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Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

306 points by devnerd239 5y ago

commie123 5y ago
Fauci is a fucking fraud piece of shit and he must DIE.
diogenesjunior 5y ago
Wow, Google finally decided to do something right.
- newuser46547 5y ago
  They are doing it to kill off competition, not because they care about privacy.
  - razius 5y ago
    Yeah, this is what I'm thinking as well. Isn't this a blatant anti-trust violation?
  - insert_coin 5y ago
    Does it matter?
- nosequel 5y ago
  After exhausting all other options.
- chimen 5y ago
  It's not right - It is for the end user I mean but the basic idea did not spawn from a need to make right with their users. They aspire for market domination as well by impeding competition. I don't believe that this will affect their tracking though.
- j_san 5y ago
  May just be because Max Schrems filed a complaint for the french data protection authority against the tracking id.
- smhenderson 5y ago
  Until it's Opt-In by default I don't see this as doing anything right, just doing something to get some attention.
- spinny 5y ago
  Killing competition and dominating the market??
- powerapple 5y ago
  Google finally decided to do something right under pressure coming from Apple. I can't praise enough for Apple though. Yes, of course, Apple's product is not user, so naturally its interests may align better with users. Still, this push for privacy is going to have a long term impact in the industry.
faitswulff 5y ago
> However, if Mark Zuckerberg goes back on the drawing board to figure what went wrong, he’ll probably realize that data breaches and privacy awareness aren’t the causes of an impending downfall. > Instead, a lack of effort in developing their own operating system a decade ago might be Facebook’s biggest regret. And this has come back to bite them today. Crazy that it came to this.
- sneak 5y ago
  Ultimately every platform is about control. With the situation wrt bonzai buddy and a million search bars on every '95 box, treacherous/trustworthy DRM-everywhere computing was eventually inevitable. Enter the iPhone/iOS and ChromeOS. (Android and Windows still have an escape hatch, and are still plagued with malware. macOS's escape hatch is basically irrelevant at this point, to the point of nonexistence.) In those circumstances, if you aren't publishing the OS and holding the secret keys to the certs in bootloaders, you are only a sharecropper, and your access to the namespace of programs that are allowed to run on end user devices is entirely outside of your control. Your milkshake is now someone else's. Epic and Facebook are upset about this, understandably. I personally believe that people should be able to run Facebook spyware on the devices they bought, even if it is worse for them and the world. We aren't free if we aren't free to act against our own interests.
- insert_coin 5y ago
  Is it that crazy? It's the reason Google not only developed Android, but Chrome, ChromeOS, Fuchsia, the Google speaker thing and all that, and Samsung has Tizen, which is sort of their plan B, of plan F or whatever, and Amazon developed the Fire line, Alexa, AWS, the speaker thing, etc. They know they can't trust each other. Even Apple had to develop their own maps! It's really a surprise Facebook was so blindsided by this, they should've known better.
  - bredren 5y ago
    When the initial FB OS attempt failed, I think Zuck realized the investment to make something work was beyond the capital he was willing to invest. When FB released its first “phone” it was still unwilling to take mobile seriously. They left the head of mobile position open for a very long time. Zuck himself has said he missed mobile. With the IPO around that time, making some major strategic investment in tech was not an option when the company was likely under a lot of pressure to make the stock price only go one way. You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it. It’s taken major investment over many years to get that app sorted out and it still needs a lot of work. I think FB did know better they just had a competing problem of revenue growth that was at odds with laying claim to the future. If anything, I think FB is making an ongoing strategic mistake in lack of any obvious work to establish an Alphabet structure. FB can recover by building a social network that monetizes via payments and subscriptions. This could be hooked up to a new fortnite-seeded metaverse and run exclusively through oculus. The opportunity for a FB-parent Corp that distinguishes a new, private network away from the damaged brand of FB is still there. Leadership just has to be way more daring now in what it’s willing to do. It really has to or the ruling metaverse social network will be built by someone else for Apple hardware.
animex 5y ago
