subscription (read: The Information, NYT, Stratechery, etc), and the top x% of privileged wealthy folks who can afford paying for a bunch of subscriptions?
Yes, I would call advertising a social necessity. It's like a multi-dimension version of prisoner's dilemma - it may not feel you're winning, but the alternative option is much worse.
That's exactly what it is. You're pretending you can predict the future with confidence about specific business decisions a company will make regarding its data and assets. You must be a billionaire with your ability to play the stock market by predicting the future.
No, I can't predict the future. I can, however, look at our world and its incentives. Look at similar companies and how consistently they change.
Right now Apple is using privacy as a marketing strategy. One day that can change - in reality it will inevitably change, it's just a matter of time. Profits will forever be the one and only motive for a company to exist. Once privacy costs more than it brings in, it will be compromised.
It's not rocket science. It's basic logic.
Now let's assume your argument is true: we can't predict they will change. Why is that a reasonable thought? Have they never changed before? Is there anything that prevents them from changing?
Your argument falls flat: change is constant. Everything changes. Your argument is that "no, for this company, it won't happen". It makes no sense. Whether you believe in this company or not is irrelevant.
If instead of doing ad hominem attacks, you'd really consider how certain we can be of change, you might even change your mind.
My personal hope is that Apple course corrects at some point that they do not need to extract the extra cash while damaging the customer experience. The company feels much less customer oriented now and has lost a lot of the premium feel. I have already stopped using their TV app because they have made it nearly non-functional with the amount of promoted content. The News app has an exceptional number of subscription only items in the feed to where I am about to go back to pure RSS. The feeling is like what Google would have done with Google Reader if it was still going stuffing in promotions.
I agree first party apps should be advertisement free if they are advertised as being included in the price of the phone. Otherwise it is a hidden bill you are paying with hours or days of your life that you can't get back.
I would pay for a service that just disabled all first party promotions advertisements. Give me the real price instead of wasting my valuable time with advertisements I would never click.
They are taking the risk of repelling their customer who paid $1k+ and still sees ads and they are entitled to the courage of their conviction to take that risk.
Because it's useful.
It helps users discover apps that the developer believes is relevant to that keyword.
I can't think of a better mechanism for doing this without an auction style system.
Or show a button to open separate window which shows related apps.
But instead, we always want to bring everything instantly under our attention [in same screen, close to the line of sight].
Do you know what has ads in settings? Xiaomi. A relative bought one and I helped him set it up, and you literally had to see an ad to listen to your ringtone!!!
What's really annoying on iOS is that persistent notification badge to "finish setting up your account" even when I choose not to use some apple services.
I'm sure we could find great examples of other companies that made similar privacy aware decisions, only to then turn around and throw all that out of the window for increased profits.
Call me skeptical, but these entities have one purpose: profits. Why would I trust they won't ever misuse my data?
A bit more history.
A shareholder once berated Tim Cook for doimg things for reasons other than profit.
Tim Cook's response:
> When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI [return on investment]. When I think about doing the right thing, I don’t think about an ROI.”
If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.
Billboards still require tracking. If you had the option of putting a billboard up in 1 of 2 neighborhoods and it would get 10k impressions in either location which one would you choose? The optimal strategy is not to pick randomly. The optimal strategy is to predict the conversion rate of both locations. In order to do that you need to investigate who is likely to see your billboard and learn about their interests to see if they would be likely to be interested.
I don't doubt that billboards are placed with some careful thought, but tracking is certainly not "required" - some aggregate stats about an area should work, especially as there isn't much feedback on who saw the billboard and bought a product etc.
I haven't seen a billboard that would follow me around before. Placing them at popular location depends on existing data (or often just plain-ass thinking, like obviously a hub in the middle of the town will have more people see it compared to the middle of nowhere), and only very very indirectly generates any sort of new data (e.g. if you only place a single ad in a specific place and can correlate that placement with an increase in product sales.. but that is thoroughly unrealistic and I only write it to be nitpicky with myself).
I've never seen a png file follow me around either. It's the people who are selling the advertising space that are doing the tracking. They want to show how valuable of a location they can offer you.
What billboard is tracking individuals?
Billboards that identify car types are still legal AFAIK.
https://www.bmediagroup.com/news/vehicle-recognition-billboa...
Enough with carrying water for a megacorp that makes money from selling advertising services.
On the other hand, I very much await sideloading to be forced out of Apple by the EU.
Many of the same people who see no issue with this mock and insult Microsoft for promoting Edge etc., in Windows. And will pretzel themselves into explaining how "that's different".
This is true, but many criticisms are valid. Apple News is user-tracking adware that cannot be uninstalled on MacOS. You cannot install an app on any of the iDevices without telling Apple. You cannot get your GPS location on an iDevice without telling Apple. Apple is spending considerable resources growing their ad business, so expect this to grow worse over time; and combined with Apple's inclination to deny user control, there is no way to opt out without opting out entirely of iDevices.
So Apple's privacy perspective is way better than Android's. Could it be better? Of course, and I'm fine with trying to pressure them to do more for protecting our privacy, but between the 2, it's not even close, Apple is WAY more private with your data than Google will ever be.
The difference is you can avoid the tracking easily. This is a direct result of prioritizing user control. You can install apps without telling anybody, you can get your GPS location without telling anybody, and so on. Apple, by denying user control, makes privacy worse for users who care, and it will only get worse as Apple ramps up its services business.