Facebook isn’t happy about Apple’s upcoming ad tracking restrictions | Hacker News Reader

Facebook isn’t happy about Apple’s upcoming ad tracking restrictions

techcrunch.com

115 pointselorant115 comments

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... And nothing of value was lost.

If it's detremental to your business to not be able to track users on such a granular level, it's a bad business.

I'm sure Facebook will survive here.

100% biased, can't stand that company.

> If it's detremental to your business to not be able to track users on such a granular level, it's a bad business.

Except that Apple still allows tracking on this granular level, it's just that now they have to explicitly ask users to allow this.

Says a lot about Facebook's (and others) business model if it only works when the vast majority of users are mostly unaware of the amount of tracking they do, but the minute you make these users aware of the tracking and ask for their permission, the business model falls apart.

It's not even just the amount of tracking that Facebook et al do but the pervasive scope of it all. It's also a serious abuse of language.

Facebook and others use the word "ad" hoping people assume the definition is the old school television or print ad; "here's our thing buy it and it'll make you happier". Beyond whatever massage it had that advertisement only affected you if you turned to that page or watched it during your show. The content creator got paid to use some of their space/time to let an advertiser reach their audience.

For Facebook (and Google and others) and "ad" means a content creator is not just selling their own space or time but they're selling their audience. To them an "ad" is a means to hoover up a vast amount of data on people. Because of their reach and the fact they run a social network the data amounts to tons of PII. There's little regulatory control over the collection, storage, or dissemination of this data. The person being surveilled has no meaningful way to control what data is collected or what's done with it. Even opt-ins don't provide meaningful data to someone to make an informed choice about "ads".

Apple making some of the scope of their tracking clear is a step in the right direction for users. People shouldn't have to participate in a dystopian panopticon just to use an app or a website. If the apps or website somehow can't survive without surveillance that would give Stasi agents a boner they can fuck right off alongside Facebook.

Isn’t it common knowledge at this point that our browsing history is used to target ads? Who hasn’t had the experience of searching for a product and then seeing ads for it?

For starters, it's not just browsing history but all of your activity on pages or in apps that use Facebook's spywa..."ads". This includes activity times, connections to other users, and even proximity to places or other people (Bluetooth beacons etc). This is all on top of the voluntary PII you might have fed directly into a Facebook profile or the shadow profile they helpfully created for you when your friend uploaded their contacts into Facebook.

There's zero oversight of how that data is used or who it's sold to and what those buyers do with it. We've already seen a number of cases where this harvested data was sold to unscrupulous or outright criminal concerns.

So it's not just Facebook using browsing history to sell you boxes of Tide. They're selling dossiers on you to groups literally trying to gaslight and manipulate you, to subconsciously influence you to do things, or to just make you generally feel like shit. Facebook exacerbates this behavior by "advertisers" by using your dossier to stick you in a filter bubble while at the same time showing you content that maximizes "engagement" and nothing else.

The dog wagging and gaslighting are not common knowledge or well understood by most people. Neither are the shadow profiles or the access of data by any organization that drove a dump truck full of money to Menlo Park. They're worse than the old school information brokers and credit reporting agencies because they feed all of your behavior into their graphs rather than just transaction history or public data.

> They're selling dossiers on you to groups literally trying to gaslight and manipulate you, to subconsciously influence you to do things, or to just make you generally feel like shit.

Where can I find one of these dossiers? Or at least a screenshot example of a dossier that someone bought from Facebook?

Surely you wouldn't make a claim without seeing proof of this behavior happening. That would misinform people and your not trying to do that, right?

Who needs a screenshot? Look at your own[0]. Yeah I am[1] trying to misinform[2] people[3].

[0] https://m.facebook.com/help/212802592074644 [1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/24/technology/facebook-data/in... [2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/faceboo... [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/how-to-see-which-facebook-ap...

Wait, you’re saying that Facebook allowing you to freely download your own data is selling dossiers? Complying with GDPR is wrongdoing, when Facebook does it?

You're well aware that's not what I was saying. I was demonstrating the data Facebook makes available and what they build their Ad products out of.

