They had people install a VPN app using enterprise certificate so it was never in the App Store and they monitored all the traffic that the VPN sent.
Unlike this case, it required users to jump through a number of hoops/scary iOS warnings. Many still did, for a gift card or less.
Incorrect. An Israeli startup (Onavo) had pivoted into selling data acquired from their VPN got acquired by Facebook. Importantly, they used statistics to estimate population prevalence which is how FB knew that Whatsapp (specifically, this was all post IG acquisition) was super popular outside the US.
> They had people install a VPN app using enterprise certificate so it was never in the App Store and they monitored all the traffic that the VPN sent.
This was (sadly) an entirely different scandal.
Honestly, I generally defend Meta/targeted advertising in these threads, but this one is such incredible, total, absolute bullshit that I can't even begin to comprehend how one could defend this.
I do remember when I joined FB in 2013, how surprised I was that most of the company didn't care about ads/making money (apart from the sales org). That ship has clearly sailed.
These kinds of things now point me in a direction where I consider advertising alone to be immoral and want it banned. I should have to request information when I want it, rather than being exposed to it at all times on every available surface.
There are only three ways this can go: 1) more frequent and more spookily relevant ads, increasing the number of people who feel that ads should be illegal because of the law breaking required to make it happen. 2) ads don’t change and everyone quickly learns to ignore them. 3) ads go away, replaced by an easy to use marketing information delivery system where only adults can request information unsupervised.
Meta do #1 because #2 and #3 mean the capitalist line doesn’t go up and the end of Meta, respectively. Meta view both of those as the same thing: the end of Meta.
“What about all the businesses which need advertising to survive?”
If they need advertising to survive they’ve been on borrowed time long enough already.
Advertisements encourage the shit Meta is doing. What kinds of similar things are they doing that we haven’t discovered, yet?
I (personally) think that's going too far. Targeted advertising has been really, really good for small businesses, and given that local newspapers are basically dead and TV/radio are expensive, these business kinda have to use Meta/Google et al.
And that's fine (IMO obviously). The actual problem here is the insatiable drive for growth from public companies/the markets, coupled with wide-scale equity ownership within the companies concerned leads to people doing mental stuff like the OP to drive those numbers up.
A bunch of this is fixable by massive, massive fines (on the part of the EU). The better solution would be for the US to introduce GDPR/DMA like regulation, as US based companies are more likely to follow their home countries laws, but that's not gonna happen any time soon.
The structural problems are harder to resolve, maybe lengthen vesting schedules and/or move back towards dividends to encourage longer-term thinking and approaches.
Coke will be fine if they stop buying TV spots (for a while, at least) but I'm pretty sure Linear/Datadog etc wouldn't be the size they are now without advertising.
> The main reason businesses need to rely on advertising to reach people is because people are already being bombarded by competitors.
Fundamentally, advertising is a way to tell potential customers you exist. Most people don't seek out new products, how do you think small businesses would grow in a world with no advertising?
The ADD incidence rate being 10x for adults since 2005 (not to even mention kids), we'd all appreciate relevance to what we're exploring/thinking about/learning, rather than the genuine nuisance of nagging for something out of context because we're tracked all around the web.