10 ms·

It's simultaneously remarkable and utterly unremarkable that Facebook has been dragged kicking and screaming into building a consent screen for this kind of tra

by bnj 6y ago

It's simultaneously remarkable and utterly unremarkable that Facebook has been dragged kicking and screaming into building a consent screen for this kind of tracking. Watching this tracking notification conflict unfold in the media has really helped me to refine where I stand on this: if a business depends on non-consensual tracking to be able to survive, then I'd prefer that the business has to fold before stripping users of their opportunity to understand and agree to the surveillance infrastructure at issue here.

kibwen 6y ago
You're more forgiving than I am. As far as I'm concerned, individual-targeted advertising has such inherently perverse incentives that even those starting out with good intentions (e.g. consensual opt-in) will eventually find themselves engaged in unethical, privacy-eroding behavior as a matter of course. Consider what would happen if you outlawed individual-targeted advertising. Ad relevancy falls overall. What then? Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really. Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors. Companies have to spend money on ads because the competition is spending money on ads. It doesn't matter how absolutely effective the campaign is, as long as it's relatively more effective than your rival's. Would consumers spend less money? No, a consumer has a budget that is independent of the relevancy of the ads they see. The advertising industry thrived for a long time in the absence of individual user tracking. It could do so again.
- imheretolearn 6y ago
  >> Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors I would like to know how this conclusion was reached. By that logic, the advertising industry would not really need individual targeting at all
  - panta 6y ago
    Individual ad targeting is needed only as soon as someone does it. It is not “needed” per se.
    - bluesign 6y ago
      For sure there are some advertisers, they would not be able to advertise if there is no individual targeting. Problem is for one of those honest businesses, there are 10 dishonest ones abusing the individual targeting.
      - panta 6y ago
        If it is targeted without explicit direct consent of the targeted individual, it is not honest, at least from my personal point of view. If it was for me, targeted advertising would illegal.
  - kibwen 6y ago
    > By that logic, the advertising industry would not really need individual targeting at all You're right, they don't. But the point is not to argue that ad relevancy itself is bad. In a vacuum, improved ad relevancy is good! However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of user tracking. To use an example, on a Facebook group for gamers, it would be fine and dandy for Facebook to establish a market where PC hardware and video game companies bid to show ads to users browsing the group page. Note that this doesn't have to involve advertisers receiving any identifiable data about who the ad was shown to, and nor does it have to involve Facebook tracking your behavior online in order to show ads based on other sites you've visited, e.g. gaming communities on Reddit. The targeting is as simple as "show the game ads to the people in the game group"; it's extremely coarse demographic-based targeting that doesn't require any sort of persistent user profiling. It's no more of a privacy issue than back in the old-timey days when a company would buy an ad in an enthusiast magazine.
    - imheretolearn 6y ago
      >> But the point is not to argue that ad relevancy itself is bad. In a vacuum, improved ad relevancy is good! However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of user tracking Agreed, this is where the incentives of the users are misaligned with the incentives of the ad tracking companies. But users don't have a choice, hence individual ad tracking.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      > However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of user tracking. Spot on. How good or relevant adverts doesn't matter if the way the information is collected is by unethical. If you went to a store and while you were shopping, an employee attached a tracking device to your car, it would clearly be a violation of your rights and you'd be rightly pissed. The equivalent of this happens all the time with software on your phone. Yet here we have people defending Facebook and Google for trying to protect their spy-monopoly.
  - prostoalex 6y ago
    This would just return to 2000-esque state of affairs, where the ad model was based on selling page views, clicks or actions. That model favors small publishers (as niche advertisers flock to niche publications) and disadvantages large generic publishers (social networks, email clients, portals).