If they got Google to turn it off by default, it would be right, but how many users are going to do that or even know about this. The average citizen will continue to fund Facebook until they default it to off.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  Exactly. Apple has allowed users to reset their advertiser ID to a new random value as often as they liked since 2012, and has allowed users to go into the settings and turn off access to the advertiser ID (so that every app will see an advertiser ID of all zeroes) since 2018. It wasn't until Apple made the Advertiser ID something that you actively had to opt into that the freakout began.
mtgx 5y ago
> To put it straight, Google’s advertising ID (GAID) can no longer be accessed by advertisers if the user disables it from their settings. > Now that Google is pulling the plug by making GAID almost obsolete, Facebook is about to stare at a bigger loss. If their loss from iOS 14 was in the range of $80bn, Android the more dominant platform will only increase their losses and woes. Almost obsolete? This means users have to OPT-OUT of tracking as opposed to OPTING-IN to tracking on iOS. The two "solutions" could not be more different. I hate all of these new articles saying that "Google joins Apple" in restricting FB. Apple is restricting FB 95%, Google is restricting it maybe 5% at best.
- smrtinsert 5y ago
  Putting their toes in the water, for sure.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure >40% of US and EU users already do. That's not 100. But it's also not even close to insignificant.
anoncow 5y ago
Does this mean that ad-tracking data control will move from individual app developers to system owners (Google for Android/Chrome on the desktop and Apple for iOS)? Facebook must be ruing spending time on Oculus instead of developing their own mobile hardware ecosystem.
- babypuncher 5y ago
  In the case of iOS, Apple's recent changes were specifically meant to make the platform's built in ad tracking worse for advertisers.
rhapsodic 5y ago
Just two days ago I bought my very first iPhone. Apple was selling privacy as a feature, so I was buying. I wish I'd seen this first, I might have stuck with Android/Samsung, which I prefer over iOS/iPhone..
______- 5y ago
> “Senator, We Run Ads” was the iconic response from Facebook’s CEO > And that’s how Facebook still manages to stay free of cost today. I enjoy articles that explain to the layman how the sausage is made. I've always wondered: if enough people know they're the product and know how Facebook makes money, would they delete their account in a fit of rage or continue to use it, knowing that they're victims of surveillance capitalism? I know for me, I cancelled my account after looking at the 'interests' page and discovered how strangely accurate it was. They really can get to know you on an intimate level. The more you engage with the app, the bigger and more accurate the profiling. More people need to visit that interests page and decide if they want to continue using Facebook.
- parthdesai 5y ago
  Anecdotal, but I think people on HN tend to care about privacy more than the general population. In my friend group, where no one else works in tech, everyone still actively uses facebook. And I haven't even started to talk about Instagram and Whatsapp. An average person doesn't care about it as much as you think or you would like to think that they do. Heck a part of me is happy that I get relevant ads rather than some random ad.
  - staplers 5y ago
    Not working in tech means it's unlikely you know how the sausage is made. Similar to factory farmed meat. I'm sure if you worked there, you'd be more likely to avoid eating it.
  - croes 5y ago
    Because all they hear is that the data is about ads. But it's also about the prices and the payment methods. They don't realize there things they never know about because they are not in the target group for the product, and not because a lack of interest but because they are not considered as a worthy customer.
  - alexanderdmitri 5y ago
    Many people on HN are the ones making the "sausage" grandparent refers to. Maybe the more general public still eats the free food and looks the other way to give the benefit of the doubt, but it's surely a signal that a good deal of people involved with the factory process and its engineering are having a hard time stomaching it.
j_san 5y ago
Max Schrems (with his group noyb) filed a complaint against the "Android Advertising Id" / "Google Advertising Id" at the french data protection authority sometime around april. May be related.
pavlov 5y ago
The article manages to contradict itself at every turn. For example: "Only yesterday, Google announced its plans to make advertising ID an opt-in feature." A few paragraphs later: "Google’s opt-out ad-tracking popup isn’t on the forefront like in iOS. Instead, it’s buried deep in the Google Play Service settings — which could be difficult for the non-tech savvy user to find out." And this opener: "Facebook has a market evaluation of over 930 billion dollars today." Versus the conclusion: "Clearly, this chain of events is about to trigger an irreversible slump in Facebook’s advertisement business — making their ambitions of becoming the fastest trillion-dollar tech firm a far-fetched dream." Is it really a far-fetched dream when the stock price only needs a 7.5% bump from its current level?
