14 ms·

Tim Cook may have just ended Facebook

69 points by rfurmani 6y ago

andrewmcwatters 6y ago
Facebook could try making another phone. I just don't see how you get around strategy like this without owning your own platform from top to bottom.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I think the only way around it (besides owning everything as you said) is to either have more competitors in the mobile phone space, or the few that control the market will have to have their power to pick and choose winners restricted.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Millions of people are moving away from their ubiquitous chat app due to privacy concerns. I think Facebook is going to have a pretty hard time selling phones.
- nradov 6y ago
  It's too late for another phone. Maybe we'll see Facebook AR goggles or some other new form factor.
throwawaysea 6y ago
As much as I dislike the effects of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit on the world, it is equally alarming that the actions of platform providers like Apple and Google can have such broad impact. Apple’s recent history in political manipulations includes swapping the gun emoji for a squirt gun emoji, banning Parler, and more. Now, I’m no less alarmed that they could “end” Facebook even if I’m not a fan of Facebook and even if privacy protections help me. This issue is that there simply isn’t much choice in the market here - between Google and Apple it’s two companies from the same area espousing the same political culture. Having them influence and control the entire world between them is dangerous. Unfortunately I don’t see viable competition for them on mobile devices. Who would we look to - Purism?
- harry8 6y ago
  Going from Apple+Google to Apple+Google+Facebook doesn't seem like a solution to any problem anyone would care about other than Facebook investors. Nokia n900 is still peak smartphone a decade after it was killed.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    It wouldn't be something to get excited about but three major players is greater than two. I believe there are still some open source phones out there but they are currently a minority so tiny their existence is deniable.
    - harry8 6y ago
      Windows phone is a third major player. How did that work out for us? Anything improve at all? Facebook is not going to provide any meaningful competition to improve things. An additional player when that player is facebook is utterly meaningless to enhancing customer power at best. More likely speeds the race to the bottom of "we can get away with that" because "this is already being done by facebook and we're not doing it as much so it's fine." The odds of looking at it and rationally thinking "I'll buy a facebook phone for its enhanced privacy compared to apple and google" are so vanishingly small they are indistinguishable from zero. It's like choosing which crime syndicate you want to to pay protection to and thinking it's a positive thing there's a new crime syndicate with a different dress code now. Anyway these are the companies who are right this minute, spending up big in washington to put your interests well behind theirs because you pay tax and they don't, they pay lobbying and political donations and you can't compete with that even if you were that dishonest which you probably aren't.
yuppie_scum 6y ago
If only he could.
- gumby 6y ago
  Why? Nobody is forcing you to use FB, are they? I have to make a google account in order to work with certain clients, which is dreadful, but have not encountered the same with FB. In the realm of lack of choice, WhatsApp (also a FB property!) is pretty hard to avoid in certain countries. So FB the company is hard to avoid, but FB the site doesn't seem so to me.
  - bagacrap 6y ago
    I don't have to be on Facebook to see that it's damaging our society, polarizing and radicalizing many of my fellow citizens.
    - gumby 6y ago
      I certainly see the polarization and radicalism but am unconvinced that FB was critical much less a “cause”
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      Access to information and easier communication will do that all by itself. When I started using Twitter I followed lots of people of differing political viewpoints to avoid an echo chamber. It was a hideous reminder that there are many, many people who genuinely hate me and what I believe in and that there are an incredible number of idiots with strongly held wrong opinions and no grasp of basic economics and politics. People hating each other because they have radically different views, priorities and goals is normal. The flattening of opinion that happened between the birth of radio and broadcast tv and that of cable was the result of a determined effort to control the narrative, not something natural.
      - totalZero 6y ago
        Idk, I never got angry on Myspace. Twitter and Facebook make money by selling engagement. Placidity of the user base, for companies that sell engagement, is a lost opportunity. They have an incentive to rile people up -- especially in an election year like 2020 when they were selling political advertisements to demagogue politicians.
nobody9999 6y ago
Despite the fact that Tim Cook's attack on Facebook and its business model is really just another round in the ongoing fight between Apple and Facebook, he hits on an important point. Facebook, et al are engaged in an effort to co-opt the freedom and privacy of people the world over and make our entire lives data points to increase their profitability. By depriving us of privacy and choice around our information spheres, these practices derail and stultify our liberty and ability to knowledgeably practice self-determination. This has been done with the tacit support (with a few notable exceptions) of frightened government officials who don't want to be blamed for another 9/11-like occurrence. As Shoshanna Zhuboff put it in her recent OpEd Piece[0]: "The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages. The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property. The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death. In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last." [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-surveillance-society-technology.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-s...
Nasrudith 6y ago
This article makes no goddamned sense. Android is the one with the majority and killer apps attract people to platforms. I don't like Facebook but it is far more likely that a full block would harm Apple way more.
harry8 6y ago
