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Comment by coreyrab | Hacker News Reader

The way Apple paints this is that it's them vs. evil Facebook. Don't get me wrong, Facebook has certainly overstepped several times in their data mining practices, but a lot of these changes will almost exclusively hurt small and medium sized businesses that have been able to inexpensively reach target customers for niche and/or local products.

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Just because you built a business on technologies and techniques that cause social harm, doesn’t mean you have the right to continue using those technologies and techniques after society has decided they no longer wish suffer the harm they cause.

Certainly some business will die, but I suspect the vast majority will find other inexpensive avenues of reaching their customers, without having to step on their privacy.

First and foremost, no company should benefit from this kind of lopsided non-arrangement to spy/ track me. I don't care if it's Facebook or Bob the window washer, they shouldn't be tracking me this way without permission.

Also, I don't agree that this is going to broadly affect small businesses. I accept that it's possible a few businesses in some places will be hit, but there isn't a ton of evidence that it's going to have a broad impact. Facebook still has massive profiles of users to provide a broad set of ad targeting tools.

The hair dresser down the corner isn't going to lose sleep over this. Nor is my favorite taqueria or sandwich shop.

I'd argue it's impossible to enact any change that would only hurt large businesses and not small/medium sized businesses.

Also, for niche products wouldn't keyword advertising be just as effective?

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