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Apple is putting itself in an entertaining position in the industry. Most big tech firms have a business model that depends on user data. By explicitly taking t

Apple is putting itself in an entertaining position in the industry. Most big tech firms have a business model that depends on user data. By explicitly taking the other side of that model, a fascinating new conflict is emerging between tech giants. And Apple is at least positioning itself on the sympathetic side of billions of users in this arena. This conflict will not die down -- the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection, so this tech war will only get more pronounced and dramatic as time passes.

onion2k 8y ago
the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection They can though - they can go back to untargetted advertising based on page content as they were doing 10 years ago. All the personal tracking data is a layer on top of that tech aiming to improve the 'targettedness' of adverts. Nothing in the online ad industry really needs any of that personal data, and arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway.
- hyperbovine 8y ago
  Look at the revenue of those companies 10ya vs. today.
  - mapleoin 8y ago
    Correlation does not imply causation.
    - onetimemanytime 8y ago
      they are certainly not charging less for targeted ads, the opposite is true.
    - Maro 8y ago
      Not strictly related to this discussion, but perhaps worth sharing. I worked at a smaller tech company, and we kept saying "Correlation does not imply causation", and trying to come up with ways to separate them, etc. We spent/wasted a lot of time on this, explaining it to non-mathy people (which leads to even less confidence in data). Then I went to work at one of the big tech companies, which is probably one of the best in the world at testing/data for product, and there I never heard it. If there was correlation, unless it was clearly spurious or a statistical fluke, they pushed on it hard. "It looks like more X means more DAUs. So let's manufacture more X." And it works pretty well for that company. My takeaway is, I stopped thinking about this too much. Today, if there's correlation, unless it's clearly spurious/etc, and unless somebody has a better idea, I tell the product/eng team to push hard on it and don't even mention correlation vs causation.
      - syastrov 8y ago
        I have experienced the same thing myself, but I would explain it differently. Even in science where the focus is actually on proving things, it is difficult to prove causation. I see this more as a question of whether you act on a correlation that you’ve discovered or whether you simply talk about it. While it’s fine to discuss things, it sounds like at the small company you worked at, that that was more important than taking action (or perhaps the company was too insecure to make a decision about what to do). At the big company, the focus was on making experiments and seeing what the results are, and then iterating on that. In the end, the business doesn’t care whether something causes something else, it is only interested in adjusting things, measuring results and if they increase some important metrics, then the business is happy. That said, it can be taken to an extreme where only the metrics are thought of as important, rather than other qualitative or hard-to-measure things. It is much easier with web companies who can quickly roll out changes and use AB testing to run experiments. Also, those companies with larger user bases will have better sets of data on which to base their decisions. Companies that are well established will also have historical data that will make it easier to interpret results. It also sounds like at the first company, the tech team was interested in being theoretically correct, while at the second one, the engineers were interested in trying things. It is an understandable problem in some ways: good programmers are lazy and won’t want to make unnecessary changes, so they tend to argue against changes that haven’t been proven ahead of time to yield results. However, for the business to thrive, knobs must be adjusted and experiments made. And those programmers have to turn the knobs (or make them adjustable by someone else). So there is a strong counter-motive at play there. However, good programmers who are also engineers with a focus on the product / business will understand the importance of doing this. It’s important for the engineering team to be aligned with the business and it helps to have cross functional teams. Otherwise you may end up with departments protecting their own interests. See also Conway’s law and its derivatives.
  - TomK32 8y ago
    Look at the userbase of the internet and those companies 10ya vs. today.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - adventured 8y ago
    There's nowhere else for the ad money to go. If less personally targeted online ads are the sole option, then that's the sole option. The ad money will go where the user attention is, which is increasingly online. Besides, for Google, they don't need Facebook style personal targeting. When you search for womens shoes, they feed you ads for womens shoes, it's a wildly lucrative approach and it doesn't matter if you're 28 or 34 years old, or what your favorite music is (yes, there are gains to be had with more personalized ad targeting even in that case, it doesn't matter, Google's model is still an extreme money machine). Radio, newspapers and TV were absolute dogshit for targeting for the prior 60 years. It was mostly blast and pray. At least with the Internet, even with less personal targeting, you still gain a lot of tech capabilities to improve ad systems (including intricate content targeting, matched with information on the demographics that like that content, and so on).