- fireball_blaze 5y ago
  On 1, I don't think it's a contradiction. It's opt-in by default, and to actually find the setting to opt-in, it's buried deep in the Play Services settings. That's how I read it.
  - croon 5y ago
    But one says "opt-out".
  - pavlov 5y ago
    It's opt-out: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6048248 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... Which undermines the whole premise of the article.
    - fireball_blaze 5y ago
      Wow, then yes -- this is a non-story.
    - pentagrama 5y ago
      I just checked my Android device and the opt-out looks like this https://imgur.com/a/1aaN4Ko https://imgur.com/a/1aaN4Ko I find interesting the UI, the user have to "enable" the opt-out, not enable the opt-in. It shows how crucial can be this simple switch for the ad industry immoral surveillance status quo. I guess the opt-out is disabled by default, I think I enabled it some time ago checking the phone settings.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
how long before facebook announces their own browser a la chrome browser and their own phone os a la android ?
- fireball_blaze 5y ago
  Why would people use a Facebook browser? And Facebook already launched a phone of sorts, with HTC in 2013. Huge flop. https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopped/ https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopp...
- kreddor 5y ago
  Oh, I remember the "HTC First". That didn't go too well. Seems like that boat sailed a long time ago.
chadlavi 5y ago
isn't this google's entire business model?
andjd 5y ago
It's really hard to trust google on anything when it comes to ads and privacy. Will these changes stop Google from tracking and targeting you? It seems that Facebook might have a much stronger case against Google here, since it's using its success in the smartphone OS market to hobble its biggest competitor in the digital ads market.
- poidos 5y ago
  > It's really hard to trust google... I feel the same way; very little chance Google stops this unless it doesn't affect them at all (either by having determined these identifiers aren't particularly effective, or by having cooked up some new scheme.)
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    But of course it won't, this is a (similar to Apple's) play to reduce the amount of data other ad platforms get.
    - manmal 5y ago
      Apple’s tracking rules also apply to their own apps.
      - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        Sure, but Apple have first party data on who you are and what you do on IOS, so they don't need IDFA. Google are similar on Android.
- swiley 5y ago
  Yup, that's exactly what's going on here. Google wants exclusive root on the web the way it has it on the phones they rent to you.
- zo1 5y ago
  Google doesn't need to track you. They've shaped and driven the web to necessitate their own continued existence. They've also slowly been turning the web into essentially a walled-garden.
whoisjuan 5y ago
I don’t think there’s a nicd way to say this, but this article is trash. Just a bunch of factless assertions, sensationalized statements and evident contradictions. I think moving forward the term “Substack Journalist” will generally be used to refer to the authors of this low quality and factless reporting, that gets dangerously close to misinformation. The same way that “Soundcloud Rapper” refers to the low quality and amateur rappers that upload their music to Soundcloud (although the latter seems to have some outliers).
papito 5y ago
Summary: Facebook is fucked.
- tibiahurried 5y ago
  About time!
manigandham 5y ago
10+ year adtech veteran here. This article is nonsense, written by someone without any industry experience. Facebook has billions of users on several different apps. And people log into these apps to use them. FB, Instagram, Whatsapp. Cross-app tracking is not a big deal, they already know who you are. The big hits are going to be a reduction in data collected by other apps fed to Facebook, and in measurement and attribution (like app install ads). If anything, it can actually strengthen their walled-garden data moat when advertisers realize that it's still the most efficient way to reach users. Their last earnings report shows significant growth and is the opposite of a struggling business.
- swiley 5y ago
  A lot of people forget that Facebook ends up on your iphone via dylibs included in almost every other app.
  - xanaxagoras 5y ago
    Wait, what?
    - swiley 5y ago
      Sorry, I'm not sure what part of that wasn't clear. Facebook ships useful libraries to app developers as binaries and they use that to get code on everyone's phone in order to add to their data collection apparatus. I'm pretty sure they're not the only ones who do that either. It's a pretty effective method to get around app sandboxes.
      - NationalPark 5y ago
        Which libraries in particular report ad/identity telemetry to Facebook?