    - somedude895 6y ago
      > That model favors small publishers (as niche advertisers flock to niche publications) and disadvantages large generic publishers (social networks, email clients, portals). I agree. Advertisers would have to go back to contextual targeting, identifying websites that are likely to appeal the target audience, rather than simply buying the audience programmatically on Google's ad network
      - liaukovv 6y ago
        Which in turn would create an incentive to actually create websites attracting different audiences?
    - AlphaSite 6y ago
      I’m not entirely convinced this is true, but equally if it is I see it as an absolute win.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    Have you ever spent time around advertising people? This is exactly how they talk to each other. An agency shooting a commercial for a hospital in Houston, TX shot in Amsterdam because the director wanted to. Another agency person bragged to a person in another agency about how much they spent. It's a game to these people. Once you become a brand, it is less about advertising a product/lifestyle as much as it is to keep the name prevelant in people's mind.
- mc32 6y ago
  >” Would consumers spend less money? No...” I’m not sure about that. A lot of advertising is about appearances and superficial things. Example. Do we need cars in the US to get from place to place (NYC, etc excepted) Yes! Does it have to have bells and whistles? No. Can an entry level car do the job in the great majority of cases? Does it have to be a “luxury” brand? Or an upscale model? Spending would go down. Good, bad? That’s another discussion.
  - fuster 6y ago
    I think there is the question of what people would do with the money they save by buying only the entry-level car. Would everyone really just save the money? I expect people would just spend it on something else (that maybe has more effective advertising, even if via word-of-mouth or something else). So spending would remain roughly the same. I don't have any hard research I can personally point to though.
  - jfk13 6y ago
    Given how many people seem to find themselves with crippling debt, or unable to save enough of a buffer to handle unexpected (but not especially unusual) expenses, I'd be inclined to say "good". Much of the advertising industry isn't about getting you to choose Company A's product rather than Company B's, or to choose the deluxe version rather than the entry-level one; it's about getting you to buy things you would never even have considered otherwise, and certainly have no "need" for.
- sriram_sun 6y ago
  Exactly! How do you grow by 25% quarter over quarter without discovering new business models? "Knowing" us even more and getting us to fork over 25% more! Or moving spend from a site outside of FB to within it.
- sanedigital 6y ago
  > Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors. This is absolutely not the case. Google’s biggest ad clients achieve pretty incredible ROI (called ROAS) on each dollar they spend. And they track these obsessively—I supported a large travel client that had a small (but highly skilled) engineering team dedicated exclusively to their SEM bidding and monitoring systems. The reason digital advertising is so valuable is pretty exclusively related to attribution and tracking. If companies weren’t sure they could make so much money with their spend, their budgets would absolutely drop.
  - betenoire 6y ago
    Advertising has existed without this feature in other mediums forever
  - squeezingswirls 6y ago
    'When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?' https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
    - fingerlocks 6y ago
      What happens when small brands don't spend on digital ads? Nothing Happening is the worst possible outcome.
      - squeezingswirls 6y ago
        I do believe small brands can get more ROI using social media than wasting their money on digital ads.
        doctor_eval 6y ago
        Isn't part of the problem that Facebook limits the reach of accounts once they get to a certain size? My understanding is that they basically block you from broadcasting to your friends. The ROI of a small business is then limited because after a point you have to effectively pay for digital ads anyway. Matthew Inman posted about this https://twitter.com/Oatmeal/status/923250055540219904 https://twitter.com/Oatmeal/status/923250055540219904 As an aside, this also reflects on the honesty of their ad campaign about supporting small business. If they really cared about small business they wouldn't make them pay to reach the audience they created on their platform.
- sriram_sun 6y ago
