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We should always remember what is being sold and who the customers are. Apple sells iPhones to consumers. Facebook sells our attention to businesses. Both comp
by matthias509 6y ago
We should always remember what is being sold and who the customers are. Apple sells iPhones to consumers. Facebook sells our attention to businesses.
Both companies are trying to sell more of their product.
Of these two I am much more concerned about Facebook because I have much less control over the transaction.
- cma 6y agoApple also sells customers to app makers through store fees. They don't just sell phones.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- smilespray 6y agoThey also sell search result placements on the App Store, which is making the already poor search function worse. The whole "services as the next growth segment" concept is a possible slippery slope for Apple.
- ineedasername 6y agoNo more than a mall sells customers to the retailers it contains. (With the caveat that, with Apple, customers aren't allowed to shop at another mall.) The mall (app store) may let retailers advertise via kiosks and banners etc, but that's basically keyword advertising, not selling personal information. Providing a marketplace like this might loosely be construed as "selling customers" but it is in a massively different class of less abusive behavior than how facebook sells customers.
- kyriakos 6y agoMalls also don't enforce their payment system
- Proziam 6y agoThey also don't stop people from going to a neighboring mall. Unfortunately, the app stores' owners certainly do that. https://www.wired.com/story/install-apps-outside-app-store-sideload/ https://www.wired.com/story/install-apps-outside-app-store-s...
- ineedasername 6y agoSure, but that's in a different class of user-abusive behavior than the pettiness of Facebook trying to "inflict pain" on Apple in one of the areas where Apple is less abusive to users.
- kyriakos 6y agoWhat people don't understand is that because Facebook is doing something bad doesn't mean apple isn't also.
- ineedasername 6y agoWhat I meant by a "different class" was simply that it did not pertain to the privacy aspects of user-hostility brought up by this article.
- cma 6y ago> with Apple, customers aren't allowed to shop at another mall And if they switch to another mall Apple will make their messages green on white to make it harder for elderly parents who stayed in the mall to read and keep up with their kids. That's pretty abusive too, a sort of excommunication via inscrutability.
- zpeti 6y agoThis is absolutely what this is about. Regaining control of the app store as a discovery of apps. Everyone should realise this is apple's actual goal here, not the privacy rhetoric. So in a way Zuck is right. Facebook through extremely good targeting has turned into the no 1 app discovery tool. This is a fact. This is not to Apple's advantage. They need the app store control for the future of the iphone. This is simply a way to regain the control. It's the only goal.
- dheera 6y agoI'd be much more concerned about Apple and all phone manufacturers. It's much harder to go about life without a smart phone than to go without a Facebook account. If you don't register for Facebook and block websites from loading JS snippets from Facebook with e.g. a simple HTTP proxy or domain-based filter, you can more or less block Facebook from getting and selling any info about you. With iOS or Google's version of Android it's damn near impossible to not hand out all your data. EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes, I guess criticism of Apple isn't welcome here as usual. But I stand by my right to be suspicious of what they do behind a walled garden OS.
- john_alan 6y agoYou can execute arbitrary code on iOS and macOS. Give me an example of something you can’t do?
- nobodywasishere 6y agoNot without Apple's permission on iOS, you can't for longer than a week.
- john_alan 6y agoOnce you have a Dev cert you can do what you like. You just can’t distribute it.
- nobodywasishere 6y agoDon't you need to pay Apple $100 for that?
- ineedasername 6y agoOn iOS, only if you're willing to void your warranty. Being able to run arbitrary code really isn't in the same class as approved phone usage if the company retaliates against you for doing it.
- Etheryte 6y ago
- hyperbovine 6y agoWhich is odd, because you already own the thing that Facebook is trying to sell to someone else.
- chiefalchemist 6y agoThat's not accurate. This interview / discussion is essential. The book makes 1984 feel lite-weight. https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/9781610395694/ https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/th...
- dalben 6y agoI gave up reading after the first chapter, I found it hard to read, too academic and terse. Does it get better after that? I might give it another chance.
- chiefalchemist 6y agoI agree. It is. A trusted friend said the same. But I see it as: 1) If you're in tech then the concepts are obvious. But if you're not then plenty of context and education is in order. Most people are the latter. The book is for them. 2) She takes the matter _very_ serious. Rightfully so. The depth and breadth is a form of counter defense. She's thorough and pro-active about plugging holes. It's not any easy read. But how do you make "privacy as you knew it is on life support" sexy and fun?
- azemetre 6y agoThe author was on an episode of econ talk that discusses the arguments in her book: https://www.econtalk.org/shoshana-zuboff-on-surveillance-capitalism/ https://www.econtalk.org/shoshana-zuboff-on-surveillance-cap... Not as thorough as the entire book but maybe listening to the interview would help persuade you?
- TechnoTimeStop 6y agoJust make his stock tank, it hurts his ability to do anything Zuck, is a frog in a pan being cooked, he's starting to hop around while his empire of spying is evaporating.