- paulie_a 8y ago
  It is astounding that with all that tracking data ad quality has not actually improved in 20 years. They are still garbage ads that are still rarely relevant.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - bojan 8y ago
    For days after I make a purchase I keep seeing ads for the very thing I have already purchased.
    - Maro 8y ago
      Even at big tech companies, a lot of those ML models are fed by nightly jobs, so updated once a day. If the targeting occurs on an outside property, there may be more delay. So if you make a purchase on day X, you should expect to see the ad for another ~48 hours. That's assuming there's logic which actually de-targets you post-purchase.
      - oldcynic 8y ago
        Even Amazon don't get this right and should have unbeatable knowledge of when the sale completes. Their helpful suggestions still only seem to work usefully for books and music.
        Mvandenbergh 8y ago
        I suspect that's because those are the only things that are easy to model. People buy them: a) based on personal taste b) in volume I just bought a ladder on amazon, what information does that tell them? Since it's the only tool I've bought from them it doesn't tell them much. They now know that I might be willing to buy more tools from them in the future but doesn't help in targeting which kind or how often. Me being a ladder buyer is a very weak signal that I will buy any particular item from them. If on the other hand, I've bought 15 Aubrey Maturin books from them over the last few months, it doesn't take the most sophisticated model to determine that I probably want to buy number 16 next. Or that I might like to read the Horatio Hornblower books.
- zaidf 8y ago
  arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway Source?
  - Cakez0r 8y ago
    > arguably
    - efsavage 8y ago
      Argument?
      - criddell 8y ago
        http://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-decided-facebook-ad-targeting-worth-money/305390/ http://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-decided-facebook-ad-tar...
- nabla9 8y ago
  You make an error when you assume that targeted ads should improve user experience to work.
- rmc 8y ago
  Is that economically viable now? Can FB survive on that sort of adverts?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - criddell 8y ago
    Probably. My medium sized city has several OTA television stations that survive partially on untargeted advertising. Ads shown to the relatively small audience supports the running of a significant amount of equipment including broadcast antennas, satellite uplinks, a helicopter, several vans with lots of radio gear in them, servers, a staff of on air personalities and all the other people required to run the station. How much infrastructure does Facebook need to serve this city? Facebook will be fine.
    - w0m 8y ago
      Though they are still targeted insofar as show X attracts demographic Y so gets Ad Y. Targeting has become a boogieman I think.
      - criddell 8y ago
        I have no problem with targeting an audience. Afterall, Cosmopolitan attracts a different audience than Guns n Ammo. It's the individual targeting that has such high costs (in resources and privacy) for an apparently small increment in effectiveness.
- roemerb 8y ago
  Unfortunately, even if they did that, a lot of their other products would suffer as things like Assistant etc. depend on the personalised data collected from their users internet traffic.
  - celeritascelery 8y ago
    But google assistant is on device, so it is not hampered by these sort of limitations.
- Iv 8y ago
  And actually they will have to. Their business model is becoming illegal in EU and I suspect that fines will start raining in a year or two.
- hedora 8y ago
  On the other side of the coin, targeted advertising is a way to get viewers of high-quality content to view your ads without paying a premiums to the people and institutions that produced the premium content. This saves money for the advertisers, by transferring wealth away from content creators. It boggles my mind that publishers still favor this model over display ads (targeted to articles, not readers).
  - SN76477 8y ago
    Depth of targetting is the easy button for the modern marketer.
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    > This saves money for the advertisers, by transferring wealth away from content creators. Not really. It actually increases the pool of money available to content creators. Everybody wins. > It boggles my mind that publishers still favor this model over display ads (targeted to articles, not readers). Because they generate more revenue, I'd guess. Mind-boggling, I know.
    - kstrauser 8y ago
      > Everybody wins. Well, except for the people being targeted, and the ones being served malware, and the ones having their cross-Internet activities being tracked, logged, and analyzed. It's not such a win for them.
      - ucaetano 8y ago
        > Well, except for the people being targeted They win too. They get content without having to hand over cash. Everybody wins because the value of what they are giving is, for them, less than they are receiving. And the value of what they are giving, for others, is more than what others are giving. Going back to non-targeted ads would significantly reduce monetization, reducing the pile of money available to content creators, and driving many (if not most) of them out of business. You can always not access any ad-funded content or service, the option is yours. Take it.
