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Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

489 points by robteix 5y ago

mojuba 5y ago
https://archive.fo/ZasjX https://archive.fo/ZasjX
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Apple probably has the power to kill the advertising industry. Wish it would use its gatekeeper position to do good for once.
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  Apple has the power to extort massive amounts from the advertisement industry. Case in point: Google.
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    I think FB is understating the cost (the drop in revenue growth is more and Google's revenue growth hints on what it could have been); maybe because they are negotiating a deal with Apple.
- friedturkey 5y ago
  I doubt it. Even with universal ad blocking on their platforms, iPhones are the minority worldwide and Macs even more so. Websites would just make sites painful to use for Apple users and force them into exceptionally expensive subscriptions (which most people won’t pay for) or onto cheap devices that allow endless ads.
  - dodgerdan 5y ago
    Users of iPhones are many many times more valuable to advertisers than Android users.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      iPhone users spend much more money on Apps per user - but the vast majority of advertising is not for apps. It's to buy real things. Android Users spend similar amounts as iOS users on everything besides apps. Even in-app purchases for games isn't "many many times more" - it's close to 2x.
      - scarface74 5y ago
        How is this possibly true when the average household income of iOS users is higher in every country that has any significant iPhone presents
        onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
        It's not "many many times" higher... It's ~40% more: https://www.comscore.com/ita/Public-Relations/Infographics/iPhone-Users-Earn-Higher-Income-Engage-More-on-Apps-than-Android-Users#:~:text=14%20Agosto%202014-,iPhone%20Users%20Earn%20Higher%20Income%2C%20Engage%20More%20on%20Apps%20than,an%20annual%20income%20of%20%2461%2C000 https://www.comscore.com/ita/Public-Relations/Infographics/i....
        scarface74 5y ago
        That 40% gives you a lot more discretionary spending ability …
    - ecdouvhr 5y ago
      Average iPhone users may be more valuable to the average advertiser when compared to the average Andoid user, but there are plenty of markets where I'd say there are plenty of advertisers who'd benefit from targetting the lower end of the income spectrum.
    - HPsquared 5y ago
      Only if they see the ads.
  - smileysteve 5y ago
    > make sites painful to use for ... users and force them into exceptionally expensive subscriptions I think you just described AdBlock, YouTube, Netflix, Washington Post, NyTimes, Spotify, and Amazon services, with of paid apps on the side.
- YmiYugy 5y ago
  They could obviously forbid apps to show ads and implement a powerful, default-enabled adblocker into Safari. But why would they? The outfall would likely see many important developers pull their apps at least temporarily. Of the Top 10 Downloaded Apps of 2021 (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/02/apple-most-downloaded-apps-2021 https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/02/apple-most-downloaded-a...) only a single one doesn't have ads. This could be Pyrrhic victory for Apple. It would most likely also seal the deal on sideloading regulation.
- viktorcode 5y ago
  I think you are under impression that ad industry depends on tracking of individuals. That's incorrect. It just a tad less efficient without tracking.
  - scim-knox-twox 5y ago
    ~4% less effective https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-extra-value-for-online-publishers-study-suggests/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
    - mcv 5y ago
      I'm totally fine with ads being 4% less effective. I wish it was more.
- pcardoso 5y ago
  Yes, but let's not get over excited. I'm fed up with their ads to subscribe to their services in macOS/iOS: the App Store, on Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Fitness+... I'm getting tired of clicking "no thank you".
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Don’t confuse advertising with tracking. I believe that the true advertising business and the people who really understand marketing is going to have a lot of success in the coming years. The business that will hurt are those who only know how to click around in Google AdWords or Facebooks Ads. Those business but all their eggs in a rather small basket. Facebook isn’t going away anytime soon, but it will fail more quickly that some expect. If 50% or more of your business is coming from Facebook, start making plans for the future now.