It sounds like Facebook is allowing advertisers who already have names and contact into for people (which is widely available info, so not too surprising that they have it), to target ads to those users. Is that what you meant by “selling dossiers”? That doesn’t sound like a dossier. I could see describing the user’s ability to download their own data as a dossier, but that’s just compliance with GDPR, not “selling dossiers”. I feel like there is some confusion happening here, where the data about yourself that you can download is being conflated with the name/contact info that the advertisers already have and use to buy ads, and these two separate things are being mixed together and described as “selling dossiers”.

To be clear: GDPR data you can download about yourself includes the information about the advertisers who already had your contact info. Those advertisers don’t get a copy of the GDPR data portability document.

You're being willfully obtuse here. All of the data your GDPR documents is what Facebook builds their actual products out of. Facebook is selling advertisers and data brokers your social graph, browsing habits, and other details linked to extremely easily correlated selectors (e-mail, phone number, etc).

Insinuating Facebook is not selling a personal dossier because they don't attach a copy of your driver's license is ridiculous. Your relationships and activity are your personal identifiable details.

Facebook sells ad space, not data. I think you have a misunderstanding about Facebook’s business. They don’t offer any product where you can pay to look at someone’s private data. There is no way to buy a dossier from Facebook, it’s simply not a product they sell. Maybe you’re thinking of background checking companies who actually provide that kind of service? I haven’t seen much protesting against them, and what they do seems pretty invasive!

I think these (to the extent they are true) are just a bunch of synonyms for ad targeting, which people already intuitively understand. If an ad is targeted at you, obviously the information needed to do that has to exist somewhere. People may not know the technical terminology, but they understand it. I’m not just talking about the tech filter bubble. When I visit my rural family home, people talk to me about it. They joke about what the algorithm will think of this or that activity they do on a phone.

It’s not true that you can just buy a dossier on someone from Google or Facebook. That would make no sense, their business is rationing the use of that data by selling inferences (the gold eggs), not by selling the model (the golden goose).

So Facebook apps with access to your friends lists, group memberships, and likes aren't dossiers? As Cambridge Analytica should have demonstrated is relationship graphs are personal dossiers. They're significant predictors of habits and behavior. It's also trivial to link those graphs to selectors like phone numbers and email addresses.

But let's pretend that because Facebook isn't providing third parties Manila folders full of photocopied papers that they're not selling your PII.

Woah, motte, meet bailey! So by “selling dossiers” you actually meant “allows users to choose to share friends list for free”, a feature that does the same thing you can also do with your contacts list on iOS and Android? And you’re muddying the waters by bringing up a group of criminals that also used other, now defunct APIs?

Took a long time for me to notice since I didn't even think that it could be possible.

To be fair if you add an opt-in step to anything, it will kill that thing. No moral judgement, just human laziness. If it doesn't kill it, it still becomes something everyone loathes (e.g., how you need an extra click to accept cookies on every site you use).

I think in some situations if users see value in the opt-in then it can be ok. E.g. your phone asking you if you're happy to share your location with an app. I sure as hell want my mapping app to know where I am, but I also feel very comforted that I still get a say in the process. The thing about this tracking opt-in is that no user would ever want it because it's solely there to exploit them. So in this case I think you're 100% right.

Wouldn't the value in this situation be "you get to use Facebook"? If they didn't make money off their users, Facebook wouldn't exist.

Would you be ok if they did it that way? A warning that says "by using Facebook, you are agreeing to be tracked", at which point the user could either continue or uninstall the app?

This is a bullshit tradeoff. Facebook still knows a ton about you by your friends and activity on Facebook, and they can still show you a ton of ads on Facebook that are highly targeted to your demographic profile, and make a shit ton of money doing it. They could also make a ton of money showing you ads on a partner app if, for example, you logged in with FB to another app.

The only thing Apple is preventing them from doing is making an even larger shit ton of money by essentially knowing every app you ever use for anything that includes the Facebook SDK.

Note the same thing is true of Google. Google can (and did, and does) make shit tons of money by showing you targeted, relevant ads just based on your search keywords, or alternatively on a partner site by showing you ads just based on that site's content. But no, they need to make even more gargantuan shit tons of money by tracking your every move in Chrome and Android.