- w0m 8y ago
  > and arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway. I think this would be a contentious point, the advertising giants have invested significantly in targeting based entirely on their metrics of it actually working, random anecdotes aside.
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
  I really hope some sort of media subscription service becomes common place. If I want to read articles online, I'd love to pay $10/m and have it go to the content creators. Ads for me are unacceptable, but I'll happily pay, and I barely even read tech articles. The specifics of the implementation would have to be very consumer friendly though. Ie, I can't imagine I make all sites combined more than $1/m from my ad traffic each month.. maybe that's not true, I just don't see it happening. So I don't want to (as a consumer) pay $5/m per site or anything silly like that. That's why as a consumer I like the idea of splitting an amount (say, $10/m) up between all places I go. I remember a service like that... flutter I think? It never caught on though, because people don't like paying. We've got a tough hill to climb in this ad war, heh.
- JeremyBanks 8y ago
  This is objectively false. Ad conversions are indeed way more efficient than they have been in the past. Your scorn doesn't change the facts
Gibbon1 8y ago
Yeah if you build hardware and aren't dependent on scumlord VC funding you have an advantage over rivals dependent on software and data. Apple and Samsung don't need your data to stay profitable. Google and Facebook are worthless without your data. Microsoft and Oracle are in a different class. They provide tools to handle high value data.
- pacala 8y ago
  The Cloud/BigData business, which is the strategic thrust of Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure and Google/GCP, is simply 2nd degree surveillance. BigData is code word for "ever more detailed logs of every human on the planet".
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    In many ways it has come to mean surveillance-as-a-service. Big Data usually means, “we want monitoring, logging & tracking at a scale large enough to cope with surveillance data ingestion rates.” There are remarkably few instances of actual “big data” problems, at least in the commercial sector, that aren’t merely surveillance. As a machine learning engineer myself, this is somewhat of an existential crisis. It truly makes quant finance look like one of the most ethically positive career choices left.
    - Aco- 8y ago
      I'm curious.. Can you please provide more information or sources on these concepts? I've always had a hunch this was the case
  - oblio 8y ago
    Those don't necessarily go together. For the cloud, you pay for infrastructure. You are not the product.
- ck425 8y ago
  I wonder if samsung will follow suit. I imagine building privacy conditions into android is likely harder than it is for Apple into iOS..
tannhaeuser 8y ago
It might seem like that, but Apple doesn't do it for the good of mankind, but to push their own ad channels. It's the same thing with Google et al: > "We're penalizing non-https sites to protect users" ... to push our own ad channels rather than theirs > "We're disabling insecure MMS on Android phones (Stagefreight bug 2015) ... to eliminate the last remaining open channel for payed content downloads with carrier billing outside of app stores
- hellofunk 8y ago
  > Apple doesn't do it for the good of mankind Apple is generally showing a superior attitude towards user privacy, even in situations that don't seem directly tied to their own ad channels, as you say. Maintaining a privacy-focused image is good for business in general, hence their reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement to violate individual user privacy.
  - dhimes 8y ago
    tannhaeuser's point is worth considering though: Is Apple truly respecting privacy, or are they just refusing to share because they want to own all of the info? Are they not storing private information- like websites you visit and apps you download and such, and using it to target you in their store?
    - ubermonkey 8y ago
      Apple's incredible success thus far selling higher-end computing devices hasn't required them to engage in "big data" tactics. The fact that there's now popular pushback against the data-gatherers is certainly to their favor, and they'd be foolish not to trade on the fact that "Hey, you know what? We collect very little, and have no interest in monetizing you as a user, because that's never been our business model." I think Apple does benefit from some solidly ethical leadership here, but it's also probably wise -- I can see lots more data-protection laws coming down the pike in the years ahead, and they'll endanger the big-data approach. If I were Apple, I'd probably stay away from it for those reasons alone.
    - 8y ago
ckastner 8y ago
> the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection Google's business is a bit more diversified than Facebook's, though, especially considering their expansion into providing cloud services. And they have long-term ventures that could really pay out in the future, like Waymo.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- rimliu 8y ago
  But money source is still the same one.
ck425 8y ago