- tirpen 5y ago
  Ads were around for hundreds of years before Apple even existed. The advertising industry will survive just fine.
mojuba 5y ago
I'm going to ask the same question here: If I run a Facebook ad campaign for my app and given that Apple already provides the SKAdNetwork attribution mechanism, does enabling IDFA benefit my app, or it benefits only Facebook? Marketing people are trying to convince me IDFA is important for ad efficiency and thus should be enabled (with the spooky ATT popup in the beginning), but something is telling me it's not. I might be wrong and would really like to know.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  If you want the Ad optimisation from FB/Google/whoever to work, it's important. More generally, if you want to be able to track your own users and where they come from, it matters. If all of your traffic is organic, then it's irrelevant.
  - mojuba 5y ago
    So if there's SKAdNetwork attribution, why do I need to give the unique device ID to FB or Google in addition to that? They will know which ad led to the install via SKAdNetwork calls anyway, right? I know IDFA benefits them because they can connect the dots and know which apps are installed on a given device. But does my app's campaign benefit from that so much that I should go for the ATT popup?
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      > So if there's SKAdNetwork attribution, why do I need to give the unique device ID to FB or Google in addition to that? They will know which ad led to the install via SKAdNetwork calls anyway, right? Nope, they'll only know that some percentage of impressions of an ad lead to installs. With their SDK, they'll know who installed, and they can then feed this back into their ML models to find more similar people for you.
      - mojuba 5y ago
        Thanks. I still doubt it though. Firstly even without the IDFA they can heuristically identify devices in vast majority of cases, in fact even more accurately compared to the IDFA method given the current opt-in rates of 30-50%. Branch does this with deep linking and it's pretty successful despite the tightened privacy on the iOS side (I can imagine how Branch and similar services irritate Apple). My hypothesis is that Facebook pushes developers to enable IDFA because it saves them some effort: of course it's faster and easier than heuristics. Therefore, apps don't benefit from enabling the IDFA. But I might be terribly wrong and am open to counter-arguments.
samwillis 5y ago
As a rough datapoint, I run a consumer targeted e-commerce site. We ran a campaign before Christmas were we were selling a new product that was only marketed on Facebook, we are certain that (almost) all customers found it though that Facebook campaign. Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. This then meant that Facebooks estimated CPA was effectively double what it actually was. Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS device, which is a little higher than the global average but matches the market segment we are in in the UK. The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns running. So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  > Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. Word-of-mouth exists. It's possible Facebook wasn't making it up. Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?
  - samwillis 5y ago
    > Word-of-mouth exists True. However in this case we are confident, based on our own internal tracking and metrics, that this is correct.
    - geoduck14 5y ago
      >True. However in this case we are confident, based on our own internal tracking and metrics, that this is correct. I'm really curious what you sell now. Can you tell us? If not, can the rest of HN create fun speculations?
      - SllX 5y ago
        > If not, can the rest of HN create fun speculations? Human armpit-scented cat toys.
tromp 5y ago
> But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked. It seems most do not: a study in December by AppsFlyer, an ad-tech company, suggested that 54% of Apple users who saw the prompt opted out. Hard to believe that nearly half of all people is ok with being tracked...
- sneak 5y ago
  I believe that most people live relatively uneventful lives, and truly believe that they have nothing to hide from anyone, and resultantly do not value their own privacy whatsoever. The loss of privacy from surveillance capitalism does not bother them at all, and practically it is all upside, because they lost nothing of value to themselves. It does not enter their minds that mass abandonment of privacy means that it renders privacy harder and harder, or even impossible, for the tiny minority of society that needs it to operate: human rights advocates, investigative journalists, labor organizers, political upstarts, et c.
  - gnfargbl 5y ago
    I agree to an extent, but I think you're grossly oversimplifying the way that the average non-technical user views their privacy online. It's true that many people don't really care about advertisers tracking them, but they do care about other privacy-related aspects of their digital experience such as having their location tracked or the content of their communications monitored. As evidence of the latter, I present the enduring popularity of Signal and the fact that WhatsApp thought E2EE was an important enough feature to roll out across their entire user base. The small minority of society that needs privacy (we should be honest and say that it includes some really nasty criminals as well as the good guys) really needs that kind of privacy, the kind that the average user is at least somewhat interested in. Ad-tracking isn't a huge concern to your average union organizer.