I think the new changes will hurt facebook competitors more. Everyone knows Facebook and it has a brand. They want to collect some info? Most people won't care - they just want to use the app like they always have. They might think twice with a new app that they don't know

I hope it might have the effect that those newer apps instead choose to innovate with their business models and pursue directions that don't require the user to sacrifice their privacy.

The change Apple is making keeps Facebook (and others) from using the advertising ID to track users between apps. Facebook's ability to notice that you have suddenly started posting a lot of baby pictures and choose to serve baby-related ads is unaffected.

Aren't they free to make their app not work at all without this setting? If so, then they must still find enough in letting you use facebook without it, even if less than they would like.

IIRC, Apple’s rules say an app is prohibited from not functioning if it’s denied permission.

Oh you may be right, sorry. I guess it's supposed to offer what functionality it can, like voice calls but no video if you decline camera permissions.

That wouldn’t fly in the EU because if the GDPR. https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/article29/document.cfm?action=...:

“If consent is bundled up as a non-negotiable part of terms and conditions it is presumed not to have been freely given.“

If you add an opt-in step to anything people don't want, it will kill that thing. If people were opting into getting an actual cookie rather than a tracker for advertisers to understand and target their behavior, you'd have 100% uptake.

That people won't opt into something that they didn't ask for and isn't primarily for their benefit is unsurprising.

I think it’s a stretch to call Apple’s solution opt-in. It is answering to a Yes/No question where your reply to allow tracking is no more obnoxious than to prevent it.

> To be fair if you add an opt-in step to anything, it will kill that thing.

That's like saying if you put a price on something, it will kill that thing. No, it doesn't.

It will certainly kill anything users wouldn't normally want. If my business model depends on stuffing a shit sandwich into my user's pocket without them knowing, and then something changes so I now have to ask them "Would you like a shit sandwich?" my business model will be in big trouble.

Most people gladly opt in to use their webcam for Zoom.

That's the key feature. That's why they're using the product.

I opt-in to using my car to drive, and I opt-in to using my laptop to write code.

I don't opt-in for tracking, advertising, or other negative externalities.

I think that was the parent commenter's point. That is, "opt-in never works" is only true if the thing you want the user to opt in to is something someone would never want in the first place.

And I don't even think it has to be the primary feature. As someone else mentioned about maps, map apps are still plenty useful without location tracking (indeed, analog maps worked well for millennia without it), but I know if I opt in to location tracking while using a map app that I'm going to get a lot of additional useful features, so I do it.

I thought the model was you had to ask permission, not that you just had to tell them.

E.g. it's not a cookie banner type thing, you provide the text for the dialog, and the dialog gives users a yes/no option.

So there's no ambiguity about what the user's intent in, and any developer who ignores it wouldn't be able to argue that they didn't understand.

> but the minute you make these users aware of the tracking and ask for their permission, the business model falls apart.

Unless you break the service in case the permission is revoked. Then users gladly enable the permission.

Why do you think it will survive?

If one is optimistic, this could be the the downfall of facebook. If FB is scummy it doesn't increase its chances of survival.

To be honest I'm sure there will be millions of other opportunities to gather data, by other companies. Facebook does it the easy way. Data gathering is a business now, I'm sure there are people who specialize in data gathering operations, a little like oil prospecting, the obstacle here is just getting the legal consent of consumers.

Why would it not survive? Facebook is a huge advertsing platform. Only thing that changes is that they can’t target iOS users as well as before, but that’s it. People will still pay fb to show ads.

If anything, the entire advertising industry takes a hit, and Facebook being Facebook, is still going to have the best targeting of iOS users out there.

Facebook isn't running on tight margins. It can eat a huge blow to revenue and just keep trucking.

Same. Good if FB takes a hit!

agree 100% with you

To me it's a miracle Facebook is allowed to do business given how many scummy things they do

The Western World claims to be honest and transparent and talks a lot about ethics etc

However, you never see stuff like Facebook or the Tik Tok ban in countries like China and INdia which are supposedly riddled with corruption

America it seems corruption is completely OK as long as there is enough bread and circuses for the common people

Facebook is banned in China

And TikTok is banned in India

Yes and good for them.

Nothing of value was lost.