  Exactly! How do you grow by 25% quarter over quarter without discovering new business models? "Knowing" us even more and getting us to fork over 25% more! Or moving spend from a site outside of FB to within it. What could be the end result? I give the algorithms my bank account and they are responsible for restocking my fridge, refilling prescriptions to purchasing books and investing in my stocks? Some aspiring product manager (of course another algorithm in training) is furiously jotting down all of the above...
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    What bank account? With everything-as-a-Service, minimalism being trendy (a form of consumerism as a lifestyle), ever shrinking buffers in supply chains, ever shrinking apartments - soon we won't be collecting money on accounts, we'll be paid in and paying with securities. Your position at ACME will entitle you to 100 units of payment, which you'll allocate to different services. (Note I said 100 units, not 100 units over time - since even now, people tend to get paid monthly, and subscriptions tend to bill monthly, it's only natural to factor out time from the equation...)
    - Shish2k 6y ago
      > people tend to get paid monthly, and subscriptions tend to bill monthly, it's only natural to factor out time I know you’re painting a picture of a dystopian future, but isn’t this basically how health insurance works in the USA today?
- aledalgrande 6y ago
  If the company is public, multiply that by 10.
- EGreg 6y ago
  Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really. Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors This premise seems wrong to me. It assumes that advertising is always a net positive, regardless of how targeted it is. As someone who runs a company that built apps and have spent ZERO on advertising and PR, I can tell you that is usually not the case. In fact, the biggest component of user acquisition cost is the untargeted advertising. Much better to reduce that cost to zero by increasing the viral k-factor and user retention. Those two metrics matter way more than advertising. If you can reduce the ad spend per user, or per customer, you are BETTER off, not worse. For example, Google adwords nor any other advert network offers NO WAY of targeting MacOS, only iOS and Android, so we couldn’t make any money advertising our Calendars for Mac app. And trust me we experimented with all kinds of monetization in that app: https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-43386918 https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-43386918 Original article was im ArsTechnica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/theres-a-currency-miner-in-the-mac-app-store-and-apple-seems-ok-with-it/?amp=1 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/there... https://www.google.com/search?q=qbix+mining&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari https://www.google.com/search?q=qbix+mining&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-...
- acchow 6y ago
  > Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really. I disagree. Currently, targeted advertising is able to hold a premium over non-targeted advertising. The more targeted, the higher the premium. Facebook wants to keep up in the arms race with Google (and others) in how targeted it can be.
- tempestn 6y ago
  As both an advertiser and publisher I'd also be far happier without individually targeted advertising. On our websites I would prefer to just show contextual ads, and when advertising I'd honestly rather just get our message out there in places where it's likely to resonate, rather than trying to target a specific person who's ready to buy a car, or whatever.
hctaw 6y ago
> if a business depends on non-consensual tracking to be able to survive, then I'd prefer that the business has to fold before stripping users of their opportunity to understand and agree to the surveillance infrastructure at issue here. Up there with "we can't afford to pay our workers a living wage." Businesses do not have an unalienable right to exist.
rationalfaith 6y ago
Apple is doing a great service for the industry. Google should follow very promptly but then again, Google's business model is on tracking users :p
ryanisnan 6y ago
"This won't allow us to collect new types of information..." Yeah, just information you've already been shadily collecting.
ROARosen 6y ago
From Facebook's consent screen: "This doesn't give us access to new types of information" [emphasis mine] I don't know whether to laugh out loud or to cry. It literally shows the consumer that - at least according to Apple - the data Facebook was collecting up until now is detailed enough to require an extra prompt. How exactly is that supposed to reassure someone who would supposedly deny them tracking once the prompt shows?!

