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Apple's Power Move to Kneecap Facebook Advertising Is Working

560 points by exolymph 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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neo1250 5y ago
I heard Tim Cook say in one of his interviews (not quoting) , businesses built on tracking users without their permission should find another things to do.
- csilverman 5y ago
  The "without their permission" part can't be reiterated enough here. Apple didn't hurt Facebook. Apple simply gave its own users more control over what was happening, and people acted in their own best interests, as they have every right to do. If revealing the truth to people and giving them a choice worked out very badly for Facebook, I'd say that speaks vastly more about Facebook than it does about Apple.
  - johncessna 5y ago
    I think your second sentence is the one worth iterating ;) > Apple didn't hurt Facebook. Apple simply gave its own users more control over what was happening, and people acted in their own best interests, as they have every right to do. It's easier to attract allies with a narrative that Apple is attacking you than it is with the truth that 96% of apple users have opted out of your 'service.'
    - abraae 5y ago
      This is all chickens coming home to roost too. If FB had invested in some decent privacy switches and education - instead of trying to dark pattern everyone to just hand over everything - then they wouldn't be in this predicament, because people would already have settled on some suitable privacy settings. If it's true that 96% are opting out, that just shows what a terrible job FB have done at approaching privacy up until now. After all, why would people opt out of tracking if they trusted the service in the first place?
      - kumarvvr 5y ago
        Everything points to the fact that keeping users in the dark is their business model. Which, makes sense. The steady erosion of any control, the tiny sparks of "settings" to assuage some privacy issue brought out in the open, the behavior of Zuck in the Congress. It is amply clear that for FB to make money, it's users should have no choice.
        csilverman 5y ago
        I think that's what offends me most about Facebook's whole ham-fisted victim routine. They adopted a business model that was dumbfoundingly, arrogantly unsustainable: trying to fool all of the people all of the time. Even the smartest, most devious minds in tech should have realized that that gravy train had a limit.
      - scatters 5y ago
        People are opting out because Apple have explicitly barred Facebook from offering them anything as a reward for opting in (other than better targeted adverts, which most don't see as a positive). Obviously if they didn't do this Facebook would use dark patterns (such as crudely gating the entire functionality of the app behind the opt-in) but it's disingenuous to say that this is a free exchange when one party is prevented from bringing anything to the table.
        csilverman 5y ago
        That's an interesting way to look at it. If I understand Apple's position, it's that Facebook can't deny functionality based on privacy settings. But it's less clear to me whether they're prohibited from offering something of actual value. Like if Facebook had a point system—"Facebucks"?—where users could buy stickers/apps in exchange for targeted ads, I wonder if Apple would permit that. That, I honestly wouldn't have an issue with. If people choose to sell their privacy for something they actually want, that's up to them. It's the shady coercive crap that I despise.
  - scatters 5y ago
    Apple explicitly barred Facebook from rewarding its users for opting in. Obviously this is done with the color of protecting its users (from, say, Facebook gating the entire functionality of its app behind the permission check) but it's still a restraint on Facebook's freedom of trade.
- DisjointedHunt 5y ago
  I also remember Steve Jobs say on stage that Apple tracks user behavior on their devices to inform their business strategy. “We know , we see the data” or something along those lines. All of Apples moves into services and many other interesting business decisions may theoretically be attributed to their surveillance of potential competitors on their devices. I would be curious to see the scale of their internal “tracking”
  - InvertedRhodium 5y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted - the current number one story on HN [1] is a list of IOS 0-days, one of which shows that the analytics data is collecting and reporting health metrics like heart rate, menstrual cycle length (?), and other somewhat less unusual information. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28637276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28637276
    - olliej 5y ago
      And all is explicitly opt in
      - DisjointedHunt 5y ago
        . . .During device set up, with soft language, amidst a slew of other settings that have a “default” big blue button that consents while a tiny text link that goes into “customise” settings. You should read the requirements and the user flow for App tracking transparency. Apple prohibits the permission dialog from firing more than three times in a long window. The default big button is negative consent. The language is “Ask app not to track” It’s ridiculous that the owner of the platform gets to suppress competition that way without regulators getting involved.
    - edoceo 5y ago
      > Not sure why you're being downvoted Said something not positive about Lord Steve.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
- tyingq 5y ago
  ...Unless they own both the tracking and the end user browser and/or device. Like Google, and Apple.
tedjdziuba 5y ago
As a person who has been censored by Facebook for wrongthink, watching them stare down the barrel of Apple "being a private company, and doing what they want" is like watching a kid step on a lego brick that he refused to clean up.
- IntelMiner 5y ago
  What is "facebook wrongthink"?
  - franckl 5y ago
    I have an example: I tried sending a Simpson gif of Flanders whipping himself to a friend on WhatsApp (1 to 1 message), whatsApp silently refused to send it....
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
Facebook is evil. But Apple using that as an excuse to punish a competitor should equally terrify us all. Apple has made it clear that they prioritize “privacy” as long as it aligns with their profit making interests with actions not least including the attempt to scan on device content recently and their move to have different standards of compliance with the regime in China. They are consolidating significant technical power over people’s lives and it’s amazing how little concern there has been to them rolling out their own private network between devices without consent or opt out.
- MBCook 5y ago
  I don’t think Apple is trying to hurt a competitor. This is all very consistent with the stance they’ve been taking for a very long time. I think hurting Facebook is just a huge bit of serendipity.
  - wmeredith 5y ago
    I agree. Apple is doing right by their users by empowering them and informing them. This hurts Facebook because their business model relies on ignorance and obfuscation. It's collateral damage.
    - lmm 5y ago
      When developers inform users how big Apple's cut of IAPs is, and empower them to pay a different way, we see how much Apple actually cares about empowering and informing users. This is a business move plain and simple.
      - cronix 5y ago
        I really doubt most users have even thought about or give a hoot about where fees are going for products they are buying on Apples platform. If the argument is "the product would cost 30% less" sure, they'd probably care. But that's not the argument. It's the relatively few (compared to users) developers and companies selling apps that are losing that money that care and are vocal about it. They would rather keep it for themselves. The end user really doesn't even figure into the equation when it comes to Apple transaction fees on their platform, because it doesn't affect them.
datavirtue 5y ago
Best news in weeks.
yuppie_scum 5y ago
Fuck Facebook.
- stalfosknight 5y ago
  I’ll drink to that!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
MBCook 5y ago
Good. The website imore reported earlier this year that 96% of people in the US had opted out of tracking. It’s almost as if no one wants this “feature” Facebook has been “providing” and given information about it and a choice have roundly rejected it. I can’t wait to see what some of Apple’s other initiatives like the anti-tracking features in Mail on iOS 15 and the upcoming iCloud Private Relay do to the industry. Hell, US intelligence agencies block ads at the network level because the ad industry is so infested with tracking/malware/spyware/exploits/etc. That’s a hell of an indictment. Of course any time someone looks into it they find that that click-rate fraud is at outrageous levels. So maybe no one needs Apple. The fraud bots will keep the ecosystem running. /s https://www.imore.com/96-iphone-users-have-opted-out-app-tracking-ios-145-launched https://www.imore.com/96-iphone-users-have-opted-out-app-tra... https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ypke/the-nsa-and-cia-use-ad-blockers-because-online-advertising-is-so-dangerous https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ypke/the-nsa-and-cia-use-a...
- xivzgrev 5y ago
  It’s also worth mentioning that apples prompt gives no benefit to tracking. It basically just asks “Facebook wants to track you. OPT OUT, or not”. Who is going to agree to that? If Apple gave developers a way to add a benefit or two, eg personalized experience or whatever, I bet we would see that % be much lower
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    My "allow apps to ask to track" setting defaulted to off, too. Not sure what determines that, but in my case, I never even got the option to opt-in; the dialog never comes up because apps aren't even allowed to try asking me. I'm presumably in that 96%, but it wasn't an explicit choice. (I'd have opted-out, obviously.)