Facebook owns masses of Photos "gifted" to them by their users many with good quality.

That alone can be turned into endless streams of money (selling them to advertisement companies).

And that's just one of many points.

So yes this won't get anywhere close to killing FB even if it is adopted by other platforms like Android.

Still it hurts revenue and this companies don't work on a morlaic basis but a pure monetary one, moral only matter because overstepping it to far makes you lose customers and trust from the government and with that potential more regulations.

"... And nothing of value was lost."

This is definitely not true. There is considerable value in advertising, it's just not apparent to you.

In fact - advertising that is 'well targeted' is considerably less annoying than ads that are poorly targetted.

The economic value of a well targeted ad is probably 10x otherwise.

Ergo - unless you are willing to pay for apps - you might now see 10x more ads appearing on pages than otherwise.

The moment you build something, and have to get the word out - your perspective will turn right upside down. As a creator you don't want to bother people who are not interested, but you definitely want to put up ads for those who may be.

A lot of ads are just a waste of time, but there is a lot of efficiency in the communication there and that has value.

The better we are able to connect people with the things they want, the better we all are.

Of course, privacy matters as well, and this presents with a great paradox, in that, losing privacy may not be worth it for some people, but it's surprisingly hard to be objective when we've only been on one side of the fence.

I agree that relevant ads are better than completely random ones for everyone involved. But there is a significant middle ground between “show this user a random ad” and “show this user an ad based on data collected through tracking”. There’s also “show this user an ad similar to what they’re currently looking at”, like the search ads on DuckDuckGo. I find that these kinds of ads are just as relevant as targeted ads. The big disadvantage compared to using tracking is the inability for advertisers to select demographics directly (instead, they would have to choose pages or search terms to appear near).

A random ad would be strange. An ad based on the content of the page or type of site would actually fit in better.

> The economic value of a well targeted ad is probably 10x otherwise.

> Ergo - unless you are willing to pay for apps - you might now see 10x more ads appearing on pages than otherwise.

I'm afraid that this is nonsense. If the economic value of selling bread went down by 10x, do you think people would start offering you 10x as much bread?

Only someone with absolutely no understanding of advertising would say this, because the effectiveness of targeting is a given, it's not controversial.

I would urge you to consider the real economics of the situation instead of propagating bad information, and embarrassing yourself.

Ironically, the evidence for the relative value of ads is right on Facebook Ad Platform itself!

You can run an experiment today, right now.

Create a Facebook ad, and send people to your web site, with some kind of intended action.

Send 'Ad 1' to a completely untargtted audience.

Send 'Ad 2' to a crudely targeted audience (say, nation and demographic)

Send 'Ad 3' to an interest based demographic.

You will right there, plain as day, in a single day, see that ads 1, 2 and 3 will each have an order of magnitude of a different conversion rate.

Most public commentary on ads is based on ignorance, which is somewhat understandable because it's domain specific knowledge, but because it's a 'personal issue' to some, they have an opinion about it.

Targeted ads are unambiguously better for everyone: sellers, marketers, exchanges, buyers.

The issue is privacy.

I know that targeted advertising is more effective and I am not disputing that. I did not dispute it in my comment.

I am disputing your random assertion that, if advertising became less effective (say by removing targeting), the quantity of advertising that people see would go up significantly.

The amount of adverts that people see currently is not based solely on their economic value - it is based on their value relative to how much people are willing to put up with being advertised to. If advertising becomes less valuable, that doesn't mean people will suddenly put up with more of it.

Indeed, if the value of adverts went down, I would expect to see fewer advertisements, not more, since the value of showing them to people is now less relative to their willingness to put up with them.

It seems obvious to me that they didn't mean economic value. Clearly ads make money. People don't pay for them recreationally.

As for 10x more ads if they get less effective, that doesn't make any sense. Advertising supported media isn't showing the minimum amount of ads needed to cover their costs out of some sort of altruism. They show the profit maximising amount. Any more ads will cost them more eyeballs/clicks than they currently get.

> In fact - advertising that is 'well targeted' is considerably less annoying than ads that are poorly targetted.

And better than targeted ads are ads that only need contextual information to work. If I'm on a page for a bit of sports equipment, I'm probably interested in sports equipment, or at the very least sports. Didn't need a complex data collection and analysis pipeline there.