They say he's taking a swing at facebook without naming them. They've missed the fact that every single thing they've excerpted there applies equally to google. Algorithm, engagement, conspiracy theory, disinformation, recommendations to more of the same is precisely what YouTube does. For both "With a computer" in the description which is necessary for how recommendation algorithms work has again caused the overwhelming majority of politicians, public servants, commentators to have their brain fall out of their ear. These recommendation algos were censoriship before censorship suddenly got cool a few weeks ago. Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple. You'd have to be stone cold crazy to trust Apple now and forever into the future and they are hoarding your data every chance they get themselves with zero consequences beyond PR if they change their policy tomorrow, next year or in 5 years time. Separately to that, I've never seen a (directly paid for) advert for apple product on the internet. Plenty on the tv. A plethora of manipulated 3rd rate news pieces [1]. Do they advertise on the internet at all? They seem to be very good at advertising. [1] Is there anyone in Apple's league for convincing news outlets to run their advertisments for free? Elon Musk, for sure. Is he even better? Anyone else? Donald Trump's political advertising maybe? What have you noticed that I might have missed here?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple The demands from privacy by Apple are right, just combine them with anti-trust measures like open APIs that break Apples walled garden down and the internet would be useable again. It'd be pretty easy to get rid of both censorship and restore people's privacy if the will was there.
  - harry8 6y ago
    >>Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple >The demands from privacy by Apple are right Apple still collect the data. They can change their policies to do literally anything with that data anytime they like. Apple deciding what is good for me is something I neither need nor want. Apple don't pay tax, they do pay lobbying and political donations while courting the favour of politicians. That's a problem in my eyes. Apple have a huge interest in downplaying it. Do you really think they won't? They could do that quite thoroughly without the people at apple who see it differently to me even noticiing they were doing it. Tweak some algos, back test, that's great there's no problem there, push the release button.
coldnose 6y ago
What an awful headline
- vinay427 6y ago
  I think they're just trying to sound "cool" by using millennial colloquialisms. However, besides being less informative than a more nuanced alternative, it ends up sounding cringeworthy to me in a business/finance publication.
  - naikrovek 6y ago
    No, this is about Apple iPhone and iPads disallowing the Facebook app from collecting a large portion of the data that Facebook believes that it needs to collect in order to do business. This is not an article about a speech that itself may end Facebook. This is an article about a speech given to formally announce a decision Apple has made to protect its users from Facebook's insane data collection.
- dang 6y ago
  I feel like changing it to "Tim Cook gave a speech" but that would be passive-aggressive.
anm89 6y ago
Hopefully they could simultaneously end each other.
Havoc 6y ago
FB definitely having an existential moment there. Not just because Apple but because this is getting more attention. Tracking is a lot more acceptable if it’s invisible / unknown. A bit like how eco friendliness of products creeped its way into more mindshare. And one day manufacturers wake up and realise it has critical mass
shuringai 6y ago
it seems like every time one company of the technofeudalist leaders got itself into a scandal, fanboys tend to forget the previous ones. When did apple become the "lifestyle brand", the good guys? Not so long ago HN was full of the storm how apps stopped working when tracking servers went down. Apple shares the very same interests around your personal data, it's just that facebook is a reseller and apple is an enduser of your privacy.
- habitue 6y ago
  > When did apple become [...] the good guys? The piece you're missing is that there are different groups of "fanboys". When a particular news story reinforces one group's ideas, you hear a lot from them in the comments. When news is ambiguous or non-threatening to a group, they stay silent in the comments. (If it's threatening they come out to defend)
- flukus 6y ago
  It depends on the issue. When it comes to privacy apple are the good guys AFAIK, they aren't in the surveillance tech business like google, facebook, and half of silicon valley. When it comes to empowering users to control and modify/repair their own devices and the software running on them apple are the bad guys. You'll see different responses depending on the topic at hand.
stevespang 6y ago
Well, the hats drop to the floor and the scuffle begins. After all, it's reported Facebook is preparing a blockbuster lawsuit against Apple for being a monopoly.
ArtisanOfWar 6y ago
I have never once been shown a conspiracy theory I didnt specifically look up. The incitement of violence is such a cope out too. People decide to be violent, punish those that are. Telling people to go "peacefully and patriotically" is obviously not inciting violence.
preommr 6y ago
As much as I dislike Apple, I dislike Facebook even more. And as much as I dislike Facebook, I dislike even more the more evil alternatives that could exist. We're lucky that it's just Zuckerberg - some nerd that lucked his way into a lot of money. There are plenty of people that could be more nefarious - particularly if the power is shared among a group of people where blame can even further be distributed. I don't want to get too political and name names, but there are certain companies that are magnitudes worse - that can be tied directly to concentration camps, cartels, war crimes, mass scale environmental destruction. And they don't get held accountable because they're made up of boards of shadowy people that know how to stay out of the public eye and grease the right wheels.
- chii 6y ago
  > made up of boards of shadowy people that know how to stay out of the public eye and yet, you > don't want to get too political and name names So they stay shadowy, and continue to be out of the public eye.
cupofcoffee 6y ago
What's wrong with showing personalized ads?
- prepend 6y ago
  It’s not so much the ads that are the problem, I think. Its the data collected and the content promoted so you see those ads. Facebook sows discord because people are more engaged. They collect data to know exactly what makes you furious and keep screaming. It’s interesting actually that Facebook could make gobs of money by not trying to optimize for engagement and just let people naturally follow all their friends and family and waste time. All this extra harm is caused for just an extra few percent on top of a pile of money.
alexashka 6y ago
Two monopolies slinging mud at each other. How classy.
golondon 6y ago
I wonder if Facebook will be able to find a way to collect not exactly same amount of data but most of the data it captures atm. Ok, if you like to access to uniq identifier that's going to trigger a confirmation modal but as we all know Facebook doesn't necessarily need to capture all the data from the mobile phone directly with their SDK. Especially, if the user is logged in app owner can send data to their backend and send it to Facebook from there. Like many of those marketing / analytics companies ask you to do. For the long term tracking, the app owners can still generate uniq identifier and store on device storage, can't they? I guess the only functionality Facebook or any ad network would lose will be cross-app tracking. But I'm not sure how important is that. The initial reaction Facebook gave to this was too aggressive and Apple will push back for sure with their own way. We all have bloody cookie confirmation on all websites and people mostly just click ok. Isn't that gonna be the same for the apps? In iOS14 modal asking you for confirmation, is it gonna say "Facebook wants to access idfa?" or "X application wants to access idfa?"

