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I think this speaks to the power of defaults. 96% of users have not turned this on because they didn't even know that its disabled, and when an app asks you if

I think this speaks to the power of defaults. 96% of users have not turned this on because they didn't even know that its disabled, and when an app asks you if they can track you, the response is going to be a strong no. The reality is that FB's entire business model has been predicated on the default being that tracking is allowed. If this holds, this will be cataclysmic for FB. You can't have a huge portion of your wealthy user base just disappear and expect advertisers to keep paying what they were paying previously. BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out.

NightMKoder 5y ago
Im not sure why this is cataclysmic for FB - they’re mostly a first party advertiser. App tracking transparency doesn’t prevent Facebook from running ads on their own apps and using SkAdNetwork to track conversions (which works even if the user opts out). Granted the fidelity and latency of SkAdNetwork is a concern but hardly enough to materially impact the bottom line.
- beagle3 5y ago
  FB SDK is basically everywhere (including e.g. Google's Waze app), and the data is incredibly useful to FB to segment users.
Lammy 5y ago
I don’t understand being strongly against one type of default tracking but strongly for another. Tracking is tracking as far as I’m concerned and I’m against all of it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
HeyImAlex 5y ago
Is there anything to stop gating features/whole apps behind having tracking enabled?
- NightMKoder 5y ago
  The Apple policy requires that opting out is not treated adversely. See https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-use/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-...
nothis 5y ago
I don't really get how trends like this one (and IMO that's just the tip of the ice berg – this is companies preparing for the inevitable legislation that will make most forms of tracking illegal within the next 10 years) don't affect facebook or google stock. This IMO makes two scenarios likely: 1) The market is currently just dragging along, hoping this will all go away and we're really in a major ad-bubble that's about to pop. 2) Tracking... isn't that profitable after all. All the personalized tracking shit can be replaced with a simple "users who clicked on canon printer also clicked on cheap ink refill kits" type of model that gets the same results or better. Which also puts into question a lot of what FB and Google are actually doing.
- bserge 5y ago
  > All the personalized tracking shit can be replaced with a simple "users who clicked on canon printer also clicked on cheap ink refill kits" type of model That was how it was done for a long time. Advanced tracking was just a way to try and keep increasing revenue. Whether it worked or not, only the higher ups at these companies can tell... probably.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    And as an advertiser, I confirm losing a lot of money trying to advertise, not seeing revenue. Choosing to advertise 25-34 males (in addition to being the definition of sexism/ageism) who type “Jira time tracking” (because “Jira” keyword is reserved anyway) is useless. I want to put an ad on websites that talk about Jira. And that requires no tracking at all.
    - coldcode 5y ago
      It's only a big issue if you try to advertise a specific item on a generic platform; but if you can target websites that cater to your specific business, you really don't need anything more. Of course it means ad networks lose out since they can't just target specific people, they have to only target specific websites or apps. Personally in the old days of newspaper ad's, I always wondered what the point was of anything smaller than a whole page; what is the point of a 1x1 inch ad in the midst of 200 others. Even today I ignore 99% of what's on the page other than the content.
hparadiz 5y ago
> BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out. If Google or Apple remotely installed a hastily built tracker controlled by a government agency on my device I'd be pretty miffed about it.
- azinman2 5y ago
  Except it wasn’t hastily built, and the tracking isn’t controlled by a gov agency in the nefarious way that you’re implying.
  - hparadiz 5y ago
    I've seen all sorts of solutions put together by municipalities big and small from counties to states to countries and everything in between during this whole Covid thing and the thing that struck me is how easy it was for them to essentially track you with perfect precision and tie it back to a phone number. > Except it wasn’t hastily built They were built very hastily with little oversight with iterative beta cycles in plain sight. > nefarious way that you’re implying I didn't imply any nefarious intent what so over. All I implied is that your location data is being tracked and put into some database somewhere and you don't control it. Who has this data? No idea. How will it be used a year from now? 10 years from now? No idea. Does it draw more energy on my device or use more processing power? No idea. That alone is enough to not use it.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      When you say Apple or Google installed, I assume you’re talking about exposure notifications that they built. I work at Apple and witnessed it. Nothing about it was slapdash and privacy was #1. In this system, it’s not easy at all for government agencies to track you. That was very explicitly part of the design, as is shown in all the public docs. It’s not like how it works is a secret [1]. Your location isn’t being tracked and put into a database. Nothing about exposure notifications uses location. [1] https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing
shmatt 5y ago
In Israel, covid exposure notification was can't-ever-opt-out. What happened next was people stopped going out with their phones, because any exposure would result in a Police enforced 14 day quarantine
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  Its a bit shocking. I heard of a gathering that the police caught, because they noticed a large concentration of mobiles in one place.
- distribot 5y ago
  Is there anything written about this? I'm extremely skeptical that a big chunk of people in such a highly online country just left their phones at home. Maybe some of the Hardeim but I would guess 95+% of people wouldn't do this.
  - anders_p 5y ago