        vlovich123 5y ago
        https://github.com/facebook/facebook-android-sdk/ https://github.com/facebook/facebook-android-sdk/
aofeisheng 5y ago
To me these news are like: die, Facebook, die! But perhaps Facebook will eventually find a new way out anyway.
sequoia 5y ago
Through shrewd acquisitions, blatantly copying the exclusivity of rivals (read: Snapchat, TikTok), Facebook managed to become an integral part of our lives in less than a decade. This is just plain stupid. Yes Facebook is a Big Evil Corp but they created a ton of value through original product development, not just “shrewd acquisitions” and ripping off other products. Didn’t read past this point, author blew their credibility here.
alejohausner 5y ago
I stopped reading when I counted ten grammatical errors and colloquialisms. Not coincidentally, the article is empty of content.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Ad driven journalism is not great for readers. Lots of clickbait, very little substance, baseless conclusions, hand wavy numbers, etc. But it made the frontpage of HN so I guess their SEO is spot on. As others are pointing out, people sign in to Facebook apps. As soon as they do, that apple & google device ID are kind of redundant. The only place where these ids are useful is when users use other application to access content and the analytics for that somehow end up in Facebook's data lake. That is indeed something they've been doing as well but also something that has been getting harder due to increasing restrictions both technically and legally (e.g. GDPR). Facebook might huff and puff a little but they'll be fine. What this will accomplish however is decimating the competition that lack their own walled gardens from which to gather tracking data and are very dependent on Google and Facebook telling them who is who. Which is also why Google is doing this. And of course the latter two have had a strategy of strengthening the walls around their walled gardens. This will likely push more content providers inside these walls. I'm hoping the EU and the US might be able to force tearing these walls down a little. Google trying to monopolize news has been something they've been fighting for a while. And of course both Facebook and Google are creating a bit of a privileged/exclusive situation for themselves here. Of course it will be years before most of their users get to play with Android 12. So, it's going to be slow process of this gradually getting harder for companies to work with rather than an overnight cut off. Unless of course they roll this out to older versions as well.
  - babypuncher 5y ago
    I don't think users take much issue with services collecting data that they feed directly into the system. I find it hard to believe anyone would not expect Facebook to be aware of what their users are doing within Facebook's walls. The issue has always been that Facebook is tracking you on non-Facebook websites and apps, even if you don't have a Facebook account. From a user's perspective, they never told Facebook what products they were looking at on Etsy, so Facebook collecting that data feels like a violation of their privacy. Things like GDPR and Apple's new IDFA policy do neuter this considerably.
failwhaleshark 5y ago
War on Facebook?
sleepybrett 5y ago
Does that apply to their own advertising ingestion or just third parties? Better question, does it apply to theirs as well but do they have workarounds for themselves?
NicoJuicy 5y ago
There is actually a quick workaround. Developers are going to apply Google login way more.
lupire 5y ago
Actual source: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6048248 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
ad8e 5y ago
Here's a link from Sept 2020 about how this was expected long in advance: https://mobiledevmemo.com/what-will-googles-deprecation-of-gaid-look-like/ https://mobiledevmemo.com/what-will-googles-deprecation-of-g... The key word here is "consensus". He's reporting that others held this expectation, not just himself. This step by Google does not yet go as far as predicted; there is a big difference between a modal opt-in/opt-out and an opt-out in settings. Here's a link speculating on the impact of Apple's IDFA deprecation on Facebook, from January: https://mobiledevmemo.com/facebook-may-take-revenue-hit-from-apple-privacy-changes/ https://mobiledevmemo.com/facebook-may-take-revenue-hit-from... It carries strong parallels to what is in-process at Google. A few ad experts I follow say that Facebook and Google will claim increasing dominance in the ad space. Their logic is that as each ad vendor loses third party information, comparative advantage will favor companies with strong first party information. This will drive more ads toward Facebook as a relative share, even if they are still losing overall. I have no information to judge to what extent this claim holds.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I'm very pleased to hear this and it blows my mind that ad IDs were built into mobile operating systems in the first place.