69 points by rfurmani 6y ago

Facebook could try making another phone. I just don't see how you get around strategy like this without owning your own platform from top to bottom.

jjeaff 6y ago
I think the only way around it (besides owning everything as you said) is to either have more competitors in the mobile phone space, or the few that control the market will have to have their power to pick and choose winners restricted.
tinus_hn 6y ago
Millions of people are moving away from their ubiquitous chat app due to privacy concerns. I think Facebook is going to have a pretty hard time selling phones.
nradov 6y ago
It's too late for another phone. Maybe we'll see Facebook AR goggles or some other new form factor.

throwawaysea 6y ago

As much as I dislike the effects of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit on the world, it is equally alarming that the actions of platform providers like Apple and Google can have such broad impact. Apple’s recent history in political manipulations includes swapping the gun emoji for a squirt gun emoji, banning Parler, and more. Now, I’m no less alarmed that they could “end” Facebook even if I’m not a fan of Facebook and even if privacy protections help me. This issue is that there simply isn’t much choice in the market here - between Google and Apple it’s two companies from the same area espousing the same political culture. Having them influence and control the entire world between them is dangerous. Unfortunately I don’t see viable competition for them on mobile devices. Who would we look to - Purism?

harry8 6y ago
Going from Apple+Google to Apple+Google+Facebook doesn't seem like a solution to any problem anyone would care about other than Facebook investors. Nokia n900 is still peak smartphone a decade after it was killed.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  It wouldn't be something to get excited about but three major players is greater than two. I believe there are still some open source phones out there but they are currently a minority so tiny their existence is deniable.
  - harry8 6y ago
    Windows phone is a third major player. How did that work out for us? Anything improve at all? Facebook is not going to provide any meaningful competition to improve things. An additional player when that player is facebook is utterly meaningless to enhancing customer power at best. More likely speeds the race to the bottom of "we can get away with that" because "this is already being done by facebook and we're not doing it as much so it's fine." The odds of looking at it and rationally thinking "I'll buy a facebook phone for its enhanced privacy compared to apple and google" are so vanishingly small they are indistinguishable from zero. It's like choosing which crime syndicate you want to to pay protection to and thinking it's a positive thing there's a new crime syndicate with a different dress code now. Anyway these are the companies who are right this minute, spending up big in washington to put your interests well behind theirs because you pay tax and they don't, they pay lobbying and political donations and you can't compete with that even if you were that dishonest which you probably aren't.