    - vineyardmike 5y ago
      > My "allow apps to ask to track" setting defaulted to off, too. I have an employer profile on my phone for email/internal app/etc and one of the things this does is force this setting off.
busymom0 5y ago
I dislike both companies but definitely Facebook more. So it’s good to watch one eat the other.
gigatexal 5y ago
This move alone will keep me buying iOS devices: any move that attempts to curb FB (would be nice if the company folded and ceased to exist but …) is laudable by me.
- ziftface 5y ago
  I think I agree with your broader point, but it would be a mistake to trust apple to keep your data private.
  - gigatexal 5y ago
    At this point I’d rather Apple monetize my data and destroy FB than keep it 100% private.
deleted 5y ago
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m0zg 5y ago
Apple, do please kneecap Google's advertising as well. In fact, eradicate unwanted advertising entirely and do what you did with Music - sell a subscription so I could browse the web without this bullshit, yet site owners would also get paid. Brave is trying to do this, but they lack the critical mass. Apple has the critical mass of basically everyone who has the money to spend, worldwide, as well as their credit card info.
- fabianhjr 5y ago
  > sell a subscription so I could browse the web without this bullshit You don't need any subscription, just install uBlock Origin or whatever blocker works best and if you want to provide financial support those FOSS projects mostly accept donations.
  - madars 5y ago
    You can't have uBlock Origin (or anything similarly powerful) on iOS as all browsers are skins for Mobile Safari. But you can install Firefox with full extension support on Android!
    - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
      It’s not uBlock, but I’ve found AdGuard to be very effective at blocking ads on mobile safari.
    - fabianhjr 5y ago
      Yeah, I have been using Firefox and uBlock Origin on mobile and I am amazed how other put up with the web without ad blockers
  - notriddle 5y ago
    That's not a sustainable solution. You should definitely do it, because ad networks are cesspools of lies, fraud, and malware, but let's not pretend that it's an answer to the question of where the money to pay for all this cool stuff comes from.
tjpnz 5y ago
Good. Facebook is a festering sore on civil society.
mpalmer 5y ago
“I don't think that Tim Cook is this benevolent privacy person,” said Kelcey Lehrich, CEO of 365 Holdings, a company that owns e-commerce brands and advertises extensively online. “They're making strategic decisions that affect the market cap, not practical decisions that serve their customers or serve their users,” he said, speaking broadly of the Big Tech companies. Talk about sour grapes. I think it might be possible to make strategic decisions that both affect the market cap and serve one's customers!
- dylan604 5y ago
  "Concern over Facebook’s ability to weather Apple’s attack" It's funny how this is described clearly shows how it is viewed by the writer/speaker. Attack is definitely not neutral.
blendergeek 5y ago
I have a slightly more cynical take on this than it seems most of Hacker News does. Facebook had found a way to monetize it's iOS app without Apple getting a 30% cut. Apple decided to cut that off to prevent Facebook from making money without Apple taking their cut. The fact that Apple can sell this to users as "privacy" is all the better for Apple. At the end of the day Apple is still a corporation. They are beholden to shareholders, not privacy advocates. Apple will maximize profits and has found a way to cut off revenue to competitor and breed goodwill at the same time. Judging by this comments thread, it is working very well.
- jeremyis 5y ago
  This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Google also makes a lot off their apps and circumvents the App Store. Airbnb too. Apple is doing what it thinks is best for its customers. Perhaps people will pick iPhones over Android due to Apples strength with privacy.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    Google pays Apple billions to be the default search engine for iphone. They've paid their way into good graces. Privacy on iPhone, that's a laugh! The only company ever to ship phones with an automated, unverifiable on-device scanning/reporting to authorities system. As we know, CSAM is just to get the foot in the door, of course. Fuck Apple and their locked-down consumer hostile disposable garbage, and while we're at it, fuck Facebook for just about everything they do. I have no need for either of those garbage companies.
    - realityking 5y ago
      > The only company ever to ship phones with an automated, unverifiable on-device scanning/reporting to authorities system. Nitpick but so far this hasn’t shipped.
- ohashi 5y ago
  Apple's revenue stream isn't as tied to internet advertising as any of its large competitors. They sell products. And also an ecosystem around those products. The two for one of hurting competitors and making customers happy is about as good a play as they could make. It makes making the 'right' decision easy. Blocking facebook from tracking everything we do online is a win most people can appreciate, except Facebook (and potentially some advertisers taking advantage of it).
jb1991 5y ago
While this is a great first step, isn’t one very likely consequence that facebook will pour extraordinary resources into much more invasive tracking using less obvious methods that cannot be blocked? I feel like this is just a start of a whole new era for fingerprinting.
- haliskerbas 5y ago
  I can guarantee you they have been working on this for some time now.
- dwaite 5y ago
  Prompting and honoring the user's choice of whether to be tracked across organizational boundaries are part of the App Store guidelines. Facebook would lose their ability to publish a native app for iPhone.
- Lio 5y ago
  Facebook is not a company with internal limits to what it sees as acceptable. They’re like a tobacco company. Recently they knowingly sat on information that showed that changes to Instagram were damaging teenage girl’s mental health. If they could track users and non-users in a more invasive way the will do that anyway.
rblion 5y ago
I'll say it again: Facebook will become the next AOL, Yahoo. It's already set in stone. They are just playing 'not to lose' at this point.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spideymans 5y ago
  Unfortunate that they'll take Instagram down with them.
  - anbende 5y ago
    They likely won’t take any of their acquisitions down with them. They’ve been pretty good about keeping them mostly separate. They’ll be spun off in any eventual liquidation. Unless you think they are being mismanaged or mismarketed now?
    - r00fus 5y ago
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive-whatsapp-cofounder-brian-acton-gives-the-inside-story-on-deletefacebook-and-why-he-left-850-million-behind/?sh=647e70703f20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive...
  - leejo 5y ago
    Instagram has been an absolute dumpster fire for the last two or three years - it's no longer a photography platform, it's a meme, "influencer", celeb, and viral video platform. Tear it down. The only recent saving grace is that I'm seeing more photographic content, the problem is that's from other photographers who are promoting their work via paid ads - they're not going to grow their following that way and TBH a lot of it is pretty mediocre.
    - yosito 5y ago
      Any recommendations on photo platforms to use if I want to passively share my photos with my friends and family? Network effects are pretty hard to overcome.
sundvor 5y ago
Nice. This was a reminder to check my own Samsung browser setting; smart anti tracking was only in secret mode. Now set to always. Hopefully they'll make this the default too.
Abrownn 5y ago
This post is just an ad. It's a brand new Substack with literally only one article that's more than 50% ad text. All of the comments here are addressing overall HN sentiment or the title, not the article and the giant ad text which I would think would stick out to more people if they had actually read it??
- iainmerrick 5y ago
  You’re not wrong that this has a lot of ad copy, but it’s a different kind of ad -- a paid sponsorship, personalised to the site rather than to individual users. It’s a more old-fashioned model, like magazine ads. I think a lot of people saying “but ads are what let us get stuff for free!” would point to this kind of thing as an example of doing it right.
  - ImaCake 5y ago
    I would say this is an ad aimed at a professional audience. I read the science equivalent of these in Nature sometimes. Sure, they are biased and misleading. But it is usually clear enough who sponsored the piece and so you get a useful perspective of the sponsor on some topic.
  - 0xFreebie 5y ago
    It's jarring because I've never seen advertising on any of the dozen substacks I've visited before. This one has so many ads.
  - Abrownn 5y ago
    I couldn't stand magazines back in the day for the same reason. Frankly, magazines are worse in my mind as I've already actually paid several dollars to purchase it. You'd think that'd allow them to get away with less ads as a result but apparently not. TV is the same way - I'm already paying for cable, stop showing me MORE stuff! I cut the cord in 2011, I don't miss it and I'd rather that model of payment+more ads not make a comeback.
- burnished 5y ago
  You don't think that its important that there aren't any irritating banners, that it opens with the content, and that any advertising copy sits below the article itself? I had to go back and check because the thing you are complaining about literally did not interrupt my flow in any way.
piiswrong 5y ago