As a long time user of Android, I am for the first time contemplating buying an iPhone. I probably would if not for the lack of headphone jack. If I ever replace my old, rarely used home laptop, I'd probably get a macbook (unless of course I was building a gaming machine). I do wonder however how much influence this will have on the average user. Those of us who work in the industry are far more aware of tracking and personal privacy. I'm not sure how much the typical consumer will actually care.
- hellofunk 8y ago
  Wasn't there a report recently that FB's user base has dropped by several percentage points in the wake of their privacy scandal? If so, that would imply that many average users are taking it seriously -- that would be millions of people who stopped using FB.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    No. Most people shook thier fist at the wind and kept posting cat pictures. The story was that young people aren't using FB. But they are using FB owned Instagram.
    - hellofunk 8y ago
      What about this: https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-active-user-decline-us-canda-q4-earnings-2018 https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-act... https://www.recode.net/2018/2/12/16998750/facebooks-teen-users-decline-instagram-snap-emarketer https://www.recode.net/2018/2/12/16998750/facebooks-teen-use... https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-shows-facebook-usage-is-in-decline-which-may-be-behind-the-late/517586/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-shows-faceb...
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Teens don't want to use FB because it's the same platform that granny is on. "FB is for old people" trend has been going on for years. It has little to do with the recent news. But to automatically say it has anything to do with the latest news is like all of the "stock analyst" who claim after the fact to know "investor sentiment".
gaius 8y ago
Microsoft could do this too - push out a security update to Win10 that blocks tracking and cut Google and Facebook off at the knees overnight. Windows Privacy Defender, they could call it. I believe the only reason they haven’t done this already is lingering fears of antitrust again. Apple and MS only have to do ads because that’s the state of the industry. But they could ditch that model entirely and retain all their core revenue streams if the attention economy was no longer a thing.
sorenjan 8y ago
I wish Microsoft would still have a viable option for phones. I don't like iPhones or Apples walled garden, but I don't wan't to be dependent on Google either. I wonder if they would have a better chance today, when cross platform app development is easier and most people only use a handful of them.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I wish that too. Especially that their UX ideas were good, and their tablets show capacity of doing better than both Apple and Google. Alas, I feel the mistake they made was releasing an MVP of a phone OS, instead of hitting feature parity with Android (or at least iOS) of the era. Phones have quite a big switching cost - if you make a mistake and are not super wealthy, you may need to live with it for the next year, or more. By releasing and aggressively pushing a subpar product, Microsoft completely obliterated the trust in their mobile brand.
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
    Was feature parity really in Microsoft's hands? One of the main features people want is app availability after all. I think Windows needs to run Android apps like Chrome OS does. Then they will eventually be able to run on phones once again.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Right. That was a problem as well. But what I remember the most from the experience with early Windows phones is the lack of many OS-level features and configuration options I came to expect from Android.
- rimliu 8y ago
  I wish developers started to care about the users again instead of looking for the ways to make a life easier for themselves. I’ve never saw enjoyable cross-platform app and I doubt I ever will, by definition.
  - 8y ago
baby 8y ago
Can facebook release a phone where you can develop apps with swift and an API similar to the iOS API? Or at least with a translation layer? Would that be illegal? That would allow devs to develop apps for both platform very easily.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
This is exciting, will grab my Popcorn if Apple thinks someday they need services to grow revenue. Also see the Pinterest/Snapchat/Apple news lately.
clatan 8y ago
This is not new however, companies have been trying to find ways to deprive others from data. For example, Google's strong push for https adoption was mostly a play to deprive ISPs from detailed web browsing data.
JKCalhoun 8y ago
Stepping back, Apple is empowering user's to "opt in".
mtgx 8y ago
Microsoft could've done the same to Google when it started that mini Do Not Track war. But it chose to fight a useless battle, when it could've added a tracking or ad blocker by default to the Edge browser instead, because at the time it wasn't sure whether or not to quit the advertising business for good (Bing was losing a lot of money at the time) or double down on it. It seems to have chosen the latter with all the tracking it has put in Windows 10.
partiallypro 8y ago
But Apple has its own ad platform, and a recent report says Facebook shared user data with hardware companies like Apple. IMO Apple wants to kill tracking pixels and ads to make their in-app ads more valuable to bidders. This is a business decision.
brogrammernot 8y ago
Both companies are in a position to do so, they could pay the users for their data. Would you never pay a cell phone bill again but trade your personal data for it? I feel like there’s enough people out there that would.