306 points by devnerd239 5y ago

commie123 5y ago

Fauci is a fucking fraud piece of shit and he must DIE.

diogenesjunior 5y ago

Wow, Google finally decided to do something right.

newuser46547 5y ago
They are doing it to kill off competition, not because they care about privacy.
- razius 5y ago
  Yeah, this is what I'm thinking as well. Isn't this a blatant anti-trust violation?
- insert_coin 5y ago
  Does it matter?
nosequel 5y ago
After exhausting all other options.
chimen 5y ago
It's not right - It is for the end user I mean but the basic idea did not spawn from a need to make right with their users. They aspire for market domination as well by impeding competition. I don't believe that this will affect their tracking though.
j_san 5y ago
May just be because Max Schrems filed a complaint for the french data protection authority against the tracking id.
smhenderson 5y ago
Until it's Opt-In by default I don't see this as doing anything right, just doing something to get some attention.
spinny 5y ago
Killing competition and dominating the market??
powerapple 5y ago
Google finally decided to do something right under pressure coming from Apple. I can't praise enough for Apple though. Yes, of course, Apple's product is not user, so naturally its interests may align better with users. Still, this push for privacy is going to have a long term impact in the industry.

faitswulff 5y ago

> However, if Mark Zuckerberg goes back on the drawing board to figure what went wrong, he’ll probably realize that data breaches and privacy awareness aren’t the causes of an impending downfall. > Instead, a lack of effort in developing their own operating system a decade ago might be Facebook’s biggest regret. And this has come back to bite them today. Crazy that it came to this.

sneak 5y ago
Ultimately every platform is about control. With the situation wrt bonzai buddy and a million search bars on every '95 box, treacherous/trustworthy DRM-everywhere computing was eventually inevitable. Enter the iPhone/iOS and ChromeOS. (Android and Windows still have an escape hatch, and are still plagued with malware. macOS's escape hatch is basically irrelevant at this point, to the point of nonexistence.) In those circumstances, if you aren't publishing the OS and holding the secret keys to the certs in bootloaders, you are only a sharecropper, and your access to the namespace of programs that are allowed to run on end user devices is entirely outside of your control. Your milkshake is now someone else's. Epic and Facebook are upset about this, understandably. I personally believe that people should be able to run Facebook spyware on the devices they bought, even if it is worse for them and the world. We aren't free if we aren't free to act against our own interests.
insert_coin 5y ago
Is it that crazy? It's the reason Google not only developed Android, but Chrome, ChromeOS, Fuchsia, the Google speaker thing and all that, and Samsung has Tizen, which is sort of their plan B, of plan F or whatever, and Amazon developed the Fire line, Alexa, AWS, the speaker thing, etc. They know they can't trust each other. Even Apple had to develop their own maps! It's really a surprise Facebook was so blindsided by this, they should've known better.
- bredren 5y ago
  When the initial FB OS attempt failed, I think Zuck realized the investment to make something work was beyond the capital he was willing to invest. When FB released its first “phone” it was still unwilling to take mobile seriously. They left the head of mobile position open for a very long time. Zuck himself has said he missed mobile. With the IPO around that time, making some major strategic investment in tech was not an option when the company was likely under a lot of pressure to make the stock price only go one way. You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it. It’s taken major investment over many years to get that app sorted out and it still needs a lot of work. I think FB did know better they just had a competing problem of revenue growth that was at odds with laying claim to the future. If anything, I think FB is making an ongoing strategic mistake in lack of any obvious work to establish an Alphabet structure. FB can recover by building a social network that monetizes via payments and subscriptions. This could be hooked up to a new fortnite-seeded metaverse and run exclusively through oculus. The opportunity for a FB-parent Corp that distinguishes a new, private network away from the damaged brand of FB is still there. Leadership just has to be way more daring now in what it’s willing to do. It really has to or the ruling metaverse social network will be built by someone else for Apple hardware.

animex 5y ago

If they got Google to turn it off by default, it would be right, but how many users are going to do that or even know about this. The average citizen will continue to fund Facebook until they default it to off.