  - scatters 5y ago
    On the contrary, they do realize that loss of privacy makes life harder for "troublemakers", and they see that as a benefit. Don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone shares your moral code.
firechickenbird 5y ago
-$10bn is not enough. They are still able to read my brain somehow
00000000005 5y ago
Facebook failed to pay the big money to Apple that they should have been paying for years. If Zuck had been handing Apple $5,000,000,000 per year as google does, then Apple would never have kneecapped Facebook. Larry and Sergei know how the protection racket works. You pay your dues to the local mob, you get to do business in their street corners. What do google pay Apple $5b for? Ummm… to be in the search of Safari. Yeah right. They all know google simply pays Apple because they don’t want no trouble, so they say “Safari”, write a huge cheque, and google gets to keep doing business in Apple devices. Tim is The Godfather. He who owns the platform owns the city. Everyone must respect and pay their dues, if they want to do business in this city. Apple has sent Facebook to sleep with the fishes because zuck didn’t show no respect and didn’t pay no dues.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  Users have the same privacy options with Google's apps that they have with Facebook's apps.
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    But Google are much, much less dependent on apps because they get all that sweet juicy search data from each iPhone (which they can then use to track you across their apps, potentially (this is possible to implement, I have no idea if they do it)).
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      So antitrust regulators should break up Google?
      - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        They should regulate them better, certainly. I'm agnostic on whether that means they should be broken up.
- nojito 5y ago
scim-knox-twox 5y ago
> For years, Apple helped by offering an “identifier for advertisers” (IDFA), giving advertisers a way to track people’s behaviour on its devices. (...) But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked. And everyone praised Apple for it. But if Apple really care about privacy, they'd never allowed for IDFA in the first place… > Google will soon offer most users of Android, its mobile operating system, the ability to opt out of ad tracking. I'll believe it when they pass some independent audits from EU countries xD
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Apple invented IDFA at the time as a compromise to prevent companies from building much more complicated and invasive tracking systems of their own. But of course they did anyway, Apple's ability to control those systems increased, and so it was time to stop providing it so easily.
- FearlessNebula 5y ago
  Why does Facebook even need the IDFA? Isn’t your Facebook account UUID also a unique ID that only you have? It’s not like people are browsing Facebook without logging in.
  - ajayyy 5y ago
    to link between the facebook app and other apps with the facebook ads sdk
    - FearlessNebula 5y ago
      They can’t use your Facebook account or something else for that? I’m pretty ignorant about ad tech, it’s something I’d like to learn more about.
      - babypuncher 5y ago
        So here's how IDFA works. User logs in to the Facebook app, and Facebook ties the user's IDFA to their Facebook account. User opens non-Facebook app X that uses the Facebook SDK for ads/tracking. App X sends the IDFA to Facebook, who then looks it up in their database and sees it on your account. They can now tie all user activity tracked by app X to the user's Facebook account. Without IDFA, this kind of cross-app tracking becomes considerably more difficult.
isodev 5y ago
All Apple did was give users the choice. Users choosing to deny Facebook the permission to share their data? That's entirely on Facebook.
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  I see this in the thread but I have to say that I disagree a bit. I'm certainly glad Apple gave users a choice, but you have to consider "the tyranny of the default" which is a great phrase I think. Most people will simply use the default option, so Apple's choice of default says something.
  - nickthegreek 5y ago
    If they tyranny of the default is to protect my privacy, I see no tyranny at all.
    - hotpotamus 5y ago
      I just like the phrase. Tyranny probably brings along a bad assumption, but it really just means that most people will stick with the default. It's something I learned independently, though it had been realized many times before I did. I'm also happy with the outcome in this case.
      - travisporter 5y ago
        Tyranny definitely has a negative connotation
        hotpotamus 5y ago
        I agree, but default connotes that you are able to change it. Maybe it's that sort of built in contradiction that appeals to me.
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    Right and the previous default was to allow all tracking.
hollowdene 5y ago
There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years. I used to work at a publisher where 80% of their website traffic came from Facebook. They haven't seen audience growth in years and their audience is skewing older and older, which is bad for their advertising business Businesses like that are going to get steadily squeezed both by Facebook's declining audience share and Facebook's own efforts to change what people see.