yuppie_scum 6y ago

If only he could.

gumby 6y ago
Why? Nobody is forcing you to use FB, are they? I have to make a google account in order to work with certain clients, which is dreadful, but have not encountered the same with FB. In the realm of lack of choice, WhatsApp (also a FB property!) is pretty hard to avoid in certain countries. So FB the company is hard to avoid, but FB the site doesn't seem so to me.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  I don't have to be on Facebook to see that it's damaging our society, polarizing and radicalizing many of my fellow citizens.
  - gumby 6y ago
    I certainly see the polarization and radicalism but am unconvinced that FB was critical much less a “cause”
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    Access to information and easier communication will do that all by itself. When I started using Twitter I followed lots of people of differing political viewpoints to avoid an echo chamber. It was a hideous reminder that there are many, many people who genuinely hate me and what I believe in and that there are an incredible number of idiots with strongly held wrong opinions and no grasp of basic economics and politics. People hating each other because they have radically different views, priorities and goals is normal. The flattening of opinion that happened between the birth of radio and broadcast tv and that of cable was the result of a determined effort to control the narrative, not something natural.
    - totalZero 6y ago
      Idk, I never got angry on Myspace. Twitter and Facebook make money by selling engagement. Placidity of the user base, for companies that sell engagement, is a lost opportunity. They have an incentive to rile people up -- especially in an election year like 2020 when they were selling political advertisements to demagogue politicians.

nobody9999 6y ago

Despite the fact that Tim Cook's attack on Facebook and its business model is really just another round in the ongoing fight between Apple and Facebook, he hits on an important point. Facebook, et al are engaged in an effort to co-opt the freedom and privacy of people the world over and make our entire lives data points to increase their profitability. By depriving us of privacy and choice around our information spheres, these practices derail and stultify our liberty and ability to knowledgeably practice self-determination. This has been done with the tacit support (with a few notable exceptions) of frightened government officials who don't want to be blamed for another 9/11-like occurrence. As Shoshanna Zhuboff put it in her recent OpEd Piece[0]: "The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages. The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property. The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death. In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last." [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-surveillance-society-technology.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-s...

Nasrudith 6y ago

This article makes no goddamned sense. Android is the one with the majority and killer apps attract people to platforms. I don't like Facebook but it is far more likely that a full block would harm Apple way more.

harry8 6y ago

They say he's taking a swing at facebook without naming them. They've missed the fact that every single thing they've excerpted there applies equally to google. Algorithm, engagement, conspiracy theory, disinformation, recommendations to more of the same is precisely what YouTube does. For both "With a computer" in the description which is necessary for how recommendation algorithms work has again caused the overwhelming majority of politicians, public servants, commentators to have their brain fall out of their ear. These recommendation algos were censoriship before censorship suddenly got cool a few weeks ago. Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple. You'd have to be stone cold crazy to trust Apple now and forever into the future and they are hoarding your data every chance they get themselves with zero consequences beyond PR if they change their policy tomorrow, next year or in 5 years time. Separately to that, I've never seen a (directly paid for) advert for apple product on the internet. Plenty on the tv. A plethora of manipulated 3rd rate news pieces [1]. Do they advertise on the internet at all? They seem to be very good at advertising. [1] Is there anyone in Apple's league for convincing news outlets to run their advertisments for free? Elon Musk, for sure. Is he even better? Anyone else? Donald Trump's political advertising maybe? What have you noticed that I might have missed here?

Barrin92 6y ago
>Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple The demands from privacy by Apple are right, just combine them with anti-trust measures like open APIs that break Apples walled garden down and the internet would be useable again. It'd be pretty easy to get rid of both censorship and restore people's privacy if the will was there.
- harry8 6y ago
  >>Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple >The demands from privacy by Apple are right Apple still collect the data. They can change their policies to do literally anything with that data anytime they like. Apple deciding what is good for me is something I neither need nor want. Apple don't pay tax, they do pay lobbying and political donations while courting the favour of politicians. That's a problem in my eyes. Apple have a huge interest in downplaying it. Do you really think they won't? They could do that quite thoroughly without the people at apple who see it differently to me even noticiing they were doing it. Tweak some algos, back test, that's great there's no problem there, push the release button.

coldnose 6y ago

What an awful headline

vinay427 6y ago
I think they're just trying to sound "cool" by using millennial colloquialisms. However, besides being less informative than a more nuanced alternative, it ends up sounding cringeworthy to me in a business/finance publication.
- naikrovek 6y ago
  No, this is about Apple iPhone and iPads disallowing the Facebook app from collecting a large portion of the data that Facebook believes that it needs to collect in order to do business. This is not an article about a speech that itself may end Facebook. This is an article about a speech given to formally announce a decision Apple has made to protect its users from Facebook's insane data collection.
dang 6y ago
I feel like changing it to "Tim Cook gave a speech" but that would be passive-aggressive.

anm89 6y ago

Hopefully they could simultaneously end each other.