by bnj 6y ago

kibwen 6y ago

You're more forgiving than I am. As far as I'm concerned, individual-targeted advertising has such inherently perverse incentives that even those starting out with good intentions (e.g. consensual opt-in) will eventually find themselves engaged in unethical, privacy-eroding behavior as a matter of course. Consider what would happen if you outlawed individual-targeted advertising. Ad relevancy falls overall. What then? Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really. Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors. Companies have to spend money on ads because the competition is spending money on ads. It doesn't matter how absolutely effective the campaign is, as long as it's relatively more effective than your rival's. Would consumers spend less money? No, a consumer has a budget that is independent of the relevancy of the ads they see. The advertising industry thrived for a long time in the absence of individual user tracking. It could do so again.

imheretolearn 6y ago
>> Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors I would like to know how this conclusion was reached. By that logic, the advertising industry would not really need individual targeting at all
- panta 6y ago
  Individual ad targeting is needed only as soon as someone does it. It is not “needed” per se.
  - bluesign 6y ago
    For sure there are some advertisers, they would not be able to advertise if there is no individual targeting. Problem is for one of those honest businesses, there are 10 dishonest ones abusing the individual targeting.
    - panta 6y ago
      If it is targeted without explicit direct consent of the targeted individual, it is not honest, at least from my personal point of view. If it was for me, targeted advertising would illegal.
- kibwen 6y ago
  > By that logic, the advertising industry would not really need individual targeting at all You're right, they don't. But the point is not to argue that ad relevancy itself is bad. In a vacuum, improved ad relevancy is good! However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of user tracking. To use an example, on a Facebook group for gamers, it would be fine and dandy for Facebook to establish a market where PC hardware and video game companies bid to show ads to users browsing the group page. Note that this doesn't have to involve advertisers receiving any identifiable data about who the ad was shown to, and nor does it have to involve Facebook tracking your behavior online in order to show ads based on other sites you've visited, e.g. gaming communities on Reddit. The targeting is as simple as "show the game ads to the people in the game group"; it's extremely coarse demographic-based targeting that doesn't require any sort of persistent user profiling. It's no more of a privacy issue than back in the old-timey days when a company would buy an ad in an enthusiast magazine.
  - imheretolearn 6y ago
    >> But the point is not to argue that ad relevancy itself is bad. In a vacuum, improved ad relevancy is good! However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of user tracking Agreed, this is where the incentives of the users are misaligned with the incentives of the ad tracking companies. But users don't have a choice, hence individual ad tracking.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of user tracking. Spot on. How good or relevant adverts doesn't matter if the way the information is collected is by unethical. If you went to a store and while you were shopping, an employee attached a tracking device to your car, it would clearly be a violation of your rights and you'd be rightly pissed. The equivalent of this happens all the time with software on your phone. Yet here we have people defending Facebook and Google for trying to protect their spy-monopoly.
- prostoalex 6y ago
  This would just return to 2000-esque state of affairs, where the ad model was based on selling page views, clicks or actions. That model favors small publishers (as niche advertisers flock to niche publications) and disadvantages large generic publishers (social networks, email clients, portals).
  - somedude895 6y ago
    > That model favors small publishers (as niche advertisers flock to niche publications) and disadvantages large generic publishers (social networks, email clients, portals). I agree. Advertisers would have to go back to contextual targeting, identifying websites that are likely to appeal the target audience, rather than simply buying the audience programmatically on Google's ad network
    - liaukovv 6y ago
      Which in turn would create an incentive to actually create websites attracting different audiences?
  - AlphaSite 6y ago
    I’m not entirely convinced this is true, but equally if it is I see it as an absolute win.
- dylan604 6y ago
  Have you ever spent time around advertising people? This is exactly how they talk to each other. An agency shooting a commercial for a hospital in Houston, TX shot in Amsterdam because the director wanted to. Another agency person bragged to a person in another agency about how much they spent. It's a game to these people. Once you become a brand, it is less about advertising a product/lifestyle as much as it is to keep the name prevelant in people's mind.
mc32 6y ago
>” Would consumers spend less money? No...” I’m not sure about that. A lot of advertising is about appearances and superficial things. Example. Do we need cars in the US to get from place to place (NYC, etc excepted) Yes! Does it have to have bells and whistles? No. Can an entry level car do the job in the great majority of cases? Does it have to be a “luxury” brand? Or an upscale model? Spending would go down. Good, bad? That’s another discussion.
- fuster 6y ago
  I think there is the question of what people would do with the money they save by buying only the entry-level car. Would everyone really just save the money? I expect people would just spend it on something else (that maybe has more effective advertising, even if via word-of-mouth or something else). So spending would remain roughly the same. I don't have any hard research I can personally point to though.
- jfk13 6y ago
  Given how many people seem to find themselves with crippling debt, or unable to save enough of a buffer to handle unexpected (but not especially unusual) expenses, I'd be inclined to say "good". Much of the advertising industry isn't about getting you to choose Company A's product rather than Company B's, or to choose the deluxe version rather than the entry-level one; it's about getting you to buy things you would never even have considered otherwise, and certainly have no "need" for.
sriram_sun 6y ago