onion2k 8y ago

the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection They can though - they can go back to untargetted advertising based on page content as they were doing 10 years ago. All the personal tracking data is a layer on top of that tech aiming to improve the 'targettedness' of adverts. Nothing in the online ad industry really needs any of that personal data, and arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway.

hyperbovine 8y ago
Look at the revenue of those companies 10ya vs. today.
- mapleoin 8y ago
  Correlation does not imply causation.
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    they are certainly not charging less for targeted ads, the opposite is true.
  - Maro 8y ago
    Not strictly related to this discussion, but perhaps worth sharing. I worked at a smaller tech company, and we kept saying "Correlation does not imply causation", and trying to come up with ways to separate them, etc. We spent/wasted a lot of time on this, explaining it to non-mathy people (which leads to even less confidence in data). Then I went to work at one of the big tech companies, which is probably one of the best in the world at testing/data for product, and there I never heard it. If there was correlation, unless it was clearly spurious or a statistical fluke, they pushed on it hard. "It looks like more X means more DAUs. So let's manufacture more X." And it works pretty well for that company. My takeaway is, I stopped thinking about this too much. Today, if there's correlation, unless it's clearly spurious/etc, and unless somebody has a better idea, I tell the product/eng team to push hard on it and don't even mention correlation vs causation.
    - syastrov 8y ago
      I have experienced the same thing myself, but I would explain it differently. Even in science where the focus is actually on proving things, it is difficult to prove causation. I see this more as a question of whether you act on a correlation that you’ve discovered or whether you simply talk about it. While it’s fine to discuss things, it sounds like at the small company you worked at, that that was more important than taking action (or perhaps the company was too insecure to make a decision about what to do). At the big company, the focus was on making experiments and seeing what the results are, and then iterating on that. In the end, the business doesn’t care whether something causes something else, it is only interested in adjusting things, measuring results and if they increase some important metrics, then the business is happy. That said, it can be taken to an extreme where only the metrics are thought of as important, rather than other qualitative or hard-to-measure things. It is much easier with web companies who can quickly roll out changes and use AB testing to run experiments. Also, those companies with larger user bases will have better sets of data on which to base their decisions. Companies that are well established will also have historical data that will make it easier to interpret results. It also sounds like at the first company, the tech team was interested in being theoretically correct, while at the second one, the engineers were interested in trying things. It is an understandable problem in some ways: good programmers are lazy and won’t want to make unnecessary changes, so they tend to argue against changes that haven’t been proven ahead of time to yield results. However, for the business to thrive, knobs must be adjusted and experiments made. And those programmers have to turn the knobs (or make them adjustable by someone else). So there is a strong counter-motive at play there. However, good programmers who are also engineers with a focus on the product / business will understand the importance of doing this. It’s important for the engineering team to be aligned with the business and it helps to have cross functional teams. Otherwise you may end up with departments protecting their own interests. See also Conway’s law and its derivatives.
- TomK32 8y ago
  Look at the userbase of the internet and those companies 10ya vs. today.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- adventured 8y ago
  There's nowhere else for the ad money to go. If less personally targeted online ads are the sole option, then that's the sole option. The ad money will go where the user attention is, which is increasingly online. Besides, for Google, they don't need Facebook style personal targeting. When you search for womens shoes, they feed you ads for womens shoes, it's a wildly lucrative approach and it doesn't matter if you're 28 or 34 years old, or what your favorite music is (yes, there are gains to be had with more personalized ad targeting even in that case, it doesn't matter, Google's model is still an extreme money machine). Radio, newspapers and TV were absolute dogshit for targeting for the prior 60 years. It was mostly blast and pray. At least with the Internet, even with less personal targeting, you still gain a lot of tech capabilities to improve ad systems (including intricate content targeting, matched with information on the demographics that like that content, and so on).
paulie_a 8y ago
It is astounding that with all that tracking data ad quality has not actually improved in 20 years. They are still garbage ads that are still rarely relevant.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bojan 8y ago
  For days after I make a purchase I keep seeing ads for the very thing I have already purchased.
  - Maro 8y ago
    Even at big tech companies, a lot of those ML models are fed by nightly jobs, so updated once a day. If the targeting occurs on an outside property, there may be more delay. So if you make a purchase on day X, you should expect to see the ad for another ~48 hours. That's assuming there's logic which actually de-targets you post-purchase.
    - oldcynic 8y ago