Has anyone noticed that Apple tracks your app installs and use that data to show app Ads to you? While Apple doesn't allow others to track users across apps, they themselves can do it because they have a monopoly on app store so it doesn't count as third party data.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  As of iOS15 they ask your permission to do this. If you don't your app ads aren't personalized.
  - bryan_w 5y ago
    But they don't use the same standard permission box that they force 3rd party apps to use. That's shady....
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      Because they're Apple and it's their store. Of course they want the box to look fancier :) Also: There is a HUGE difference (in my opinion) between Apple recommending me other apps based on the ones I already have installed vs Facebook tracking my presence and activity everywhere around the internet.
- tgv 5y ago
  That’s probably the “personalized recommendations”, and you can switch it off in your profile.
  - random314 5y ago
    Is it opt in or opt out?
    - likpok 5y ago
      Opt out, because of course very few people would opt in.
r00fus 5y ago
I really liked the response Tim Cook gave when Zuckerberg was in trouble regarding Cambridge Analytica [1] When asked what he would do if he were currently faced with the problems confronting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Cook said: “I wouldn’t be in this situation.” ... Cook said that Apple has never believed that detailed online profiles of people should exist. “We can make a ton of money if customers were our product. We have elected not to do that,” Cook said. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/28/tim-cook-on-facebooks-scandal-i-wouldnt-be-in-this-situation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/28/tim-cook-on-facebooks-scanda...
- pornel 5y ago
  As a begrudging App Store user, I feel like I'm a product that Apple is selling to app developers.
floatingatoll 5y ago
Apple and Amazon both seem to ignore you if you don't do business with them. If they sell you things, they obviously keep track of that. Amazon's ads are really intrusive and give away my Amazon search history. Facebook and Google doxx you in order to exploit your weaknesses. It's each of our choice how to interpret that and respond to it, whether with "who cares" or "that's terrifying" or "bury gold" or whatever. But it's important to recognize that, at the core, this mandatory tracking question is curtailing the business of an entire category of startup that we've mostly forgotten. DoubleClick. I didn't understand that DoubleClick would lead to this nightmare of being stalked by hawkers. I do not like where we have ended up. May their business chip and shatter.
jqquah 5y ago
As an iOS user, I would like to say that I'm enjoying not feeling targeted by ads that makes me want to spend. The latest focus function is even better.
amelius 5y ago
As much as I hate Facebook, I think that one company abusing its power against other companies is not a good thing.
- burnished 5y ago
  Where is the abuse of power? The problem (I don't own an iphone! I could be wrong) as I understand it is that Apple is giving its customers the option to opt-in to tracking and that people are choosing not to do that. Yeah, it offers a business advantage I'm sure, but its also hard to see what is wrong with that action you know?
  - simonklitj 5y ago
    You got it exactly right! And considering that (beginning with iOS 15) they ask you if they can track you too (for eg App Store ads), there’s not much business advantage either.
- Lio 5y ago
  That’s a straw man argument. Apple has only given users the chance to say no to Facebook they haven’t stopped them saying yes.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  How can it be "abuse", when all Apple has done is to provide users a window saying "Hey, this app is collecting all your data. Do you want to prevent it?". The abuser is Facebook here. Fact : Apple is providing an authentic choice to users regarding sharing of their data. FB Spin : Apple is attacking us and hurting our business.
- gigel82 5y ago
  Proof: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-ad-network-gets-special-privileges-that-facebook-google-wont-on-ios14/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...
vincentmarle 5y ago
In my country there's a saying: "a cornered cat makes weird jumps". Expect Facebook to start working on their own mobile phones soon..
metters 5y ago
I opened the link and my email address is already filled out in the import form for subscription. Where does it have my email address from? I am not using auto fill features.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Someone farther up said that ironically Firefox warned them that the website requests your email from Facebook.
  - metters 5y ago
    I am using Firefox and I do not have a Facebook account
collaborative 5y ago
As a small advertiser, this year I will be pulling all ads. In fact, I may even set the company dormant. What used to work (keyword based advertising) no longer does. The whole ad market is so fraudulent... the only winner here is Amazon
ParanoidShroom 5y ago
The amount of bias in tech savvy people here is scary. This is def a power move, don't think they do it for us as consumers tho.
- viktorcode 5y ago
  This is also a very expected move. Apple was cutting down trackable stuff from iOS for a very long time now. Obviously, they going to keep improving on that.
fleddr 5y ago
"People are opting out of Facebook’s tracking for a reason: they no longer trust the company with their data after years of evidence they should not." Alternatively, this is the first time mainstream users are able at all to opt-out. I would strongly suspect users opt-out in any case, for any app, regardless of trust history.
- vln 5y ago
  Yeah, I opt out by default.
1cvmask 5y ago
It seems Apple wants that money for itself. It will take a couple of years to see how much of FB ads (amongst others) have shifted to Apple.
asimpletune 5y ago
Wow can you imagine if the rest of the internet worked like that?
helen___keller 5y ago
This is a perfect example of why competition needs to exist in tech, even when products seem to exist in harmony. I know this is contentious, but IMO this has been the strongest evidence thus far that we need regulation or antitrust to break up companies that own a platform and also compete on said platform. Side note, I don't tend to view Facebook as some inherently evil corporation as many commenters seem to. I hope that by eliminating certain unsavory practices (like predatory tracking), Facebooks interests will better align with its users interests, and we will see a better Facebook for it in the future.
mwexler 5y ago
Economists talk of the public good, ethicists and privacy folks talk of a right to privacy of a citizen (in some countries, at least)... but has anyone had an actual "experience improvement" from all this blocking? Do you see less ads or "better" ones? Has your business picked up due to this change, in that poor-but-targeted ads have ceased and "contextually relevant" ads let your business thrive? That is, this action by Apple should have remedied some consumer harm. While de-anonymyzation of advertising data could reveal, in some cases, identities and geo-behaviors, this seemed proof of concept more than actual impacts. In looking at my own iphone use, the blocking has not resulted in any improvement in ad frequency, relevance, or enjoyment. My android ads on my tablet have also not shown any measurable improvement. The businesses I help are not benefitting from this change. So, other than the satisfaction of "job well done, privacy is preserved", has anyone found any direct improvement to user experience from this action? I know none was really expected, that wasn't the point, but just wondering what the HN community has experienced so far.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  I would be very surprised if anybody found an experience improvement, considering there are still ads. That doesn't do to justify tracking, however. Fun thought experiment: suppose that Facebook served fewer ads to those who clicked to allow tracking, on the basis that the ads are worth more, and served more ads otherwise. Which do you think consumers would prefer to choose on average? This isn't rhetorical, I genuinely wonder because I don't know how much people actually care about tracking versus just picking "don't track me" as an easy win.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bingohbangoh 5y ago
Antonio Garcia Martinez of the Pull Request mentioned that Facebook will move all of the advertising matching work to the phone. Facebook certainly has the intellectual firepower and motivation to pull this off, if it can be.
- Epskampie 5y ago
  The issue is not where the matching is done with data gathered on facebook, the issue is whether they can track you accross other apps. They can't anymore, and "matching on the phone" won't make a lick of difference.
rchaud 5y ago
In a twist of irony, there's a Firefox warning next to the Substack email input field. "This site may share your email address with Facebook".
dhosek 5y ago
It seems to me that few if any of the businesses that need all the tracking information are really productive. Most of them are really just playing arbitrage games between the rates for advertising and fees paid for leads from other businesses (I've worked in this industry in the past and it's kind of an icky place to be). If every single business that does this disappeared, outside of their employees, no one would ever notice that they no longer existed.
teekert 5y ago