> unless you are willing to pay for apps - you might now see 10x more ads appearing on pages than otherwise.

I do in fact pay for apps, and I'd very interested in seeing the data collection + sale markets collapse, so that apps are not tempted to double-dip and sell my data anyway.

> The better we are able to connect people with the things they want, the better we all are.

I'd suggest that the more efficiently we are able to let people find what they need, the better. Advertising exists to sell you a product, totally regardless of whether it's the actual best product for your needs.

> Of course, privacy matters as well If advertising can be done even 50-60% as well without scooping every piece of user data it can get its hands on, then it should be.

"If I'm on a page for a bit of sports equipment, I'm probably interested in sports equipment, or at the very least sports. Didn't need a complex data collection and analysis pipeline there."

Unfortunately, this simply isn't true.

The value of a vistor to a 'sports site' may be considerably more for some other product or service.

The fact is - most content is placed on sites for which there is no obvious context: Facebook, Twitter, news - none of it provides much information.

"I do in fact pay for apps" - it doesn't matter what you or I do - it matters what people do. The fact is, people are considerably more likely to opt for ad-based products than pay-based products, and for some kinds of products, it has a strategic consideration (i.e. those with network effects).

Ads are not going away.

"I'd suggest that the more efficiently we are able to let people find what they need, the better."

People never knew they needed a smartphone, did they? Nobody was thinking 'hey I really want a 'big screen phone'.

So I agree 'search for stuff' should be better, but advertising is not going away.

The 'ill effects' of privacy are negligible.

Nobody is harmed because of what FB is able to discern 'out of network' vs. what it already knows from what you do 'on network'.

There are definitely considerations, but in reality, no harm.

Can you think of examples where you, or someone you know has been harmed by FB out of network data collection?

Ads are not going away, better ads are better for everyone, we need to figure out how to deal with privacy.

> Unfortunately, this simply isn't true.

It quite literally is. I like mountain biking, if I go to Pinkbike (largest MTB news site), all the ads are for mountain biking products. If I'm there, I don't want to see ads for cloud services, or toasters, because that's literally not what I'm interested in at this point.

> The value of a vistor to a 'sports site' may be considerably more for some other product or service.

Like what? Probably less utility to the user though.

> The fact is, people are considerably more likely to opt for ad-based products than pay-based products

Many products are advertising only, and there's a strong culture (pushed by the advertising industry I might ad) of ad-supported above all else.

> The 'ill effects' of privacy are negligible...Nobody is harmed because of what FB is able to discern 'out of network' vs. what it already knows from what you do 'on network'.

In your opinion, sure. So what, we should all just have to put up with it, just because Facebook thinks it "deserves" to make money. Phillip Morris and friends argued that cigarettes didn't harm anybody as well.

> There are definitely considerations, but in reality, no harm.

The previous American election and the well documented effect of troll farms would indicate otherwise. Targeted advertising, enabled by invasion of privacy and amplified by the ill-effects of social-networks literally enabled that directly. The "chilling effect" of constant monitoring on culture is a well documented effect.

> Ads are not going away, better ads are better for everyone, we need to figure out how to deal with privacy.

"Ads are here, who cares about privacy, we want to make money". We have a right to privacy, advertisers not have right to make money, and when rights and advertising collide, I don't see any reason beyond "let's just endlessly feed people to the machine of capitalism" why the latter should be allowed to win.

You are conflating 'targetting = harm' with the more broad concern of 'private information in private hands = harm'.

It's a huge stretch to say 'targetted ads disrupt elections'.

What if we could to 'perfect targetting' without invasion of privacy? Well, the 'Evil Russians' would still be able to try to use ads.

They are completely separate issues.

'The Russians' FYI mostly use FB pages, Reddit pages and fake groups to generate outrage, not just ads.

There isn't really specific harm to individuals by FB having this information. It 'feels' creepy, but it's really not a material issue. It's something we would rather not have, obviously, and there are elements of privacy we definitely don't want to give up (ie intimate moments haard by Alexa), but in general not something that's bad.