- jjtheblunt 6y ago> ...because I have much less control over the transaction made me immediately think "just don't use Facebook?".
- danhak 6y agoYou are being tracked, and your network is identifying you (tagging, mentioning you, posting photos that include you etc) whether or not you use Facebook. This is like telling people who have privacy concerns about 23andMe / Ancestry DNA "just don't use them." Meanwhile their parents or siblings happily open up the floodgates.
- bcherny 6y agoHow do you tag someone that doesn’t use Facebook?
- ciberado 6y agoThe fb ecosystem is widely used, many times as a third-party library in many apps. Sometimes those apps send your data to facebook, sometimes they do it for free as a consecuence of integrating their services. And then, there are the "share with facebook" and "I like this" buttons. https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-tracking-you-even-if-you-dont-have-account-888699 https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-tracking-you-even-if-you-d...
- bcherny 6y agoGDPR, CCPA, etc. ban this, right? And without a permanent user ID (cookies etc. are super volatile), I’m not sure how valuable this data is.
- Nextgrid 6y agoThe GDPR does ban this however it's not being enforced, as proven by the prevalence of Facebook's malicious SDK in any mainstream app.
- mdoms 6y agoYou should be concerned about both. You don't have to pick a side.
- modeless 6y agoApple sells you a phone at the beginning, but after that they sell access to your wallet. They take 30% for the privilege of charging you money, ruthlessly enforced to the point where you're not even allowed to run anyone else's native code on your own phone without Apple's prior approval. For your own protection of course, and conveniently also protecting Apple's 30%.
- jshen 6y agoYes is 100% accurate, and still MUCH better than the situation with FB.
- kgin 6y agoThat sounds great. The world is big and people are devious. I don’t have time to vet every app I use. I’ll gladly pay Apple a percentage to do that for me.
- wayneftw 6y agoYou'd still have that choice if there was an alternative app store or side loading. Facebook is easy to ignore. As an app developer there is no way for me to ignore half of all phone users in the US.
- BuckRogers 6y agoThe developers aren’t the important party. Many of us that love our iPhones partially do because of the AppStore. I don’t want anything to change, it works very well. Developers like Epic should be thanking them. I wouldn’t have a smartphone if iOS didn’t exist.
- wayneftw 6y agoThat still doesn't explain how giving us a choice of app stores causes a problem. If you don't like some other app store, don't shop there. And, as an iPhone user myself I want this option. So, you certainly do not speak for all iPhone users.
- op03 6y agoConcerned about them pfft they need to be locked up. Zuckerberg level mindless ambition wastes everyones time and energy. He has no clue what outcomes his network is going to produce tomorrow morning but stands around acting as if what comes out of his head matters. Its like watching the guy in Jurassic Park still believing things can be fixed after the kids are missing, the power is gone and the raptors have escaped. Its really mind boggling the patience people have show this buffoon running essentially an unapproved social psyc experiment on 2 billion lab rats, imposing a half baked reward system, that amplifies randomness.
- thethimble 6y agoIt seems like it amplifies superficiality, insecurity, consumerism, and dogmatism - things that feel much worse that randomness.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago> half baked reward system, that amplifies randomness. The very point is that it doesn't amplify randomness but content that provokes emotions.
- ffhhj 6y ago> 2 billion lab rats Agreed with what you said, but that's a very inflated figure FB wants us to believe. Most people I know have 2 or more accounts, also all those profiles of dead people, companies manage other fake accounts for promotion, and there are spam actors that run huge amounts of fake profiles. So there might be around 100 million rat labs or way less.
- birksherty 6y agoNo way, everyone in India has one except children. Population 1.3 billions, highest number of youths. 100 million is wrong.
- edanm 6y ago> Its really mind boggling the patience people have show this buffoon running essentially an unapproved social psyc experiment on 2 billion lab rats, imposing a half baked reward system, that amplifies randomness. I happily use Facebook (as does almost everyone I know). I don't consider myself a lab rat, and think it's kind of an offensive way to view your fellow humans in general. You don't need to be so morally outraged on my behalf - Facebook provides a product that I love using, and I use it, with the understanding that they get advertising money out of it. I'm fine with that transaction, as are most people. You don't have some secret knowledge that I don't have (I imagine) - I know the same things as you, and yet I decide that for myself, using FB is worth the tradeoff of the privacy/advertisements vs. the product itself. The same as when I decide to eat ice cream, even though it's bad for me. Do you want to put ice cream makers in prison too on my behalf?
- sto_hristo 6y agoApple rents you a platform. You have 0 control over it, have 0 insight what is going on, anything that you do with what you've rented is explicitly allowed by Apple. They make, bake, and cut the bread and you dance whatever song they play. Facebook is just a site you don't pay anything to use.
- ratsmack 6y agoGoogle is no different than Facebook in this regard, just a horse of a different color.