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Comment by websites2023 | Hacker News Reader

websites2023

> With Apple and Google continuing to make changes via their browsers and operating systems, and with the changing privacy regulatory landscape, it’s important to acknowledge that digital advertising must evolve to become less reliant on individual third-party data.

Nothing in there about the users at all. Just “we’ve been forced to do this by others.” Facebook truly believes privacy is just an obstacle to their revenue, not something good for the people who use their product.

If there were any signal that Facebook is really, truly a net negative for humanity it’s that opening paragraph. Christ.

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I mean, they published an op-ed arguing against Apple's changes so I'm a little surprised that them admitting they've lost this battle is what has really done it for you.

>With Apple and Google continuing to make changes via their browsers and operating systems

Firefox not even mentioned

With Firefox below 4% of traffic [1], it's not surprising that Safari and Chrome are the browsers Facebook is primarily thinking about.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Convenient excuse when having no interest in privacy.

my router is blocking this domain as privacy intrusive... can the data be misleading then?

Most traffic is through the mobiles apps anyways, so the traffic to FB from FF is a statistical blip.

Statcounter counts traffic from their web analytics service installed on ~2m site. And more generic question: all those traffic analytics services rely on javascript modules and if majority of firefox users block them, all this data is heavily biased in favor of “plain” chrome and safari.

Btw, when FB and the like say "we value our users" they really mean "we maximize average lifetime value of our users".

I agree with you but there were so many cases already in the past, that its for a long time just a fact of life that won't change, nothing revealing.

Trying to spin their amoral business setup in any other way is just an exercise in (self)lying.

I would have settled for an acknowledgement that users are demanding this change. No need to fake believing it’s a good thing for users or Facebook’s business, even. Simply: “Users are becoming increasingly concerned with how their data is processed. To meet this concern, and maintain personalization that benefits them, we…”

But they couldn’t muster that.

Glad to see privacy being made into another black and white issue people froth at the mouth over.

How soon before we declare a war on it? We need to spend trillions to fix it like we did WMD, terrorism, drugs and communism.

Since we're on HackerNews, I also can't wait for millions to be poured into dozens of blockchain_crypto_privacy_big_data_new_company.

Before you complain about people complaining about privacy, perhaps you should spare a thought for whales and how we have polluted the oceans.

> Just “we’ve been forced to do this by others.”

Well, because they were. Apple poked them with a stick, Facebook responds in the most blithe, un-entertaining fashion possible. No surprise there, since everyone in the privacy community knew this was a pissing contest from the start. If we want real change, we should be holding people accountable and forcing transparency everywhere possible. Until then, it looks like the corporate interests-that-be are more concerned with slowly destroying one another using their liquid assets than improving the "user experience".

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