All of this discussion is worthless without any transparency about the numbers (and I don't mean: FB's lost revenue). I'm still of the opinion that targeted advertising [0] (as opposed to context-aware advertising [1]) is a bunch of BS. So 80% of the traffic to Carousel came from FB, but how useful was it? Is there an actual drop in total visitors who spend money on products? And how is this across the market? Does this mean smaller companies are now getting a larger part of the interested people where as they couldn't pay for them before? Was FB anything more than a "pay us for traffic"-mafia? Is there any win for the tracked people, or were they just getting served ads for inferior products from companies that spend more on advertising instead of quality? I really hate reading these pieces without this information. It's really useless. [0]: Tracking and profiling based ads as FB offers [1]: Just show me a laptop ad when I'm reading a review of laptops, or shows me the latest Trek MTB on an MTB site.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
On one hand they do us all a solid by removing FacePuke from our phones in a meaningful way. But then they ruin that by implementing the infrastructure of Surveillance on our phones under the guise of the CSAM stuff. So was Apple removing FB simply because it sees value in its ability to be the sole arbiter of content/habits/data on your phone?
Jensson 5y ago
Look at Facebook stocks, they don't seem to be "kneecaped" at all. My theory is that tracking is a nice to have but not necessary to make huge amounts of money on ads. They lost a few percent of value over this, a huge hit to investors but even with that they are still one of the tech giants with more money than they know what to do with.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Most of Facebooks claims about Apple hurting small businesses always seemed a bit weird, because much of the targeting that make the most sense can be done solely by data users enter into Facebook themselfs. Age, location, profession, combined with the content of your posts and the stuff you share should be more than enough to do efficient targeting of ads. The main issue that Facebook might face, in my mind, is that they oversold the value of the tracking of users across the web. So their customers now see a much hyped feature disappearing, so they slow down their ad buying, even though they could get the same results. The business that are going to be hurt the most a the agencies who honestly don't know anything about good advertising, but who just knows how to click around in Google Adword and Facebook Ads. Those people now need to learn a little more about targeting.
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
I've actually (anecdotally) seen the opposite. Before, you could very accurately track your ROI on your ad spend. Now, it's much harder to do, so Facebook spend starts looking more like traditional marketing where the age old quote "Half of my advertising spend is wasted, I don't know which half" applies. What does this mean? Some agencies and brands spend MORE because there's no clean data telling them their spend isn't working. They're just shooting in the dark. Over time, you can in aggregate tell which campaigns and ads work and which don't, but the iterations and experiments take longer and are more expensive. I don't know how long that's sustainable. But traditional advertising has been doing that ruse for decades.
- xivzgrev 5y ago
  That’s an interesting point. Ive seen CPMs rising, almost like people were spending more, but wasn’t sure why that may be. Also the article missed a few big points. 1) There’s really not much you can do in diversifying your channel mix - this change affects any paid platform. 2) what you can do is spend more on Android, which hasn’t (yet) lost the tracking 3) Facebook is working on work arounds, like a conversion API, where the data is matched on hashed PII. Other platforms without that rich, accurate PII will struggle a bit more.
- bryan_w 5y ago
  That's exactly what I said would happen. Big companies can do their own "Nelson" research and know how to tune their ads. As a result, they are willing to increase their bids over the less informed small businesses who now have to resort to a spray and pray approach. People never stopped to consider that FB would be fine with the changes and was genuine in their pleas for small businesses.
  - anaganisk 5y ago
    Meanwhile they accidentally leak the exact data to institutions that help with election fraud. Profile generation of individuals. So who is going to consider their “genuine” reasoning. And they’re always and always lying.
dillondoyle 5y ago
As usual many highly upvoted takes here devaluing FB and claiming the ads don't work or are all just fake clicks. Hate FB or not their ads work well and this article is spot on from my experiences, though words like 'attack' have clear bias. I run direct response ads raising money for non profits and political campaigns on FB. This month has been a big struggle. While I can't quantify how much is due to limited iOS targeting, I know that we get lots of value from targeting donor lists which is harder now and ios users donate more. Doesn't help FB reported a 15% discrepancy bug which would effect optimization. I used to be heavy bull on FB based solely on the ads I buy and the ROI/value they provide. But I this has been a scary month. The bid market will eventually level out but if the targeting value loses say 25% effectiveness that will kneecap a ton of businesses who advertise there with thin margin. BTW thanks for sharing this format I love Axios and this looks like a great tech focused 'smart brevity'-style
- hownottowrite 5y ago
  Small retailer here and I can confirm similar dips. Basically it’s pulling out a channel we can use for discovery ads which just leads us all back to making the same boring stuff to feed into the Amazon/Google searchplex. Hope everyone enjoys having the same of everything!
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I got a request on spotify to continue tracking me. On some level I actually thought about saying yes if it meant spotify would get more revenue for my free consumption, and by proxy, musicians. I chose to say no. But I don't know if that was the right call. I don't care what spotify does with my data.
- nyuszika7h 5y ago
  As far as I know, the amount Spotify pays to musicians is pretty low. I doubt musicians are losing out on much by users rejecting tracking.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    A quick check suggests maybe 1/11th of revenue is from advertising on spotify. Assuming musicians get a fixed share of this, and non targeted advertising revenue is small... yeah probably not a big drop.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
This must be why FB is dumping money into the metaverse.
gigel82 5y ago
I'd like to see the look on everyone's face (who's now acting like Apple is this benevolent company looking out for their interest and privacy) when they'll launch their own Ad business in a couple of years; I'll eat my hat if Apple doesn't become one of the biggest Ad companies up there with Google and FB in a few years. They're just being proactive about weeding out the competition from their platforms.
not2b 5y ago
The issue here is knowing whether a given ad is leading to sales. But there is an old technique that has been used for a very long time: the ad provides a code or a coupon that gives the customer a small discount. If the advertiser uses multiple channels and different codes for each, they will quickly find out which ads are leading to sales.
williamtrask 5y ago
There’s a paragraph of this article that is a straight up advertisement with no markings at all.
poundofshrimp 5y ago
I have bought a few things by clicking on Instagram ads and enjoyed it. I choose to allow all apps to track me because I really dislike irrelevant ads. Ads will get smarter in the future, and I think this can be a good thing for the consumer. I’d really like to understand what the issue everyone on HN seems to have with this is - to me, this seems more of a personal preference (being privacy-conscious), rather than some sort of a fundamental issue that is bad for users (it’s not).
- mayankkaizen 5y ago
  I don't think HN crowd is against relevant ads. Heck, they aren't even against ads. The issues are more subtle. I never used IG but I was on FB. I'd frequently see 'unbelievable' ads. I mean I see ads offering me latest iphones selling at 100 dollars. What do you think what'll happen if I order one? Anything except getting a genuine iphone. So much for relevant ads. Tracking doesn't stop at showing you relevant ads. It also affects what is shown to you in content. Facebook manipulates your news feed. And when your internet browsing is mostly limited to Facebook, your world view is essentially controlled by it. And how much information do they need to show me relevant ads? My entire list of family members, relatives, friends, colleagues, ex colleagues and everyone I have exchanged numbers? My entire location history? My every interaction? Every financial transaction? My entire medical history? My entire photo collection? Even my sex life? Facebook will simply not stop until it collects every imaginable piece of information about you. Although I deactivated my profile 5 years ago, I still think FB is somehow collecting information about me. The worst part, they 'trick' you to expose every data. They collect these data absolutely by any means possible. Illegal? Unethical? Spying? Doesn't matter. Imagine a random person asking you some personal questions. You wouldn't feel comfortable. Besides, companies like FB have no morals. They will sell your data to just about anyone that throws enough money. You think that is a good thing?
Lamad123 5y ago
Now apple can sell that data!! Anyways, the customer is still being preyed on!
carbine 5y ago
It’s easy to cheer this since ad tracking and FB are both deeply unpopular. But not enough people are talking about who’s left holding the bag here: thousands of small businesses whose very existence is only possible because of the affordable customer acquisition they had via FB. Yes, they can divert budget elsewhere, but for small businesses that can be very hard to do. Coca-Cola will have no problem diverting low-performing spend to other channels. The mom and pop bakery down the street from you may not be so lucky. Just want more people to be aware of the human implications of this change.