Facebook is 21st-century cigarettes. Thousands of brilliant scientists and engineers testing and optimizing their product to be as addictive as possible. No concern for the effects on their users or on society. The only concern is making money. Just like with cigarettes, at first it was cool, then it became mainstream, then the dangers became better known, then the CEO was ordered to appear before Congress and gave a lot of misleading and empty responses, now it's used primarily by laggards and poorly-educated demographics. I'll be glad to see them go. Because one day they will go.

Welp, don't hold your breath. Facebook has 1.79B people on the side daily, 2.7B on monthly, and $18B in revenue in the last 3 months alone. It's going to be a while before that momentum slows down and/or collapses.

Too bad you had to ruin an otherwise good post with

>now it's used primarily by laggards and poorly-educated demographics

I dislike Facebook too (and don't use it) but the above statement is a clear lie. Normal people are who use Facebook, like it or not.

I agree with this: closest family, well educated, use Facebook though I ask them not to.

Cigarettes aren't free and haven't caused society to implode in every country on the planet.

Dopamine on the other hand, that the Facebook cartel pushes through their Like counting, attention capturing/engagement maximizing algos is Free and Unlimited.

If cigarettes were handed out for free and in unlimited quantities to everyone, for watching cat videos and accumulating Likes by insulting each other 24x7 then sure comparing Facebook to Big Tobacco would be apt.

They are a type of drug cartel that has never existed in history and their execs need to be thrown in jail for being completely clueless for so long.

Lol, clueless. Mark originally was going to school to study psychology. Something tells me this isn’t from being daft.

I think we have to get away from calling these things "ad tracking." They're not tracking ads, they're tracking people, and their response to the ads.

If Facebook was a guy with a notepad and a trench coat doing what it does in meatspace, you could get a restraining order against him.

yeah, and almost everyone would

You take a normal parent and tell them - This guy from Facebook is going to follow your teenage daughter around high school, the mall, her room, everywhere she goes, and keep a record of every single thing she does on the computer

and they would be running for their guns or their lawyers

Online, Facebook does all that and most people don't even have a clue

What Facebook (and adtech writ large) does is sniff your farts trying to figure out what you had for breakfast. If you shoo them away, they sniff your friends' farts to indirectly infer that.

I'm sure the folks who work on this are proud of their accomplishments.

Curious if there is case law here?

This is a tsunami for ad tech. Facebook just being the tip of the iceberg here.

Tracking or not tracking is not really the topic here. Rather, this is yet another proof of how abusive Apple is. They claim killing IDFA is for the sake of users' privacy, while they do track users and their behavior and feed them sponsored search results on the App Store (via Apple Search Ads). This ability is just too good to share!

Apple is giving 3 months notice to an entire industry, this is just not nice. They do it for tracking this time, 'social' login next, and you name it. This idea of doing business unilaterally will backfire at some point...

Regardless, the next 12 months are going to be as interesting as the rise of Facebook Ads on mobile, the rise of re-targeting or SEM. Because the entire ad tech stack is looking for alternatives and doing anything it can to remain effective on iOS. Get ready for some good and some ugly! Looking forward to seeing what Google will do with their own advertising ID on Android.

Good luck convincing Apple users that they’re the bad guys here.

“Facebook (renowned monopolist) needs the right to take your data, otherwise Apple is a monopoly!” is really, really unconvincing.

Seems like they have to overcompensate for the PR to appear as the good guys after all the PR damage they took lately. Nothing more, nothing less. Perfunctory privacy efforts.

What damage? Outside of here and tech/gaming sites, the Apple v. Epic Games slap fight is low on the zeitgeist, at least in the US. Outside of those tribes, no one knew about the case, or cared enough to want to know when I explained it to them.

What's the appropriate amount of notice to give?

I think what they're doing here is objectively a Good Thing, and don't really follow your argument otherwise, though I agree that it's bad if Apple simply takes it over.

Do you have a source on Apple “killing IDFA”?

My understanding is that they are going to simply show a consent dialog before allowing an app to access the IDFA, similar to what they have done for years to access other sensitive data like Contacts, Location, etc.

> Now Apple is going to slowly shut off the oxygen in order to take the value for themselves.

what happened was that developers left the facebook platform and all those viral games consolidated into zynga .