- altdataseller 5y ago
  Yeah publishers like BuzzFeed are in deep trouble, as less ppl are discovering content on FB
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Good riddance? People will keep finding & buying things they need. If nobody’s buying anything from these businesses without invasive advertising & tracking then maybe whatever goods they were selling aren’t actually necessary? Of course there is nuance and edge cases to this, but in general I wouldn’t be surprised if society and the planet was better off once we stop producing useless garbage.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    I don't know... I've seen some interesting products thanks to Facebook that I wouldn't have otherwise. Life would be pretty boring if we all only bought what we need.
    - OzCrimson 5y ago
      The question is more about the trade-off. 1. I see an ad for some really nice pens. COOL! 2. I go to a website that allows me to opt out of tracking but I'd have to opt out of their 300 affiliates one at a time. 3. The privacy policies that state: we do not honor do-not-track signals because we don't know if it was the user or a browser default. For me: not worth the tradeoff.
    - 5y ago
lvl100 5y ago
What I don’t understand is why is this hitting them now? Those privacy features were turned on for awhile.
zahma 5y ago
Apple knows where the future of technology is going, and Meta is getting in the way. Meta, appropriately renamed to reflect the trend toward augmented and virtual reality, would eventually become a threat to Apple’s walled garden business model. Apple gives lip service to privacy so long as it attracts users to their platform. However the moment we’re in is when the their invasion of privacy is meant to benefit their vision for keeping a customer totally content from home, to work, to play; they have a service for everything, and the data with which they have determined hidden markets, pain points, and markets of desire is coming at a cost for Facebook/Meta. In the future, whether that’s 5, 10, or 20 years, the biggest companies will produce their own platforms of walled garden experiences. Meta isn’t there yet and has suffered a setback, but the reports that Meta is trying to poach Apple devs is telling about where this is all headed. The “metaverse” is nascent and mockable, but my kid will probably grow up in it just like I grew up on AIM, chat rooms, and texting.
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  Do you think the past 2 years of digital-only communications has really enticed kids into the arms of Facebook/the like and their live-your-life-in-a-headset plan? I get a sense of the opposite. Bloody cassette tapes and boomboxes are back in style. It's not just a gimmick. Kids are nostalgic for a past they didn't even know—one without such intense and obligatory interconnection—one where they can run around and get dirty and mess up and not have it broadcast to everyone and monetized by international corporations. I don't blame them.
  - sfink 5y ago
    Ironically, I think they're looking for (and finding) a life with more interconnection by rejecting one with "such intense and obligatory interconnection" as you put it well. I guess it's the natural evolution of things: 1. we seek connectedness. 2. we invent a set of reductionist mechanisms for achieving connectedness 3. we discover that the reductionist aspect really matters and the connectedness we've achieved is hollow and fake 4. we (or rather our heirs since we're too stubborn to change) adapt to the new reality and build some degree of real connectedness on top of the old and a warped version of the new. "warped" meaning either "adapted to actual needs" or "perverted to serve unintended purposes" depending on whether your interests are being served or not.
d12bb 5y ago
Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing to back it up, but the whole press jumps on it. Apple is not Facebook's problem, all they did was giving users a choice, which should have happened ages ago. So Facebook just says Apple kills our business without ever thinking that maybe users don't like the way they do business. If they did, they wouldn't opt out…
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing to back it up, but the whole press jumps on it. If Zuck knowingly gave investors bad guidance, I don't think that would go over well with the SEC: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5#Forward-looking_statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5#Forward-looking... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement
  - ARandumGuy 5y ago
    Yeah, the CEO of a company saying numbers on official communication to investors is pretty compelling evidence on its own, especially if it's bad news. Executives don't generally lie about specifics to their investors, unless they're doing something completely fraudulent. And if you think that's the case for Facebook, you're going to need more evidence then just a gut feeling.
    - bduerst 5y ago
      Not to mention supporting data for announcements like these tend to come up in discovery requests for lawsuits so I highly doubt they'd make such a definitive statement w/o the points to back it up.
  - 1024core 5y ago
    Wilson Sonsini (the consiglieri to the Valley CEOs) has entered the chat..