    Seriously? Why would you be so skeptical of that? Would you really bring your phone with you, when going out for a beer or coffee, even if it could easily result in you being forced to stay quarantined for 2 weeks? Is your smartphone really that important to you? Even though I have personally stayed socially distanced and worn a mask everywhere it was required, it makes perfect sense to me, after seeing how a lot of people have reacted to the pandemic, that a good portion of the population, would let their phone stay at home, so they would not risk a police enforced quarantine.
    - codebook 5y ago
      I do want to know whether I am exposed to COVId and get to be quarantined to not spread out the covid to others who I really take care of. Dont want to be a person that possibly make my family or friends sick.
      - beagle3 5y ago
        Most people do. However, the precision of the Israeli system (Based IIUC on cell tower triangulation) was not good, meaning you'd have a nontrivial chance of getting randomly get flagged for 14 days quarantine (with legal consequences for not doing so); Some people were flagged multiple times within 3 months, and it's not entirely clear what the rate of FP was, but it was nontrivial.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tannhauser23 5y ago
How is going to be 'cataclysmic' for FB? They can still serve up ads. The ads won't be as targeted as before, but they still have billions of users. Advertisers will spend money on the platform. Perhaps they'll have to spend more since they can't fine-tune the ads as much.
- rednerrus 5y ago
  The ability FB had to target ads directly to people was their biggest value add.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"I think this speaks to the power of defaults." Even more, it speaks to the power of removing choice. When app tracking is enabled by default it effectively removes choice because most users never touch settings (and may not even know they exist). Therefore users are not choosing anything. Someone else is choosing for them. "Tech" company employees will respond to criticism of their employer's behaviour with something like: "But users can choose to turn this off." That is not relevant if 96% are unaware of this "choice". The question is: why is tracking on by default. That was a choice the user did not make. Only when faced with a screen asking the user if she chooses to be tracked do we get a chance to find out what a user would choose. And even then, developers will use "dark patterns" to manipulate the decision-making process toward a self-serving outcome. Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether there should even be a setting to enable tracking. If the majority of users would choose to turn it off, if they were presented with the choice, then why even have it. This is essentially "privacy by design". This is no different than when developers argue to HN that it is not worth catering to the preferences of privacy-conscious or minimalist users since those users comprise such a small percentage of users overall. By the same token, it should not worth catering to the small percentange of users who want to be tracked.
- paledot 5y ago
  Depends on the tracking, IMO. Selling data to advertisers is a hard no, but as an independent developer, having access to crash logs and usage statistics is vital. Not only is it valuable to me, it provides legitimate value to my customers because it allows me to fix problems that they are experiencing or enhance the features they use the most. Still shouldn't be on by default, but asking up-front seems perfectly reasonable.
- Siira 5y ago
  If users don’t care enough to see the options available to them, it’s on them.
  - r3trohack3r 5y ago
    I feel like this isn’t respecting your user’s time. I’ve converted to opting out of relationships like this where possible; it’s not healthy. I wouldn’t enter a personal relationship on these grounds, I don’t know why I’d do it for some company. A service provider makes one decision and it impacts N users. A user consumes from M service providers. A user evaluating whether a service provider is trying to “pull one over” on them in the TOS costs M units of time, 1 unit per service provider. A service provider deciding to choose the cow path as the default saves N units of time and costs the service provider 1 unit. I engage with service providers that respect my time. If I suspect your default is user hostile, and provide a “we won’t exploit you in this relationship” as an option, I look elsewhere. This breaks down in places though. Example: I haven’t found a communication provider that doesn’t default to building a profile on me and selling it to anyone willing to pay. The lack of choice for me makes me wish a governing body would intervene and give me a marketplace where I didn’t have to waste my valuable time making sure the person I was engaging with wasn’t going to pull one over on me.
Spivak 5y ago
> BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out. Absolutely not. Using defaults because you know most people wont' change them to achieve a specific outcome that you, the default setter want, is exactly the same evil. Just because you're doing it for "good" doesn't justify it.
- woeirua 5y ago
  LOL. OK. How many lives could’ve been saved if everyone had Covid exposure notifications enabled during the pandemic? The answer is most certainly not zero. Maybe it’s hundreds or thousands.
1cvmask 5y ago
While Apple and it's ad business will be the biggest beneficiaries, it will not be a surprise if Google and FB also partially benefit. The clear losers will be all the smaller players.
rawrfml 5y ago
I'll give my perspective which I think is very different than the rest of the HN crowd here in the comments. I think this mainly stems from the fact that I'm probably much younger than a lot of the folks here. I do a lot of random shopping online... I opted into the FB tracking when I got the popup yesterday because I do FB/IG a lot and I click on interesting ads. Honestly, I tend to buy quite a bit from the ads that I see because they genuinely interest me, and a lot of them are from smaller businesses that I want to try out. If I see ads on FB/IG, at least I want them to be relevant to me rather than be generic.
- teitoklien 5y ago
  Which is great Now you have the choice to choose whether you want generic ads or personalised That’s what people wanted for so long The choice to choose , nothing more nothing less.
Too 5y ago
In the old Internet Explorer monopoly situation, Microsoft was forced to prompt the user which browser to use on first startup. It was not an option of choosing an alternative from the default, the order was random. Same for the default search engine. If this was setup in the same way i wonder what the ratio would be. With that i mean a fair yes/no choice, not the GDPR-joke where accept is a big green button and reject is hidden in confusing fine print 3 sub-pages deep.