      Even Amazon don't get this right and should have unbeatable knowledge of when the sale completes. Their helpful suggestions still only seem to work usefully for books and music.
      - Mvandenbergh 8y ago
        I suspect that's because those are the only things that are easy to model. People buy them: a) based on personal taste b) in volume I just bought a ladder on amazon, what information does that tell them? Since it's the only tool I've bought from them it doesn't tell them much. They now know that I might be willing to buy more tools from them in the future but doesn't help in targeting which kind or how often. Me being a ladder buyer is a very weak signal that I will buy any particular item from them. If on the other hand, I've bought 15 Aubrey Maturin books from them over the last few months, it doesn't take the most sophisticated model to determine that I probably want to buy number 16 next. Or that I might like to read the Horatio Hornblower books.
zaidf 8y ago
arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway Source?
- Cakez0r 8y ago
  > arguably
  - efsavage 8y ago
    Argument?
    - criddell 8y ago
      http://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-decided-facebook-ad-targeting-worth-money/305390/ http://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-decided-facebook-ad-tar...
nabla9 8y ago
You make an error when you assume that targeted ads should improve user experience to work.
rmc 8y ago
Is that economically viable now? Can FB survive on that sort of adverts?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- criddell 8y ago
  Probably. My medium sized city has several OTA television stations that survive partially on untargeted advertising. Ads shown to the relatively small audience supports the running of a significant amount of equipment including broadcast antennas, satellite uplinks, a helicopter, several vans with lots of radio gear in them, servers, a staff of on air personalities and all the other people required to run the station. How much infrastructure does Facebook need to serve this city? Facebook will be fine.
  - w0m 8y ago
    Though they are still targeted insofar as show X attracts demographic Y so gets Ad Y. Targeting has become a boogieman I think.
    - criddell 8y ago
      I have no problem with targeting an audience. Afterall, Cosmopolitan attracts a different audience than Guns n Ammo. It's the individual targeting that has such high costs (in resources and privacy) for an apparently small increment in effectiveness.
roemerb 8y ago
Unfortunately, even if they did that, a lot of their other products would suffer as things like Assistant etc. depend on the personalised data collected from their users internet traffic.
- celeritascelery 8y ago
  But google assistant is on device, so it is not hampered by these sort of limitations.
Iv 8y ago
And actually they will have to. Their business model is becoming illegal in EU and I suspect that fines will start raining in a year or two.
hedora 8y ago
On the other side of the coin, targeted advertising is a way to get viewers of high-quality content to view your ads without paying a premiums to the people and institutions that produced the premium content. This saves money for the advertisers, by transferring wealth away from content creators. It boggles my mind that publishers still favor this model over display ads (targeted to articles, not readers).
- SN76477 8y ago
  Depth of targetting is the easy button for the modern marketer.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  > This saves money for the advertisers, by transferring wealth away from content creators. Not really. It actually increases the pool of money available to content creators. Everybody wins. > It boggles my mind that publishers still favor this model over display ads (targeted to articles, not readers). Because they generate more revenue, I'd guess. Mind-boggling, I know.
  - kstrauser 8y ago
    > Everybody wins. Well, except for the people being targeted, and the ones being served malware, and the ones having their cross-Internet activities being tracked, logged, and analyzed. It's not such a win for them.
    - ucaetano 8y ago
      > Well, except for the people being targeted They win too. They get content without having to hand over cash. Everybody wins because the value of what they are giving is, for them, less than they are receiving. And the value of what they are giving, for others, is more than what others are giving. Going back to non-targeted ads would significantly reduce monetization, reducing the pile of money available to content creators, and driving many (if not most) of them out of business. You can always not access any ad-funded content or service, the option is yours. Take it.
w0m 8y ago
> and arguably it doesn't actually make many ads more effective anyway. I think this would be a contentious point, the advertising giants have invested significantly in targeting based entirely on their metrics of it actually working, random anecdotes aside.
notheguyouthink 8y ago
I really hope some sort of media subscription service becomes common place. If I want to read articles online, I'd love to pay $10/m and have it go to the content creators. Ads for me are unacceptable, but I'll happily pay, and I barely even read tech articles. The specifics of the implementation would have to be very consumer friendly though. Ie, I can't imagine I make all sites combined more than $1/m from my ad traffic each month.. maybe that's not true, I just don't see it happening. So I don't want to (as a consumer) pay $5/m per site or anything silly like that. That's why as a consumer I like the idea of splitting an amount (say, $10/m) up between all places I go. I remember a service like that... flutter I think? It never caught on though, because people don't like paying. We've got a tough hill to climb in this ad war, heh.
JeremyBanks 8y ago
This is objectively false. Ad conversions are indeed way more efficient than they have been in the past. Your scorn doesn't change the facts