560 points by exolymph 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

I heard Tim Cook say in one of his interviews (not quoting) , businesses built on tracking users without their permission should find another things to do.

csilverman 5y ago
The "without their permission" part can't be reiterated enough here. Apple didn't hurt Facebook. Apple simply gave its own users more control over what was happening, and people acted in their own best interests, as they have every right to do. If revealing the truth to people and giving them a choice worked out very badly for Facebook, I'd say that speaks vastly more about Facebook than it does about Apple.
- johncessna 5y ago
  I think your second sentence is the one worth iterating ;) > Apple didn't hurt Facebook. Apple simply gave its own users more control over what was happening, and people acted in their own best interests, as they have every right to do. It's easier to attract allies with a narrative that Apple is attacking you than it is with the truth that 96% of apple users have opted out of your 'service.'
  - abraae 5y ago
    This is all chickens coming home to roost too. If FB had invested in some decent privacy switches and education - instead of trying to dark pattern everyone to just hand over everything - then they wouldn't be in this predicament, because people would already have settled on some suitable privacy settings. If it's true that 96% are opting out, that just shows what a terrible job FB have done at approaching privacy up until now. After all, why would people opt out of tracking if they trusted the service in the first place?
    - kumarvvr 5y ago
      Everything points to the fact that keeping users in the dark is their business model. Which, makes sense. The steady erosion of any control, the tiny sparks of "settings" to assuage some privacy issue brought out in the open, the behavior of Zuck in the Congress. It is amply clear that for FB to make money, it's users should have no choice.
      - csilverman 5y ago
        I think that's what offends me most about Facebook's whole ham-fisted victim routine. They adopted a business model that was dumbfoundingly, arrogantly unsustainable: trying to fool all of the people all of the time. Even the smartest, most devious minds in tech should have realized that that gravy train had a limit.
    - scatters 5y ago
      People are opting out because Apple have explicitly barred Facebook from offering them anything as a reward for opting in (other than better targeted adverts, which most don't see as a positive). Obviously if they didn't do this Facebook would use dark patterns (such as crudely gating the entire functionality of the app behind the opt-in) but it's disingenuous to say that this is a free exchange when one party is prevented from bringing anything to the table.
      - csilverman 5y ago
        That's an interesting way to look at it. If I understand Apple's position, it's that Facebook can't deny functionality based on privacy settings. But it's less clear to me whether they're prohibited from offering something of actual value. Like if Facebook had a point system—"Facebucks"?—where users could buy stickers/apps in exchange for targeted ads, I wonder if Apple would permit that. That, I honestly wouldn't have an issue with. If people choose to sell their privacy for something they actually want, that's up to them. It's the shady coercive crap that I despise.
- scatters 5y ago
  Apple explicitly barred Facebook from rewarding its users for opting in. Obviously this is done with the color of protecting its users (from, say, Facebook gating the entire functionality of its app behind the permission check) but it's still a restraint on Facebook's freedom of trade.
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
I also remember Steve Jobs say on stage that Apple tracks user behavior on their devices to inform their business strategy. “We know , we see the data” or something along those lines. All of Apples moves into services and many other interesting business decisions may theoretically be attributed to their surveillance of potential competitors on their devices. I would be curious to see the scale of their internal “tracking”
- InvertedRhodium 5y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted - the current number one story on HN [1] is a list of IOS 0-days, one of which shows that the analytics data is collecting and reporting health metrics like heart rate, menstrual cycle length (?), and other somewhat less unusual information. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28637276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28637276
  - olliej 5y ago
    And all is explicitly opt in
    - DisjointedHunt 5y ago
      . . .During device set up, with soft language, amidst a slew of other settings that have a “default” big blue button that consents while a tiny text link that goes into “customise” settings. You should read the requirements and the user flow for App tracking transparency. Apple prohibits the permission dialog from firing more than three times in a long window. The default big button is negative consent. The language is “Ask app not to track” It’s ridiculous that the owner of the platform gets to suppress competition that way without regulators getting involved.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    > Not sure why you're being downvoted Said something not positive about Lord Steve.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
tyingq 5y ago
...Unless they own both the tracking and the end user browser and/or device. Like Google, and Apple.

tedjdziuba 5y ago

As a person who has been censored by Facebook for wrongthink, watching them stare down the barrel of Apple "being a private company, and doing what they want" is like watching a kid step on a lego brick that he refused to clean up.

IntelMiner 5y ago
What is "facebook wrongthink"?
- franckl 5y ago
  I have an example: I tried sending a Simpson gif of Flanders whipping himself to a friend on WhatsApp (1 to 1 message), whatsApp silently refused to send it....

DisjointedHunt 5y ago

Facebook is evil. But Apple using that as an excuse to punish a competitor should equally terrify us all. Apple has made it clear that they prioritize “privacy” as long as it aligns with their profit making interests with actions not least including the attempt to scan on device content recently and their move to have different standards of compliance with the regime in China. They are consolidating significant technical power over people’s lives and it’s amazing how little concern there has been to them rolling out their own private network between devices without consent or opt out.

MBCook 5y ago
I don’t think Apple is trying to hurt a competitor. This is all very consistent with the stance they’ve been taking for a very long time. I think hurting Facebook is just a huge bit of serendipity.
- wmeredith 5y ago
  I agree. Apple is doing right by their users by empowering them and informing them. This hurts Facebook because their business model relies on ignorance and obfuscation. It's collateral damage.
  - lmm 5y ago
    When developers inform users how big Apple's cut of IAPs is, and empower them to pay a different way, we see how much Apple actually cares about empowering and informing users. This is a business move plain and simple.
    - cronix 5y ago
      I really doubt most users have even thought about or give a hoot about where fees are going for products they are buying on Apples platform. If the argument is "the product would cost 30% less" sure, they'd probably care. But that's not the argument. It's the relatively few (compared to users) developers and companies selling apps that are losing that money that care and are vocal about it. They would rather keep it for themselves. The end user really doesn't even figure into the equation when it comes to Apple transaction fees on their platform, because it doesn't affect them.

datavirtue 5y ago

Best news in weeks.

yuppie_scum 5y ago

Fuck Facebook.

stalfosknight 5y ago
I’ll drink to that!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

MBCook 5y ago

Good. The website imore reported earlier this year that 96% of people in the US had opted out of tracking. It’s almost as if no one wants this “feature” Facebook has been “providing” and given information about it and a choice have roundly rejected it. I can’t wait to see what some of Apple’s other initiatives like the anti-tracking features in Mail on iOS 15 and the upcoming iCloud Private Relay do to the industry. Hell, US intelligence agencies block ads at the network level because the ad industry is so infested with tracking/malware/spyware/exploits/etc. That’s a hell of an indictment. Of course any time someone looks into it they find that that click-rate fraud is at outrageous levels. So maybe no one needs Apple. The fraud bots will keep the ecosystem running. /s https://www.imore.com/96-iphone-users-have-opted-out-app-tracking-ios-145-launched https://www.imore.com/96-iphone-users-have-opted-out-app-tra... https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ypke/the-nsa-and-cia-use-ad-blockers-because-online-advertising-is-so-dangerous https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ypke/the-nsa-and-cia-use-a...

xivzgrev 5y ago
It’s also worth mentioning that apples prompt gives no benefit to tracking. It basically just asks “Facebook wants to track you. OPT OUT, or not”. Who is going to agree to that? If Apple gave developers a way to add a benefit or two, eg personalized experience or whatever, I bet we would see that % be much lower
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  My "allow apps to ask to track" setting defaulted to off, too. Not sure what determines that, but in my case, I never even got the option to opt-in; the dialog never comes up because apps aren't even allowed to try asking me. I'm presumably in that 96%, but it wasn't an explicit choice. (I'd have opted-out, obviously.)
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    > My "allow apps to ask to track" setting defaulted to off, too. I have an employer profile on my phone for email/internal app/etc and one of the things this does is force this setting off.