NightMKoder 5y ago

Im not sure why this is cataclysmic for FB - they’re mostly a first party advertiser. App tracking transparency doesn’t prevent Facebook from running ads on their own apps and using SkAdNetwork to track conversions (which works even if the user opts out). Granted the fidelity and latency of SkAdNetwork is a concern but hardly enough to materially impact the bottom line.

beagle3 5y ago
FB SDK is basically everywhere (including e.g. Google's Waze app), and the data is incredibly useful to FB to segment users.

Lammy 5y ago

I don’t understand being strongly against one type of default tracking but strongly for another. Tracking is tracking as far as I’m concerned and I’m against all of it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

HeyImAlex 5y ago

Is there anything to stop gating features/whole apps behind having tracking enabled?

NightMKoder 5y ago
The Apple policy requires that opting out is not treated adversely. See https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-use/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-...

nothis 5y ago

I don't really get how trends like this one (and IMO that's just the tip of the ice berg – this is companies preparing for the inevitable legislation that will make most forms of tracking illegal within the next 10 years) don't affect facebook or google stock. This IMO makes two scenarios likely: 1) The market is currently just dragging along, hoping this will all go away and we're really in a major ad-bubble that's about to pop. 2) Tracking... isn't that profitable after all. All the personalized tracking shit can be replaced with a simple "users who clicked on canon printer also clicked on cheap ink refill kits" type of model that gets the same results or better. Which also puts into question a lot of what FB and Google are actually doing.