Gibbon1 8y ago

Yeah if you build hardware and aren't dependent on scumlord VC funding you have an advantage over rivals dependent on software and data. Apple and Samsung don't need your data to stay profitable. Google and Facebook are worthless without your data. Microsoft and Oracle are in a different class. They provide tools to handle high value data.

pacala 8y ago
The Cloud/BigData business, which is the strategic thrust of Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure and Google/GCP, is simply 2nd degree surveillance. BigData is code word for "ever more detailed logs of every human on the planet".
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  In many ways it has come to mean surveillance-as-a-service. Big Data usually means, “we want monitoring, logging & tracking at a scale large enough to cope with surveillance data ingestion rates.” There are remarkably few instances of actual “big data” problems, at least in the commercial sector, that aren’t merely surveillance. As a machine learning engineer myself, this is somewhat of an existential crisis. It truly makes quant finance look like one of the most ethically positive career choices left.
  - Aco- 8y ago
    I'm curious.. Can you please provide more information or sources on these concepts? I've always had a hunch this was the case
- oblio 8y ago
  Those don't necessarily go together. For the cloud, you pay for infrastructure. You are not the product.
ck425 8y ago
I wonder if samsung will follow suit. I imagine building privacy conditions into android is likely harder than it is for Apple into iOS..

tannhaeuser 8y ago

It might seem like that, but Apple doesn't do it for the good of mankind, but to push their own ad channels. It's the same thing with Google et al: > "We're penalizing non-https sites to protect users" ... to push our own ad channels rather than theirs > "We're disabling insecure MMS on Android phones (Stagefreight bug 2015) ... to eliminate the last remaining open channel for payed content downloads with carrier billing outside of app stores

hellofunk 8y ago
> Apple doesn't do it for the good of mankind Apple is generally showing a superior attitude towards user privacy, even in situations that don't seem directly tied to their own ad channels, as you say. Maintaining a privacy-focused image is good for business in general, hence their reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement to violate individual user privacy.
- dhimes 8y ago
  tannhaeuser's point is worth considering though: Is Apple truly respecting privacy, or are they just refusing to share because they want to own all of the info? Are they not storing private information- like websites you visit and apps you download and such, and using it to target you in their store?
  - ubermonkey 8y ago
    Apple's incredible success thus far selling higher-end computing devices hasn't required them to engage in "big data" tactics. The fact that there's now popular pushback against the data-gatherers is certainly to their favor, and they'd be foolish not to trade on the fact that "Hey, you know what? We collect very little, and have no interest in monetizing you as a user, because that's never been our business model." I think Apple does benefit from some solidly ethical leadership here, but it's also probably wise -- I can see lots more data-protection laws coming down the pike in the years ahead, and they'll endanger the big-data approach. If I were Apple, I'd probably stay away from it for those reasons alone.
  - 8y ago

ckastner 8y ago

> the entire FB and Google business models cannot suddenly change to move away from user data collection Google's business is a bit more diversified than Facebook's, though, especially considering their expansion into providing cloud services. And they have long-term ventures that could really pay out in the future, like Waymo.

deleted 8y ago
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rimliu 8y ago
But money source is still the same one.

ck425 8y ago

As a long time user of Android, I am for the first time contemplating buying an iPhone. I probably would if not for the lack of headphone jack. If I ever replace my old, rarely used home laptop, I'd probably get a macbook (unless of course I was building a gaming machine). I do wonder however how much influence this will have on the average user. Those of us who work in the industry are far more aware of tracking and personal privacy. I'm not sure how much the typical consumer will actually care.