GeekyBear 5y ago
Exactly. Apple has allowed users to reset their advertiser ID to a new random value as often as they liked since 2012, and has allowed users to go into the settings and turn off access to the advertiser ID (so that every app will see an advertiser ID of all zeroes) since 2018. It wasn't until Apple made the Advertiser ID something that you actively had to opt into that the freakout began.

mtgx 5y ago

> To put it straight, Google’s advertising ID (GAID) can no longer be accessed by advertisers if the user disables it from their settings. > Now that Google is pulling the plug by making GAID almost obsolete, Facebook is about to stare at a bigger loss. If their loss from iOS 14 was in the range of $80bn, Android the more dominant platform will only increase their losses and woes. Almost obsolete? This means users have to OPT-OUT of tracking as opposed to OPTING-IN to tracking on iOS. The two "solutions" could not be more different. I hate all of these new articles saying that "Google joins Apple" in restricting FB. Apple is restricting FB 95%, Google is restricting it maybe 5% at best.

smrtinsert 5y ago
Putting their toes in the water, for sure.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
I'm pretty sure >40% of US and EU users already do. That's not 100. But it's also not even close to insignificant.

anoncow 5y ago

Does this mean that ad-tracking data control will move from individual app developers to system owners (Google for Android/Chrome on the desktop and Apple for iOS)? Facebook must be ruing spending time on Oculus instead of developing their own mobile hardware ecosystem.

babypuncher 5y ago
In the case of iOS, Apple's recent changes were specifically meant to make the platform's built in ad tracking worse for advertisers.

rhapsodic 5y ago

Just two days ago I bought my very first iPhone. Apple was selling privacy as a feature, so I was buying. I wish I'd seen this first, I might have stuck with Android/Samsung, which I prefer over iOS/iPhone..

______- 5y ago

> “Senator, We Run Ads” was the iconic response from Facebook’s CEO > And that’s how Facebook still manages to stay free of cost today. I enjoy articles that explain to the layman how the sausage is made. I've always wondered: if enough people know they're the product and know how Facebook makes money, would they delete their account in a fit of rage or continue to use it, knowing that they're victims of surveillance capitalism? I know for me, I cancelled my account after looking at the 'interests' page and discovered how strangely accurate it was. They really can get to know you on an intimate level. The more you engage with the app, the bigger and more accurate the profiling. More people need to visit that interests page and decide if they want to continue using Facebook.

parthdesai 5y ago
Anecdotal, but I think people on HN tend to care about privacy more than the general population. In my friend group, where no one else works in tech, everyone still actively uses facebook. And I haven't even started to talk about Instagram and Whatsapp. An average person doesn't care about it as much as you think or you would like to think that they do. Heck a part of me is happy that I get relevant ads rather than some random ad.
- staplers 5y ago
  Not working in tech means it's unlikely you know how the sausage is made. Similar to factory farmed meat. I'm sure if you worked there, you'd be more likely to avoid eating it.
- croes 5y ago
  Because all they hear is that the data is about ads. But it's also about the prices and the payment methods. They don't realize there things they never know about because they are not in the target group for the product, and not because a lack of interest but because they are not considered as a worthy customer.
- alexanderdmitri 5y ago
  Many people on HN are the ones making the "sausage" grandparent refers to. Maybe the more general public still eats the free food and looks the other way to give the benefit of the doubt, but it's surely a signal that a good deal of people involved with the factory process and its engineering are having a hard time stomaching it.

j_san 5y ago

Max Schrems (with his group noyb) filed a complaint against the "Android Advertising Id" / "Google Advertising Id" at the french data protection authority sometime around april. May be related.

pavlov 5y ago

The article manages to contradict itself at every turn. For example: "Only yesterday, Google announced its plans to make advertising ID an opt-in feature." A few paragraphs later: "Google’s opt-out ad-tracking popup isn’t on the forefront like in iOS. Instead, it’s buried deep in the Google Play Service settings — which could be difficult for the non-tech savvy user to find out." And this opener: "Facebook has a market evaluation of over 930 billion dollars today." Versus the conclusion: "Clearly, this chain of events is about to trigger an irreversible slump in Facebook’s advertisement business — making their ambitions of becoming the fastest trillion-dollar tech firm a far-fetched dream." Is it really a far-fetched dream when the stock price only needs a 7.5% bump from its current level?