busymom0 5y ago

I dislike both companies but definitely Facebook more. So it’s good to watch one eat the other.

gigatexal 5y ago

This move alone will keep me buying iOS devices: any move that attempts to curb FB (would be nice if the company folded and ceased to exist but …) is laudable by me.

ziftface 5y ago
I think I agree with your broader point, but it would be a mistake to trust apple to keep your data private.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  At this point I’d rather Apple monetize my data and destroy FB than keep it 100% private.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

m0zg 5y ago

Apple, do please kneecap Google's advertising as well. In fact, eradicate unwanted advertising entirely and do what you did with Music - sell a subscription so I could browse the web without this bullshit, yet site owners would also get paid. Brave is trying to do this, but they lack the critical mass. Apple has the critical mass of basically everyone who has the money to spend, worldwide, as well as their credit card info.

fabianhjr 5y ago
> sell a subscription so I could browse the web without this bullshit You don't need any subscription, just install uBlock Origin or whatever blocker works best and if you want to provide financial support those FOSS projects mostly accept donations.
- madars 5y ago
  You can't have uBlock Origin (or anything similarly powerful) on iOS as all browsers are skins for Mobile Safari. But you can install Firefox with full extension support on Android!
  - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
    It’s not uBlock, but I’ve found AdGuard to be very effective at blocking ads on mobile safari.
  - fabianhjr 5y ago
    Yeah, I have been using Firefox and uBlock Origin on mobile and I am amazed how other put up with the web without ad blockers
- notriddle 5y ago
  That's not a sustainable solution. You should definitely do it, because ad networks are cesspools of lies, fraud, and malware, but let's not pretend that it's an answer to the question of where the money to pay for all this cool stuff comes from.

tjpnz 5y ago

Good. Facebook is a festering sore on civil society.

mpalmer 5y ago

“I don't think that Tim Cook is this benevolent privacy person,” said Kelcey Lehrich, CEO of 365 Holdings, a company that owns e-commerce brands and advertises extensively online. “They're making strategic decisions that affect the market cap, not practical decisions that serve their customers or serve their users,” he said, speaking broadly of the Big Tech companies. Talk about sour grapes. I think it might be possible to make strategic decisions that both affect the market cap and serve one's customers!

dylan604 5y ago
"Concern over Facebook’s ability to weather Apple’s attack" It's funny how this is described clearly shows how it is viewed by the writer/speaker. Attack is definitely not neutral.

blendergeek 5y ago

I have a slightly more cynical take on this than it seems most of Hacker News does. Facebook had found a way to monetize it's iOS app without Apple getting a 30% cut. Apple decided to cut that off to prevent Facebook from making money without Apple taking their cut. The fact that Apple can sell this to users as "privacy" is all the better for Apple. At the end of the day Apple is still a corporation. They are beholden to shareholders, not privacy advocates. Apple will maximize profits and has found a way to cut off revenue to competitor and breed goodwill at the same time. Judging by this comments thread, it is working very well.

jeremyis 5y ago
This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Google also makes a lot off their apps and circumvents the App Store. Airbnb too. Apple is doing what it thinks is best for its customers. Perhaps people will pick iPhones over Android due to Apples strength with privacy.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  Google pays Apple billions to be the default search engine for iphone. They've paid their way into good graces. Privacy on iPhone, that's a laugh! The only company ever to ship phones with an automated, unverifiable on-device scanning/reporting to authorities system. As we know, CSAM is just to get the foot in the door, of course. Fuck Apple and their locked-down consumer hostile disposable garbage, and while we're at it, fuck Facebook for just about everything they do. I have no need for either of those garbage companies.
  - realityking 5y ago
    > The only company ever to ship phones with an automated, unverifiable on-device scanning/reporting to authorities system. Nitpick but so far this hasn’t shipped.
ohashi 5y ago
Apple's revenue stream isn't as tied to internet advertising as any of its large competitors. They sell products. And also an ecosystem around those products. The two for one of hurting competitors and making customers happy is about as good a play as they could make. It makes making the 'right' decision easy. Blocking facebook from tracking everything we do online is a win most people can appreciate, except Facebook (and potentially some advertisers taking advantage of it).

jb1991 5y ago

While this is a great first step, isn’t one very likely consequence that facebook will pour extraordinary resources into much more invasive tracking using less obvious methods that cannot be blocked? I feel like this is just a start of a whole new era for fingerprinting.

haliskerbas 5y ago
I can guarantee you they have been working on this for some time now.
dwaite 5y ago
Prompting and honoring the user's choice of whether to be tracked across organizational boundaries are part of the App Store guidelines. Facebook would lose their ability to publish a native app for iPhone.
Lio 5y ago
Facebook is not a company with internal limits to what it sees as acceptable. They’re like a tobacco company. Recently they knowingly sat on information that showed that changes to Instagram were damaging teenage girl’s mental health. If they could track users and non-users in a more invasive way the will do that anyway.

rblion 5y ago

I'll say it again: Facebook will become the next AOL, Yahoo. It's already set in stone. They are just playing 'not to lose' at this point.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spideymans 5y ago
Unfortunate that they'll take Instagram down with them.
- anbende 5y ago
  They likely won’t take any of their acquisitions down with them. They’ve been pretty good about keeping them mostly separate. They’ll be spun off in any eventual liquidation. Unless you think they are being mismanaged or mismarketed now?
  - r00fus 5y ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive-whatsapp-cofounder-brian-acton-gives-the-inside-story-on-deletefacebook-and-why-he-left-850-million-behind/?sh=647e70703f20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive...
- leejo 5y ago
  Instagram has been an absolute dumpster fire for the last two or three years - it's no longer a photography platform, it's a meme, "influencer", celeb, and viral video platform. Tear it down. The only recent saving grace is that I'm seeing more photographic content, the problem is that's from other photographers who are promoting their work via paid ads - they're not going to grow their following that way and TBH a lot of it is pretty mediocre.
  - yosito 5y ago
    Any recommendations on photo platforms to use if I want to passively share my photos with my friends and family? Network effects are pretty hard to overcome.

sundvor 5y ago

Nice. This was a reminder to check my own Samsung browser setting; smart anti tracking was only in secret mode. Now set to always. Hopefully they'll make this the default too.

Abrownn 5y ago

This post is just an ad. It's a brand new Substack with literally only one article that's more than 50% ad text. All of the comments here are addressing overall HN sentiment or the title, not the article and the giant ad text which I would think would stick out to more people if they had actually read it??

iainmerrick 5y ago
You’re not wrong that this has a lot of ad copy, but it’s a different kind of ad -- a paid sponsorship, personalised to the site rather than to individual users. It’s a more old-fashioned model, like magazine ads. I think a lot of people saying “but ads are what let us get stuff for free!” would point to this kind of thing as an example of doing it right.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  I would say this is an ad aimed at a professional audience. I read the science equivalent of these in Nature sometimes. Sure, they are biased and misleading. But it is usually clear enough who sponsored the piece and so you get a useful perspective of the sponsor on some topic.
- 0xFreebie 5y ago
  It's jarring because I've never seen advertising on any of the dozen substacks I've visited before. This one has so many ads.
- Abrownn 5y ago
  I couldn't stand magazines back in the day for the same reason. Frankly, magazines are worse in my mind as I've already actually paid several dollars to purchase it. You'd think that'd allow them to get away with less ads as a result but apparently not. TV is the same way - I'm already paying for cable, stop showing me MORE stuff! I cut the cord in 2011, I don't miss it and I'd rather that model of payment+more ads not make a comeback.
burnished 5y ago
You don't think that its important that there aren't any irritating banners, that it opens with the content, and that any advertising copy sits below the article itself? I had to go back and check because the thing you are complaining about literally did not interrupt my flow in any way.