Exactly! How do you grow by 25% quarter over quarter without discovering new business models? "Knowing" us even more and getting us to fork over 25% more! Or moving spend from a site outside of FB to within it.
sanedigital 6y ago
> Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors. This is absolutely not the case. Google’s biggest ad clients achieve pretty incredible ROI (called ROAS) on each dollar they spend. And they track these obsessively—I supported a large travel client that had a small (but highly skilled) engineering team dedicated exclusively to their SEM bidding and monitoring systems. The reason digital advertising is so valuable is pretty exclusively related to attribution and tracking. If companies weren’t sure they could make so much money with their spend, their budgets would absolutely drop.
- betenoire 6y ago
  Advertising has existed without this feature in other mediums forever
- squeezingswirls 6y ago
  'When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?' https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
  - fingerlocks 6y ago
    What happens when small brands don't spend on digital ads? Nothing Happening is the worst possible outcome.
    - squeezingswirls 6y ago
      I do believe small brands can get more ROI using social media than wasting their money on digital ads.
      - doctor_eval 6y ago
        Isn't part of the problem that Facebook limits the reach of accounts once they get to a certain size? My understanding is that they basically block you from broadcasting to your friends. The ROI of a small business is then limited because after a point you have to effectively pay for digital ads anyway. Matthew Inman posted about this https://twitter.com/Oatmeal/status/923250055540219904 https://twitter.com/Oatmeal/status/923250055540219904 As an aside, this also reflects on the honesty of their ad campaign about supporting small business. If they really cared about small business they wouldn't make them pay to reach the audience they created on their platform.
sriram_sun 6y ago
Exactly! How do you grow by 25% quarter over quarter without discovering new business models? "Knowing" us even more and getting us to fork over 25% more! Or moving spend from a site outside of FB to within it. What could be the end result? I give the algorithms my bank account and they are responsible for restocking my fridge, refilling prescriptions to purchasing books and investing in my stocks? Some aspiring product manager (of course another algorithm in training) is furiously jotting down all of the above...
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  What bank account? With everything-as-a-Service, minimalism being trendy (a form of consumerism as a lifestyle), ever shrinking buffers in supply chains, ever shrinking apartments - soon we won't be collecting money on accounts, we'll be paid in and paying with securities. Your position at ACME will entitle you to 100 units of payment, which you'll allocate to different services. (Note I said 100 units, not 100 units over time - since even now, people tend to get paid monthly, and subscriptions tend to bill monthly, it's only natural to factor out time from the equation...)
  - Shish2k 6y ago
    > people tend to get paid monthly, and subscriptions tend to bill monthly, it's only natural to factor out time I know you’re painting a picture of a dystopian future, but isn’t this basically how health insurance works in the USA today?
aledalgrande 6y ago
If the company is public, multiply that by 10.
EGreg 6y ago
Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really. Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors This premise seems wrong to me. It assumes that advertising is always a net positive, regardless of how targeted it is. As someone who runs a company that built apps and have spent ZERO on advertising and PR, I can tell you that is usually not the case. In fact, the biggest component of user acquisition cost is the untargeted advertising. Much better to reduce that cost to zero by increasing the viral k-factor and user retention. Those two metrics matter way more than advertising. If you can reduce the ad spend per user, or per customer, you are BETTER off, not worse. For example, Google adwords nor any other advert network offers NO WAY of targeting MacOS, only iOS and Android, so we couldn’t make any money advertising our Calendars for Mac app. And trust me we experimented with all kinds of monetization in that app: https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-43386918 https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-43386918 Original article was im ArsTechnica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/theres-a-currency-miner-in-the-mac-app-store-and-apple-seems-ok-with-it/?amp=1 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/there... https://www.google.com/search?q=qbix+mining&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari https://www.google.com/search?q=qbix+mining&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-...
acchow 6y ago
> Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really. I disagree. Currently, targeted advertising is able to hold a premium over non-targeted advertising. The more targeted, the higher the premium. Facebook wants to keep up in the arms race with Google (and others) in how targeted it can be.
tempestn 6y ago
As both an advertiser and publisher I'd also be far happier without individually targeted advertising. On our websites I would prefer to just show contextual ads, and when advertising I'd honestly rather just get our message out there in places where it's likely to resonate, rather than trying to target a specific person who's ready to buy a car, or whatever.

hctaw 6y ago

> if a business depends on non-consensual tracking to be able to survive, then I'd prefer that the business has to fold before stripping users of their opportunity to understand and agree to the surveillance infrastructure at issue here. Up there with "we can't afford to pay our workers a living wage." Businesses do not have an unalienable right to exist.

rationalfaith 6y ago

Apple is doing a great service for the industry. Google should follow very promptly but then again, Google's business model is on tracking users :p

ryanisnan 6y ago

"This won't allow us to collect new types of information..." Yeah, just information you've already been shadily collecting.

ROARosen 6y ago

From Facebook's consent screen: "This doesn't give us access to new types of information" [emphasis mine] I don't know whether to laugh out loud or to cry. It literally shows the consumer that - at least according to Apple - the data Facebook was collecting up until now is detailed enough to require an extra prompt. How exactly is that supposed to reassure someone who would supposedly deny them tracking once the prompt shows?!