fireball_blaze 5y ago
On 1, I don't think it's a contradiction. It's opt-in by default, and to actually find the setting to opt-in, it's buried deep in the Play Services settings. That's how I read it.
- croon 5y ago
  But one says "opt-out".
- pavlov 5y ago
  It's opt-out: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6048248 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... Which undermines the whole premise of the article.
  - fireball_blaze 5y ago
    Wow, then yes -- this is a non-story.
  - pentagrama 5y ago
    I just checked my Android device and the opt-out looks like this https://imgur.com/a/1aaN4Ko https://imgur.com/a/1aaN4Ko I find interesting the UI, the user have to "enable" the opt-out, not enable the opt-in. It shows how crucial can be this simple switch for the ad industry immoral surveillance status quo. I guess the opt-out is disabled by default, I think I enabled it some time ago checking the phone settings.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

how long before facebook announces their own browser a la chrome browser and their own phone os a la android ?

fireball_blaze 5y ago
Why would people use a Facebook browser? And Facebook already launched a phone of sorts, with HTC in 2013. Huge flop. https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopped/ https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopp...
kreddor 5y ago
Oh, I remember the "HTC First". That didn't go too well. Seems like that boat sailed a long time ago.

chadlavi 5y ago

isn't this google's entire business model?

andjd 5y ago

It's really hard to trust google on anything when it comes to ads and privacy. Will these changes stop Google from tracking and targeting you? It seems that Facebook might have a much stronger case against Google here, since it's using its success in the smartphone OS market to hobble its biggest competitor in the digital ads market.

poidos 5y ago
> It's really hard to trust google... I feel the same way; very little chance Google stops this unless it doesn't affect them at all (either by having determined these identifiers aren't particularly effective, or by having cooked up some new scheme.)
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  But of course it won't, this is a (similar to Apple's) play to reduce the amount of data other ad platforms get.
  - manmal 5y ago
    Apple’s tracking rules also apply to their own apps.
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      Sure, but Apple have first party data on who you are and what you do on IOS, so they don't need IDFA. Google are similar on Android.
swiley 5y ago
Yup, that's exactly what's going on here. Google wants exclusive root on the web the way it has it on the phones they rent to you.
zo1 5y ago
Google doesn't need to track you. They've shaped and driven the web to necessitate their own continued existence. They've also slowly been turning the web into essentially a walled-garden.

whoisjuan 5y ago

I don’t think there’s a nicd way to say this, but this article is trash. Just a bunch of factless assertions, sensationalized statements and evident contradictions. I think moving forward the term “Substack Journalist” will generally be used to refer to the authors of this low quality and factless reporting, that gets dangerously close to misinformation. The same way that “Soundcloud Rapper” refers to the low quality and amateur rappers that upload their music to Soundcloud (although the latter seems to have some outliers).

papito 5y ago

Summary: Facebook is fucked.

tibiahurried 5y ago
About time!

manigandham 5y ago

10+ year adtech veteran here. This article is nonsense, written by someone without any industry experience. Facebook has billions of users on several different apps. And people log into these apps to use them. FB, Instagram, Whatsapp. Cross-app tracking is not a big deal, they already know who you are. The big hits are going to be a reduction in data collected by other apps fed to Facebook, and in measurement and attribution (like app install ads). If anything, it can actually strengthen their walled-garden data moat when advertisers realize that it's still the most efficient way to reach users. Their last earnings report shows significant growth and is the opposite of a struggling business.

swiley 5y ago
A lot of people forget that Facebook ends up on your iphone via dylibs included in almost every other app.
- xanaxagoras 5y ago
  Wait, what?
  - swiley 5y ago
    Sorry, I'm not sure what part of that wasn't clear. Facebook ships useful libraries to app developers as binaries and they use that to get code on everyone's phone in order to add to their data collection apparatus. I'm pretty sure they're not the only ones who do that either. It's a pretty effective method to get around app sandboxes.
    - NationalPark 5y ago
      Which libraries in particular report ad/identity telemetry to Facebook?
      - vlovich123 5y ago
        https://github.com/facebook/facebook-android-sdk/ https://github.com/facebook/facebook-android-sdk/

aofeisheng 5y ago

To me these news are like: die, Facebook, die! But perhaps Facebook will eventually find a new way out anyway.