Also , with targeted channels closed, ad money will have to flow to non-targeted ads, which actually benefits small publishers who can sell a lot of impressions. It's not like ad spending will stop

Untargeted ads are worse for small publishers, not better. Avg cpms right now for targeted ads are around $3-3.50. Untargeted, ~$.50 (Safari/Firefox CPMs).

What I think we'll see is ad spend will flow more to the walled gardens since targeted ads still will be available, and perform significantly better than untargeted.

Source: I own websites that make money with ads.

if there are no targeted ads, cpms have no way to go but up

There is only so much inventory to sell in walled gardens, people don't spend all their time on FB properties. And if apple makes it more difficult for FB to target users, the line between targeted/untargeted gets blurry

Gaming devs leaving facebook is not part of the equation and switching to non-targeted ads absolutely does not benefit publishers - their ads are now worth 10x less than they were before. Any 'small publisher' using FB display ads will be hurt by this. For better or worse.

I wonder how long it will be before Apple gets into serious ad business themselves.

Well, one side effect of this is developers will rely on App Store adverts to promote their apps, whereas before Facebook ads were an effective way to promote them. So indirectly, Apple will be gaining revenue from this move.

It's probably their plan, though tbh the App Store discovery process is atrocious. You re much more likely to find an app through google, and then you have to type the exact full name of the app in the store to have a chance of finding it

Negative a decade, at least. :)

I'm sure they have plenty of other data points to help them get a pretty good idea of who the phone belongs to

It just occured to me that we're looking at Facebook wrong.

Why do people come to FB? For the content that other people post. There would be no eyeballs for the ads if the users didn't post content.

Shouldn't Facebook give us a piece of that ad revenue then?

That sounds like youtube

Oh, so there is a precedent :)

I bet they're talking about how the heck they can own their own platform/browser.

Facebook is too big to be under the thumb of the operating system and browser vendors, who are possibly hostile towards Facebook's way of doing things.

Not an easy problem to solve.

Apple's control over its app ecosystem is unsettling at times. The tactics against Epic seem heavy-handed.

But then you have to remember how Facebook scraped the contacts list on Android phones, when users installed the Android app. Ugh.

Maybe an ideal world is one where there's more than one app store for iOS, but Apple still maintains control over the developer APIs. Apple bans plenty of legit content that isn't Disney kiddie-ish enough for its tastes. Imagine if the web were like that.

Not a rhetoric question, I'm honestly curious:

Has there been any case where an entity who complained about Apple's restrictions, turned out to genuinely be in the favor of users, instead of just trying to make more money?

These are not exclusives. You can be in favor of users and also happen to make more money.

“Instead of just about money” and asking for specific examples where the complainant actually did something that benefited end users.

I doubt there’s anyone pouring their charitable money into suing Apple, so there will probably always be a profit motive.

https://wp.puri.sm/posts/apple-is-right-about-privacy-but-wr...

This is genuinely in favor of users and small business: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/14/facebook-says-apple-refused-... For example, some of my friends run a dog care training business and they had to switch to using facebook streaming to make money. This 30% fee is something they are quite unhappy about because it runs in the thousands of dollars for their scenario.

I think the OP's definition of "user" is the end user, meaning the person who sees the ad, not the company placing the ad.

they had to switch to using facebook streaming to make money

This I find hard to believe. The could easily have streamed on another service like YouTube, Zoom, or any of a dozen other solutions. Nobody "has" to switch to Facebook streaming.

> some of my friends

I have my doubts about a new user account being specifically created to post an unverifiable anecdote.

And ironically, that link is unreadable when using an ad blocker.

I think it’s really kind of funny that you’ve got all these companies decrying Apple completely destroying their business with onerous conditions. Then you have facebook chiming in. No Facebook. Not you.

If facebook pulls its app though, and goes web-only it will be a big blow to apples products. Users spend most of their time on those apps.

This change is good for Facebook. When it plays out that way they just don't want to get blamed for it.

A lot of articles seem to think Facebook won't be able to monetize you anymore. Far from the case. Within their apps -- the Facebook app, Instagram -- where they make most of their profit, there won't be any change. They don't need anything like IDFA because you're signed in.