bserge 5y ago
> All the personalized tracking shit can be replaced with a simple "users who clicked on canon printer also clicked on cheap ink refill kits" type of model That was how it was done for a long time. Advanced tracking was just a way to try and keep increasing revenue. Whether it worked or not, only the higher ups at these companies can tell... probably.
- laurent92 5y ago
  And as an advertiser, I confirm losing a lot of money trying to advertise, not seeing revenue. Choosing to advertise 25-34 males (in addition to being the definition of sexism/ageism) who type “Jira time tracking” (because “Jira” keyword is reserved anyway) is useless. I want to put an ad on websites that talk about Jira. And that requires no tracking at all.
  - coldcode 5y ago
    It's only a big issue if you try to advertise a specific item on a generic platform; but if you can target websites that cater to your specific business, you really don't need anything more. Of course it means ad networks lose out since they can't just target specific people, they have to only target specific websites or apps. Personally in the old days of newspaper ad's, I always wondered what the point was of anything smaller than a whole page; what is the point of a 1x1 inch ad in the midst of 200 others. Even today I ignore 99% of what's on the page other than the content.

hparadiz 5y ago

> BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out. If Google or Apple remotely installed a hastily built tracker controlled by a government agency on my device I'd be pretty miffed about it.

azinman2 5y ago
Except it wasn’t hastily built, and the tracking isn’t controlled by a gov agency in the nefarious way that you’re implying.
- hparadiz 5y ago
  I've seen all sorts of solutions put together by municipalities big and small from counties to states to countries and everything in between during this whole Covid thing and the thing that struck me is how easy it was for them to essentially track you with perfect precision and tie it back to a phone number. > Except it wasn’t hastily built They were built very hastily with little oversight with iterative beta cycles in plain sight. > nefarious way that you’re implying I didn't imply any nefarious intent what so over. All I implied is that your location data is being tracked and put into some database somewhere and you don't control it. Who has this data? No idea. How will it be used a year from now? 10 years from now? No idea. Does it draw more energy on my device or use more processing power? No idea. That alone is enough to not use it.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    When you say Apple or Google installed, I assume you’re talking about exposure notifications that they built. I work at Apple and witnessed it. Nothing about it was slapdash and privacy was #1. In this system, it’s not easy at all for government agencies to track you. That was very explicitly part of the design, as is shown in all the public docs. It’s not like how it works is a secret [1]. Your location isn’t being tracked and put into a database. Nothing about exposure notifications uses location. [1] https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing

shmatt 5y ago

In Israel, covid exposure notification was can't-ever-opt-out. What happened next was people stopped going out with their phones, because any exposure would result in a Police enforced 14 day quarantine

FridayoLeary 5y ago
Its a bit shocking. I heard of a gathering that the police caught, because they noticed a large concentration of mobiles in one place.
distribot 5y ago
Is there anything written about this? I'm extremely skeptical that a big chunk of people in such a highly online country just left their phones at home. Maybe some of the Hardeim but I would guess 95+% of people wouldn't do this.
- anders_p 5y ago
  Seriously? Why would you be so skeptical of that? Would you really bring your phone with you, when going out for a beer or coffee, even if it could easily result in you being forced to stay quarantined for 2 weeks? Is your smartphone really that important to you? Even though I have personally stayed socially distanced and worn a mask everywhere it was required, it makes perfect sense to me, after seeing how a lot of people have reacted to the pandemic, that a good portion of the population, would let their phone stay at home, so they would not risk a police enforced quarantine.
  - codebook 5y ago
    I do want to know whether I am exposed to COVId and get to be quarantined to not spread out the covid to others who I really take care of. Dont want to be a person that possibly make my family or friends sick.
    - beagle3 5y ago
      Most people do. However, the precision of the Israeli system (Based IIUC on cell tower triangulation) was not good, meaning you'd have a nontrivial chance of getting randomly get flagged for 14 days quarantine (with legal consequences for not doing so); Some people were flagged multiple times within 3 months, and it's not entirely clear what the rate of FP was, but it was nontrivial.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tannhauser23 5y ago

How is going to be 'cataclysmic' for FB? They can still serve up ads. The ads won't be as targeted as before, but they still have billions of users. Advertisers will spend money on the platform. Perhaps they'll have to spend more since they can't fine-tune the ads as much.