piiswrong 5y ago

Has anyone noticed that Apple tracks your app installs and use that data to show app Ads to you? While Apple doesn't allow others to track users across apps, they themselves can do it because they have a monopoly on app store so it doesn't count as third party data.

theshrike79 5y ago
As of iOS15 they ask your permission to do this. If you don't your app ads aren't personalized.
- bryan_w 5y ago
  But they don't use the same standard permission box that they force 3rd party apps to use. That's shady....
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    Because they're Apple and it's their store. Of course they want the box to look fancier :) Also: There is a HUGE difference (in my opinion) between Apple recommending me other apps based on the ones I already have installed vs Facebook tracking my presence and activity everywhere around the internet.
tgv 5y ago
That’s probably the “personalized recommendations”, and you can switch it off in your profile.
- random314 5y ago
  Is it opt in or opt out?
  - likpok 5y ago
    Opt out, because of course very few people would opt in.

r00fus 5y ago

I really liked the response Tim Cook gave when Zuckerberg was in trouble regarding Cambridge Analytica [1] When asked what he would do if he were currently faced with the problems confronting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Cook said: “I wouldn’t be in this situation.” ... Cook said that Apple has never believed that detailed online profiles of people should exist. “We can make a ton of money if customers were our product. We have elected not to do that,” Cook said. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/28/tim-cook-on-facebooks-scandal-i-wouldnt-be-in-this-situation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/28/tim-cook-on-facebooks-scanda...

pornel 5y ago
As a begrudging App Store user, I feel like I'm a product that Apple is selling to app developers.

floatingatoll 5y ago

Apple and Amazon both seem to ignore you if you don't do business with them. If they sell you things, they obviously keep track of that. Amazon's ads are really intrusive and give away my Amazon search history. Facebook and Google doxx you in order to exploit your weaknesses. It's each of our choice how to interpret that and respond to it, whether with "who cares" or "that's terrifying" or "bury gold" or whatever. But it's important to recognize that, at the core, this mandatory tracking question is curtailing the business of an entire category of startup that we've mostly forgotten. DoubleClick. I didn't understand that DoubleClick would lead to this nightmare of being stalked by hawkers. I do not like where we have ended up. May their business chip and shatter.

jqquah 5y ago

As an iOS user, I would like to say that I'm enjoying not feeling targeted by ads that makes me want to spend. The latest focus function is even better.

amelius 5y ago

As much as I hate Facebook, I think that one company abusing its power against other companies is not a good thing.

burnished 5y ago
Where is the abuse of power? The problem (I don't own an iphone! I could be wrong) as I understand it is that Apple is giving its customers the option to opt-in to tracking and that people are choosing not to do that. Yeah, it offers a business advantage I'm sure, but its also hard to see what is wrong with that action you know?
- simonklitj 5y ago
  You got it exactly right! And considering that (beginning with iOS 15) they ask you if they can track you too (for eg App Store ads), there’s not much business advantage either.
Lio 5y ago
That’s a straw man argument. Apple has only given users the chance to say no to Facebook they haven’t stopped them saying yes.
kumarvvr 5y ago
How can it be "abuse", when all Apple has done is to provide users a window saying "Hey, this app is collecting all your data. Do you want to prevent it?". The abuser is Facebook here. Fact : Apple is providing an authentic choice to users regarding sharing of their data. FB Spin : Apple is attacking us and hurting our business.
gigel82 5y ago
Proof: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-ad-network-gets-special-privileges-that-facebook-google-wont-on-ios14/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...

vincentmarle 5y ago

In my country there's a saying: "a cornered cat makes weird jumps". Expect Facebook to start working on their own mobile phones soon..

metters 5y ago

I opened the link and my email address is already filled out in the import form for subscription. Where does it have my email address from? I am not using auto fill features.

vxNsr 5y ago
Someone farther up said that ironically Firefox warned them that the website requests your email from Facebook.
- metters 5y ago
  I am using Firefox and I do not have a Facebook account

collaborative 5y ago

As a small advertiser, this year I will be pulling all ads. In fact, I may even set the company dormant. What used to work (keyword based advertising) no longer does. The whole ad market is so fraudulent... the only winner here is Amazon

ParanoidShroom 5y ago

The amount of bias in tech savvy people here is scary. This is def a power move, don't think they do it for us as consumers tho.

viktorcode 5y ago
This is also a very expected move. Apple was cutting down trackable stuff from iOS for a very long time now. Obviously, they going to keep improving on that.

fleddr 5y ago

"People are opting out of Facebook’s tracking for a reason: they no longer trust the company with their data after years of evidence they should not." Alternatively, this is the first time mainstream users are able at all to opt-out. I would strongly suspect users opt-out in any case, for any app, regardless of trust history.

vln 5y ago
Yeah, I opt out by default.

1cvmask 5y ago

It seems Apple wants that money for itself. It will take a couple of years to see how much of FB ads (amongst others) have shifted to Apple.

asimpletune 5y ago

Wow can you imagine if the rest of the internet worked like that?

helen___keller 5y ago

This is a perfect example of why competition needs to exist in tech, even when products seem to exist in harmony. I know this is contentious, but IMO this has been the strongest evidence thus far that we need regulation or antitrust to break up companies that own a platform and also compete on said platform. Side note, I don't tend to view Facebook as some inherently evil corporation as many commenters seem to. I hope that by eliminating certain unsavory practices (like predatory tracking), Facebooks interests will better align with its users interests, and we will see a better Facebook for it in the future.

mwexler 5y ago

Economists talk of the public good, ethicists and privacy folks talk of a right to privacy of a citizen (in some countries, at least)... but has anyone had an actual "experience improvement" from all this blocking? Do you see less ads or "better" ones? Has your business picked up due to this change, in that poor-but-targeted ads have ceased and "contextually relevant" ads let your business thrive? That is, this action by Apple should have remedied some consumer harm. While de-anonymyzation of advertising data could reveal, in some cases, identities and geo-behaviors, this seemed proof of concept more than actual impacts. In looking at my own iphone use, the blocking has not resulted in any improvement in ad frequency, relevance, or enjoyment. My android ads on my tablet have also not shown any measurable improvement. The businesses I help are not benefitting from this change. So, other than the satisfaction of "job well done, privacy is preserved", has anyone found any direct improvement to user experience from this action? I know none was really expected, that wasn't the point, but just wondering what the HN community has experienced so far.

helen___keller 5y ago
I would be very surprised if anybody found an experience improvement, considering there are still ads. That doesn't do to justify tracking, however. Fun thought experiment: suppose that Facebook served fewer ads to those who clicked to allow tracking, on the basis that the ads are worth more, and served more ads otherwise. Which do you think consumers would prefer to choose on average? This isn't rhetorical, I genuinely wonder because I don't know how much people actually care about tracking versus just picking "don't track me" as an easy win.
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bingohbangoh 5y ago

Antonio Garcia Martinez of the Pull Request mentioned that Facebook will move all of the advertising matching work to the phone. Facebook certainly has the intellectual firepower and motivation to pull this off, if it can be.

Epskampie 5y ago
The issue is not where the matching is done with data gathered on facebook, the issue is whether they can track you accross other apps. They can't anymore, and "matching on the phone" won't make a lick of difference.

rchaud 5y ago

In a twist of irony, there's a Firefox warning next to the Substack email input field. "This site may share your email address with Facebook".

dhosek 5y ago

It seems to me that few if any of the businesses that need all the tracking information are really productive. Most of them are really just playing arbitrage games between the rates for advertising and fees paid for leads from other businesses (I've worked in this industry in the past and it's kind of an icky place to be). If every single business that does this disappeared, outside of their employees, no one would ever notice that they no longer existed.

teekert 5y ago

All of this discussion is worthless without any transparency about the numbers (and I don't mean: FB's lost revenue). I'm still of the opinion that targeted advertising [0] (as opposed to context-aware advertising [1]) is a bunch of BS. So 80% of the traffic to Carousel came from FB, but how useful was it? Is there an actual drop in total visitors who spend money on products? And how is this across the market? Does this mean smaller companies are now getting a larger part of the interested people where as they couldn't pay for them before? Was FB anything more than a "pay us for traffic"-mafia? Is there any win for the tracked people, or were they just getting served ads for inferior products from companies that spend more on advertising instead of quality? I really hate reading these pieces without this information. It's really useless. [0]: Tracking and profiling based ads as FB offers [1]: Just show me a laptop ad when I'm reading a review of laptops, or shows me the latest Trek MTB on an MTB site.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

On one hand they do us all a solid by removing FacePuke from our phones in a meaningful way. But then they ruin that by implementing the infrastructure of Surveillance on our phones under the guise of the CSAM stuff. So was Apple removing FB simply because it sees value in its ability to be the sole arbiter of content/habits/data on your phone?