Havoc 6y ago

FB definitely having an existential moment there. Not just because Apple but because this is getting more attention. Tracking is a lot more acceptable if it’s invisible / unknown. A bit like how eco friendliness of products creeped its way into more mindshare. And one day manufacturers wake up and realise it has critical mass

shuringai 6y ago

it seems like every time one company of the technofeudalist leaders got itself into a scandal, fanboys tend to forget the previous ones. When did apple become the "lifestyle brand", the good guys? Not so long ago HN was full of the storm how apps stopped working when tracking servers went down. Apple shares the very same interests around your personal data, it's just that facebook is a reseller and apple is an enduser of your privacy.

habitue 6y ago
> When did apple become [...] the good guys? The piece you're missing is that there are different groups of "fanboys". When a particular news story reinforces one group's ideas, you hear a lot from them in the comments. When news is ambiguous or non-threatening to a group, they stay silent in the comments. (If it's threatening they come out to defend)
flukus 6y ago
It depends on the issue. When it comes to privacy apple are the good guys AFAIK, they aren't in the surveillance tech business like google, facebook, and half of silicon valley. When it comes to empowering users to control and modify/repair their own devices and the software running on them apple are the bad guys. You'll see different responses depending on the topic at hand.

stevespang 6y ago

Well, the hats drop to the floor and the scuffle begins. After all, it's reported Facebook is preparing a blockbuster lawsuit against Apple for being a monopoly.

ArtisanOfWar 6y ago

I have never once been shown a conspiracy theory I didnt specifically look up. The incitement of violence is such a cope out too. People decide to be violent, punish those that are. Telling people to go "peacefully and patriotically" is obviously not inciting violence.

preommr 6y ago

As much as I dislike Apple, I dislike Facebook even more. And as much as I dislike Facebook, I dislike even more the more evil alternatives that could exist. We're lucky that it's just Zuckerberg - some nerd that lucked his way into a lot of money. There are plenty of people that could be more nefarious - particularly if the power is shared among a group of people where blame can even further be distributed. I don't want to get too political and name names, but there are certain companies that are magnitudes worse - that can be tied directly to concentration camps, cartels, war crimes, mass scale environmental destruction. And they don't get held accountable because they're made up of boards of shadowy people that know how to stay out of the public eye and grease the right wheels.

chii 6y ago
> made up of boards of shadowy people that know how to stay out of the public eye and yet, you > don't want to get too political and name names So they stay shadowy, and continue to be out of the public eye.

cupofcoffee 6y ago

What's wrong with showing personalized ads?

prepend 6y ago
It’s not so much the ads that are the problem, I think. Its the data collected and the content promoted so you see those ads. Facebook sows discord because people are more engaged. They collect data to know exactly what makes you furious and keep screaming. It’s interesting actually that Facebook could make gobs of money by not trying to optimize for engagement and just let people naturally follow all their friends and family and waste time. All this extra harm is caused for just an extra few percent on top of a pile of money.

alexashka 6y ago

Two monopolies slinging mud at each other. How classy.

golondon 6y ago

I wonder if Facebook will be able to find a way to collect not exactly same amount of data but most of the data it captures atm. Ok, if you like to access to uniq identifier that's going to trigger a confirmation modal but as we all know Facebook doesn't necessarily need to capture all the data from the mobile phone directly with their SDK. Especially, if the user is logged in app owner can send data to their backend and send it to Facebook from there. Like many of those marketing / analytics companies ask you to do. For the long term tracking, the app owners can still generate uniq identifier and store on device storage, can't they? I guess the only functionality Facebook or any ad network would lose will be cross-app tracking. But I'm not sure how important is that. The initial reaction Facebook gave to this was too aggressive and Apple will push back for sure with their own way. We all have bloody cookie confirmation on all websites and people mostly just click ok. Isn't that gonna be the same for the apps? In iOS14 modal asking you for confirmation, is it gonna say "Facebook wants to access idfa?" or "X application wants to access idfa?"