sequoia 5y ago

Through shrewd acquisitions, blatantly copying the exclusivity of rivals (read: Snapchat, TikTok), Facebook managed to become an integral part of our lives in less than a decade. This is just plain stupid. Yes Facebook is a Big Evil Corp but they created a ton of value through original product development, not just “shrewd acquisitions” and ripping off other products. Didn’t read past this point, author blew their credibility here.

alejohausner 5y ago

I stopped reading when I counted ten grammatical errors and colloquialisms. Not coincidentally, the article is empty of content.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
Ad driven journalism is not great for readers. Lots of clickbait, very little substance, baseless conclusions, hand wavy numbers, etc. But it made the frontpage of HN so I guess their SEO is spot on. As others are pointing out, people sign in to Facebook apps. As soon as they do, that apple & google device ID are kind of redundant. The only place where these ids are useful is when users use other application to access content and the analytics for that somehow end up in Facebook's data lake. That is indeed something they've been doing as well but also something that has been getting harder due to increasing restrictions both technically and legally (e.g. GDPR). Facebook might huff and puff a little but they'll be fine. What this will accomplish however is decimating the competition that lack their own walled gardens from which to gather tracking data and are very dependent on Google and Facebook telling them who is who. Which is also why Google is doing this. And of course the latter two have had a strategy of strengthening the walls around their walled gardens. This will likely push more content providers inside these walls. I'm hoping the EU and the US might be able to force tearing these walls down a little. Google trying to monopolize news has been something they've been fighting for a while. And of course both Facebook and Google are creating a bit of a privileged/exclusive situation for themselves here. Of course it will be years before most of their users get to play with Android 12. So, it's going to be slow process of this gradually getting harder for companies to work with rather than an overnight cut off. Unless of course they roll this out to older versions as well.
- babypuncher 5y ago
  I don't think users take much issue with services collecting data that they feed directly into the system. I find it hard to believe anyone would not expect Facebook to be aware of what their users are doing within Facebook's walls. The issue has always been that Facebook is tracking you on non-Facebook websites and apps, even if you don't have a Facebook account. From a user's perspective, they never told Facebook what products they were looking at on Etsy, so Facebook collecting that data feels like a violation of their privacy. Things like GDPR and Apple's new IDFA policy do neuter this considerably.

failwhaleshark 5y ago

War on Facebook?

sleepybrett 5y ago

Does that apply to their own advertising ingestion or just third parties? Better question, does it apply to theirs as well but do they have workarounds for themselves?

NicoJuicy 5y ago

There is actually a quick workaround. Developers are going to apply Google login way more.

lupire 5y ago

Actual source: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6048248 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

ad8e 5y ago

Here's a link from Sept 2020 about how this was expected long in advance: https://mobiledevmemo.com/what-will-googles-deprecation-of-gaid-look-like/ https://mobiledevmemo.com/what-will-googles-deprecation-of-g... The key word here is "consensus". He's reporting that others held this expectation, not just himself. This step by Google does not yet go as far as predicted; there is a big difference between a modal opt-in/opt-out and an opt-out in settings. Here's a link speculating on the impact of Apple's IDFA deprecation on Facebook, from January: https://mobiledevmemo.com/facebook-may-take-revenue-hit-from-apple-privacy-changes/ https://mobiledevmemo.com/facebook-may-take-revenue-hit-from... It carries strong parallels to what is in-process at Google. A few ad experts I follow say that Facebook and Google will claim increasing dominance in the ad space. Their logic is that as each ad vendor loses third party information, comparative advantage will favor companies with strong first party information. This will drive more ads toward Facebook as a relative share, even if they are still losing overall. I have no information to judge to what extent this claim holds.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

I'm very pleased to hear this and it blows my mind that ad IDs were built into mobile operating systems in the first place.