rednerrus 5y ago
The ability FB had to target ads directly to people was their biggest value add.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"I think this speaks to the power of defaults." Even more, it speaks to the power of removing choice. When app tracking is enabled by default it effectively removes choice because most users never touch settings (and may not even know they exist). Therefore users are not choosing anything. Someone else is choosing for them. "Tech" company employees will respond to criticism of their employer's behaviour with something like: "But users can choose to turn this off." That is not relevant if 96% are unaware of this "choice". The question is: why is tracking on by default. That was a choice the user did not make. Only when faced with a screen asking the user if she chooses to be tracked do we get a chance to find out what a user would choose. And even then, developers will use "dark patterns" to manipulate the decision-making process toward a self-serving outcome. Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether there should even be a setting to enable tracking. If the majority of users would choose to turn it off, if they were presented with the choice, then why even have it. This is essentially "privacy by design". This is no different than when developers argue to HN that it is not worth catering to the preferences of privacy-conscious or minimalist users since those users comprise such a small percentage of users overall. By the same token, it should not worth catering to the small percentange of users who want to be tracked.

paledot 5y ago
Depends on the tracking, IMO. Selling data to advertisers is a hard no, but as an independent developer, having access to crash logs and usage statistics is vital. Not only is it valuable to me, it provides legitimate value to my customers because it allows me to fix problems that they are experiencing or enhance the features they use the most. Still shouldn't be on by default, but asking up-front seems perfectly reasonable.
Siira 5y ago
If users don’t care enough to see the options available to them, it’s on them.
- r3trohack3r 5y ago
  I feel like this isn’t respecting your user’s time. I’ve converted to opting out of relationships like this where possible; it’s not healthy. I wouldn’t enter a personal relationship on these grounds, I don’t know why I’d do it for some company. A service provider makes one decision and it impacts N users. A user consumes from M service providers. A user evaluating whether a service provider is trying to “pull one over” on them in the TOS costs M units of time, 1 unit per service provider. A service provider deciding to choose the cow path as the default saves N units of time and costs the service provider 1 unit. I engage with service providers that respect my time. If I suspect your default is user hostile, and provide a “we won’t exploit you in this relationship” as an option, I look elsewhere. This breaks down in places though. Example: I haven’t found a communication provider that doesn’t default to building a profile on me and selling it to anyone willing to pay. The lack of choice for me makes me wish a governing body would intervene and give me a marketplace where I didn’t have to waste my valuable time making sure the person I was engaging with wasn’t going to pull one over on me.

Spivak 5y ago

> BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out. Absolutely not. Using defaults because you know most people wont' change them to achieve a specific outcome that you, the default setter want, is exactly the same evil. Just because you're doing it for "good" doesn't justify it.

woeirua 5y ago
LOL. OK. How many lives could’ve been saved if everyone had Covid exposure notifications enabled during the pandemic? The answer is most certainly not zero. Maybe it’s hundreds or thousands.

1cvmask 5y ago

While Apple and it's ad business will be the biggest beneficiaries, it will not be a surprise if Google and FB also partially benefit. The clear losers will be all the smaller players.

rawrfml 5y ago

I'll give my perspective which I think is very different than the rest of the HN crowd here in the comments. I think this mainly stems from the fact that I'm probably much younger than a lot of the folks here. I do a lot of random shopping online... I opted into the FB tracking when I got the popup yesterday because I do FB/IG a lot and I click on interesting ads. Honestly, I tend to buy quite a bit from the ads that I see because they genuinely interest me, and a lot of them are from smaller businesses that I want to try out. If I see ads on FB/IG, at least I want them to be relevant to me rather than be generic.

teitoklien 5y ago
Which is great Now you have the choice to choose whether you want generic ads or personalised That’s what people wanted for so long The choice to choose , nothing more nothing less.

Too 5y ago

In the old Internet Explorer monopoly situation, Microsoft was forced to prompt the user which browser to use on first startup. It was not an option of choosing an alternative from the default, the order was random. Same for the default search engine. If this was setup in the same way i wonder what the ratio would be. With that i mean a fair yes/no choice, not the GDPR-joke where accept is a big green button and reject is hidden in confusing fine print 3 sub-pages deep.