hellofunk 8y ago
Wasn't there a report recently that FB's user base has dropped by several percentage points in the wake of their privacy scandal? If so, that would imply that many average users are taking it seriously -- that would be millions of people who stopped using FB.
- scarface74 8y ago
  No. Most people shook thier fist at the wind and kept posting cat pictures. The story was that young people aren't using FB. But they are using FB owned Instagram.
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    What about this: https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-active-user-decline-us-canda-q4-earnings-2018 https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-act... https://www.recode.net/2018/2/12/16998750/facebooks-teen-users-decline-instagram-snap-emarketer https://www.recode.net/2018/2/12/16998750/facebooks-teen-use... https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-shows-facebook-usage-is-in-decline-which-may-be-behind-the-late/517586/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-shows-faceb...
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Teens don't want to use FB because it's the same platform that granny is on. "FB is for old people" trend has been going on for years. It has little to do with the recent news. But to automatically say it has anything to do with the latest news is like all of the "stock analyst" who claim after the fact to know "investor sentiment".

gaius 8y ago

Microsoft could do this too - push out a security update to Win10 that blocks tracking and cut Google and Facebook off at the knees overnight. Windows Privacy Defender, they could call it. I believe the only reason they haven’t done this already is lingering fears of antitrust again. Apple and MS only have to do ads because that’s the state of the industry. But they could ditch that model entirely and retain all their core revenue streams if the attention economy was no longer a thing.

sorenjan 8y ago

I wish Microsoft would still have a viable option for phones. I don't like iPhones or Apples walled garden, but I don't wan't to be dependent on Google either. I wonder if they would have a better chance today, when cross platform app development is easier and most people only use a handful of them.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
I wish that too. Especially that their UX ideas were good, and their tablets show capacity of doing better than both Apple and Google. Alas, I feel the mistake they made was releasing an MVP of a phone OS, instead of hitting feature parity with Android (or at least iOS) of the era. Phones have quite a big switching cost - if you make a mistake and are not super wealthy, you may need to live with it for the next year, or more. By releasing and aggressively pushing a subpar product, Microsoft completely obliterated the trust in their mobile brand.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  Was feature parity really in Microsoft's hands? One of the main features people want is app availability after all. I think Windows needs to run Android apps like Chrome OS does. Then they will eventually be able to run on phones once again.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Right. That was a problem as well. But what I remember the most from the experience with early Windows phones is the lack of many OS-level features and configuration options I came to expect from Android.
rimliu 8y ago
I wish developers started to care about the users again instead of looking for the ways to make a life easier for themselves. I’ve never saw enjoyable cross-platform app and I doubt I ever will, by definition.
- 8y ago

baby 8y ago

Can facebook release a phone where you can develop apps with swift and an API similar to the iOS API? Or at least with a translation layer? Would that be illegal? That would allow devs to develop apps for both platform very easily.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

This is exciting, will grab my Popcorn if Apple thinks someday they need services to grow revenue. Also see the Pinterest/Snapchat/Apple news lately.

clatan 8y ago

This is not new however, companies have been trying to find ways to deprive others from data. For example, Google's strong push for https adoption was mostly a play to deprive ISPs from detailed web browsing data.

JKCalhoun 8y ago

Stepping back, Apple is empowering user's to "opt in".

mtgx 8y ago

Microsoft could've done the same to Google when it started that mini Do Not Track war. But it chose to fight a useless battle, when it could've added a tracking or ad blocker by default to the Edge browser instead, because at the time it wasn't sure whether or not to quit the advertising business for good (Bing was losing a lot of money at the time) or double down on it. It seems to have chosen the latter with all the tracking it has put in Windows 10.

partiallypro 8y ago

But Apple has its own ad platform, and a recent report says Facebook shared user data with hardware companies like Apple. IMO Apple wants to kill tracking pixels and ads to make their in-app ads more valuable to bidders. This is a business decision.

brogrammernot 8y ago

Both companies are in a position to do so, they could pay the users for their data. Would you never pay a cell phone bill again but trade your personal data for it? I feel like there’s enough people out there that would.