Jensson 5y ago

Look at Facebook stocks, they don't seem to be "kneecaped" at all. My theory is that tracking is a nice to have but not necessary to make huge amounts of money on ads. They lost a few percent of value over this, a huge hit to investors but even with that they are still one of the tech giants with more money than they know what to do with.

mrweasel 5y ago
Most of Facebooks claims about Apple hurting small businesses always seemed a bit weird, because much of the targeting that make the most sense can be done solely by data users enter into Facebook themselfs. Age, location, profession, combined with the content of your posts and the stuff you share should be more than enough to do efficient targeting of ads. The main issue that Facebook might face, in my mind, is that they oversold the value of the tracking of users across the web. So their customers now see a much hyped feature disappearing, so they slow down their ad buying, even though they could get the same results. The business that are going to be hurt the most a the agencies who honestly don't know anything about good advertising, but who just knows how to click around in Google Adword and Facebook Ads. Those people now need to learn a little more about targeting.

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

I've actually (anecdotally) seen the opposite. Before, you could very accurately track your ROI on your ad spend. Now, it's much harder to do, so Facebook spend starts looking more like traditional marketing where the age old quote "Half of my advertising spend is wasted, I don't know which half" applies. What does this mean? Some agencies and brands spend MORE because there's no clean data telling them their spend isn't working. They're just shooting in the dark. Over time, you can in aggregate tell which campaigns and ads work and which don't, but the iterations and experiments take longer and are more expensive. I don't know how long that's sustainable. But traditional advertising has been doing that ruse for decades.

xivzgrev 5y ago
That’s an interesting point. Ive seen CPMs rising, almost like people were spending more, but wasn’t sure why that may be. Also the article missed a few big points. 1) There’s really not much you can do in diversifying your channel mix - this change affects any paid platform. 2) what you can do is spend more on Android, which hasn’t (yet) lost the tracking 3) Facebook is working on work arounds, like a conversion API, where the data is matched on hashed PII. Other platforms without that rich, accurate PII will struggle a bit more.
bryan_w 5y ago
That's exactly what I said would happen. Big companies can do their own "Nelson" research and know how to tune their ads. As a result, they are willing to increase their bids over the less informed small businesses who now have to resort to a spray and pray approach. People never stopped to consider that FB would be fine with the changes and was genuine in their pleas for small businesses.
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Meanwhile they accidentally leak the exact data to institutions that help with election fraud. Profile generation of individuals. So who is going to consider their “genuine” reasoning. And they’re always and always lying.

dillondoyle 5y ago

As usual many highly upvoted takes here devaluing FB and claiming the ads don't work or are all just fake clicks. Hate FB or not their ads work well and this article is spot on from my experiences, though words like 'attack' have clear bias. I run direct response ads raising money for non profits and political campaigns on FB. This month has been a big struggle. While I can't quantify how much is due to limited iOS targeting, I know that we get lots of value from targeting donor lists which is harder now and ios users donate more. Doesn't help FB reported a 15% discrepancy bug which would effect optimization. I used to be heavy bull on FB based solely on the ads I buy and the ROI/value they provide. But I this has been a scary month. The bid market will eventually level out but if the targeting value loses say 25% effectiveness that will kneecap a ton of businesses who advertise there with thin margin. BTW thanks for sharing this format I love Axios and this looks like a great tech focused 'smart brevity'-style

hownottowrite 5y ago
Small retailer here and I can confirm similar dips. Basically it’s pulling out a channel we can use for discovery ads which just leads us all back to making the same boring stuff to feed into the Amazon/Google searchplex. Hope everyone enjoys having the same of everything!

spywaregorilla 5y ago

I got a request on spotify to continue tracking me. On some level I actually thought about saying yes if it meant spotify would get more revenue for my free consumption, and by proxy, musicians. I chose to say no. But I don't know if that was the right call. I don't care what spotify does with my data.

nyuszika7h 5y ago
As far as I know, the amount Spotify pays to musicians is pretty low. I doubt musicians are losing out on much by users rejecting tracking.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  A quick check suggests maybe 1/11th of revenue is from advertising on spotify. Assuming musicians get a fixed share of this, and non targeted advertising revenue is small... yeah probably not a big drop.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

This must be why FB is dumping money into the metaverse.

gigel82 5y ago

I'd like to see the look on everyone's face (who's now acting like Apple is this benevolent company looking out for their interest and privacy) when they'll launch their own Ad business in a couple of years; I'll eat my hat if Apple doesn't become one of the biggest Ad companies up there with Google and FB in a few years. They're just being proactive about weeding out the competition from their platforms.

not2b 5y ago

The issue here is knowing whether a given ad is leading to sales. But there is an old technique that has been used for a very long time: the ad provides a code or a coupon that gives the customer a small discount. If the advertiser uses multiple channels and different codes for each, they will quickly find out which ads are leading to sales.

williamtrask 5y ago

There’s a paragraph of this article that is a straight up advertisement with no markings at all.

poundofshrimp 5y ago

I have bought a few things by clicking on Instagram ads and enjoyed it. I choose to allow all apps to track me because I really dislike irrelevant ads. Ads will get smarter in the future, and I think this can be a good thing for the consumer. I’d really like to understand what the issue everyone on HN seems to have with this is - to me, this seems more of a personal preference (being privacy-conscious), rather than some sort of a fundamental issue that is bad for users (it’s not).

mayankkaizen 5y ago
I don't think HN crowd is against relevant ads. Heck, they aren't even against ads. The issues are more subtle. I never used IG but I was on FB. I'd frequently see 'unbelievable' ads. I mean I see ads offering me latest iphones selling at 100 dollars. What do you think what'll happen if I order one? Anything except getting a genuine iphone. So much for relevant ads. Tracking doesn't stop at showing you relevant ads. It also affects what is shown to you in content. Facebook manipulates your news feed. And when your internet browsing is mostly limited to Facebook, your world view is essentially controlled by it. And how much information do they need to show me relevant ads? My entire list of family members, relatives, friends, colleagues, ex colleagues and everyone I have exchanged numbers? My entire location history? My every interaction? Every financial transaction? My entire medical history? My entire photo collection? Even my sex life? Facebook will simply not stop until it collects every imaginable piece of information about you. Although I deactivated my profile 5 years ago, I still think FB is somehow collecting information about me. The worst part, they 'trick' you to expose every data. They collect these data absolutely by any means possible. Illegal? Unethical? Spying? Doesn't matter. Imagine a random person asking you some personal questions. You wouldn't feel comfortable. Besides, companies like FB have no morals. They will sell your data to just about anyone that throws enough money. You think that is a good thing?

Lamad123 5y ago

Now apple can sell that data!! Anyways, the customer is still being preyed on!

carbine 5y ago

It’s easy to cheer this since ad tracking and FB are both deeply unpopular. But not enough people are talking about who’s left holding the bag here: thousands of small businesses whose very existence is only possible because of the affordable customer acquisition they had via FB. Yes, they can divert budget elsewhere, but for small businesses that can be very hard to do. Coca-Cola will have no problem diverting low-performing spend to other channels. The mom and pop bakery down the street from you may not be so lucky. Just want more people to be aware of the human implications of this change.