What this will hurt is the ROI on non-Facebook apps. Publishers will get less money & advertisers will see less return.

So where will those dollars start to shift to?

Facebook.

This may actually be good. For years, all the mobile app developers had motto "iOS first", because iOS users are bringing more revenue per install. If ads in iOS apps will underperform because of Apple keeping all the user's data to itself, those money could flow to Android devices.

As this is about a terrible company suffering another terrible company, I don't know who to cheer for.

so if epic wins their lawsuit, will facebook just make their own app store and track as much as they want?

I don’t think Epic are asking to be able to add their own APIs to iOS so I doubt it, unless Apple’s implementation of these permission requests is tied to the App Store for some reason and disappears if the app is distributed some other way.

Good to see that they're not happy, it's our time to be happy.

Good!

Well, Facebook can go to h*ll with their complaints. There is a little something called freedom: corporations like Apple have the right to make their own business decisions as long as they don’t break laws. People have the right to buy and use products that make it more difficult for Facebook to harvest their digital data.

Facebook also has the right to run their business as they see fit, again, as long as they don’t break any laws.

An entirely different conversation: as much as I like free markets and capitalism, without governments enforcing laws that put some restraints on capitalism, that take into account externalities/costs to society, then capitalism and free markets will die.

a bit off topic, how much time does your spouse spend on Facebook? I just peeked at her iPhone time tracking thingy and it's 26 hours a week. That sounds crazy to me. The scarier thing is that she doesn't see anything wrong with it. But I can't say anything to her; I chose being happy than being right. But then again not very happy either. Oh well.

Don’t know you so take this with a grain of salt, but personally if I could not discuss how we spend that much of our time with my spouse, I would feel that we had a fundamental problem with the way we communicate. You should also be talking about how you are not that happy. Maybe it is related to other things left unsaid.

That is quite a deal of time that you all are choosing as a couple to spend on FB instead of in person.

For my spouse and I, we quit FB a few years ago (for similar reasons - mindlessly scrolling, fomo and jealous feelings about others, watching everyone’s highlight reel instead of real life.) We did the same with IG and Reddit. Now I read HN and she IGs/YouTubes some for her business, and we spend the rest of our time away from social media, playing games, making art, reading, working, etc.

Thanks for the input. It makes sense.

Maybe this will encourage switching to context-based ads. If I'm reading blog post about Rust, I might be interested in buying books or online training in Rust. Or, if I'm watching a video on how to take care of kitten, food or vaccination for kitten might be of interest for me. Nobody needs to track all my activity to guess that.

If I'm reading blog post about Rust, I might be interested in buying books or online training in Rust

I have been repeatedly assured by ad tech experts on HN that Facebook (and Google's) advertisements which are custom-tailored to my tabulated interests are far superior to the ads I would get through traditional context advertising.

You can tell by all the ads I see on Facebook for feminine hygiene products for the lady parts I don't have, the concert ads for bands I don't like, and the restaurant ads for cities where I don't live in places I've never been.

Life is so much better with the ad tech algorithms in charge.

>advertisements which are custom-tailored to my tabulated interests are far superior to the ads I would get through traditional context advertising.

actually my post is not arguing with that, however facing the reality where interest tracking/profiling will become harder or impossible good old context-based ads might at some point become better alternative. Not because they're inherently more efficient but because, with changes like that, interest tracking might become infisible or too resource consuming

Don't forget the ads following you across websites for the expensive product (that you only need one of) you just bought.

I'm not sure if it's intentional or not but this is what some online stores appear to do (poorly). E.g. suggesting me office chairs after I just ordered one, suggesting motherboards incompatible with a CPU I'm looking at...

If you're seeing ads from the same company for office chairs it's most likely a poor marketing campaign setup. It could also be if you're running third party blockers in your browser when you check out and then use the mobile apps you might not have been counted by the Facebook pixel.

"Oh that's because they set their campaign up poorly, they should have done xyz" yes but they didn't - a statement that holds for most campaigns we encounter. It is the ad-tech equivalent of "just don't write code that does <insert unsafe behaviour here>". It's a flawed argument, because demonstrably, in the vast majority of cases, people simply don't.

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