  - bradleybuda 5y ago
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
- mattkevan 5y ago
  He looks utterly haunted. It’s tough to have sympathy for him, but if I’d built a website to rate women at my uni for a laugh, then accidentally found myself in charge of one of the world’s most powerful companies that’s destroying society from the inside out - and personally one of the world’s most hated people, I’d look pretty haunted too.
- pestatije 5y ago
  It´s a known effect. The older you get, the more difficult your true persona to disguise.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  Eh, the picture in the article seems to actually be a better picture of him than a lot of articles use. That being said, I think the biggest issue is his eye brows are very thin and fair, which combined with his pale skin, lips, and no facial hair gives his face very few defining features.
deleted 5y ago
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eric4smith 5y ago
Lies. Don’t you all see it? Facebook has been declining over the past year and this is a convenient way to blame someone - anyone. Let’s face it, what are your friends all using now? That’s right - video - YouTube and TikTok. Facebook had no answer for video and thus lost a lot of eyeballs. Instagram is a poor clone of TikTok and most people just repost their popular TikTok videos on Instagram reels anyway - hardly any original videos show up there. As the world transitions to short form video even YouTube is going to feel the pinch. Don’t you notice every one of your favorite content creators starting “clip” channels which are blowing up with YouTube shorts and reposts to TikTok? Facebook is beginning its long inevitable decline. Who knows if it will accelerate or just be a slow death? And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse and so he’s trying to make Facebook be the epicenter of it. Who knows if it will work. But this has nothing if anything to do with Apple. And everything to do with the long term trends of history… or if you will, psychohistory.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- krono 5y ago
  Yes to everything, but what even is a metaverse? I still have no idea.
  - rgbrenner 5y ago
    It's the same thing the marvelverse is... a way of referring to all of facebook's products. They're just trying to generate some hype and make their products look more forward thinking.. even though they're exactly the same as always.
    - sporkland 5y ago
      Metaverse is a concept originally popularized by Neal Stephenson in his book snowcrash. It's an online VR based world that is very cool and fun and most people spend there times there instead of the real world.
sixhobbits 5y ago
Maybe off topic but super ironic that I had managed to read the first sentence "POP-UP NOTIFICATIONS are often annoying." and then got punched in the face by a huge cookie popup from Economist
vincentmarle 5y ago
As the Dutch say: a cat that is backed into a corner, makes unpredictable jumps. And Zuckerberg is one really smart cat, with a lot of money at his disposal. So I wouldn’t rule him out yet.
intrasight 5y ago
FB is one of the most developer hostile platforms that I've worked with. For example, their API tokens expire in 60 days, so users of automated reporting tools are constantly having to re-grant. Why? No good reason. And the documentation is garbage. FB can't blame Apple or anyone else for those failings. They should fix the things that are under their own control.
- worik 5y ago
  > FB is one of the most developer hostile platforms that I've worked with Have you done development on Apple platforms? That might push FB into second place....
- ferdowsi 5y ago
  FB has been making their API increasingly useless for a decade now. They don't want you building integrations, they want you in their walled garden using their tools.
deleted 5y ago
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sjs382 5y ago
Alternatively, "How Apple Closed the Privacy Hole that Facebook Was Exploiting to the Tune of $10bn"
footlose_3815 5y ago
[dead]
skizm 5y ago
Facebook's revenue up 35% year over year: -26% (P/E ~16) Amazon's revenue up 15% year over year: +12% (P/E 60+) I don't get the stock market. Facebook can simply turn on billions in revenue whenever they want still with WhatsApp, which has north of 2 billion MAU, and has not been monetized at all yet. Facebook is a reverse meme stock.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Facebook's guidance was shit. Amazon's was not.
- coldpie 5y ago
  > I don't get the stock market. There's nothing to get, it's just gambling for rich people.
  - altdataseller 5y ago
    This. The market is just a bunch of random ppl and robots who are have different motivations and opinions. Some are long term oriented, some just wanna make a quick buck. It’s just a chaotic casino.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  WhatsApp has competitors that in Telegram/Signal etc. that are financially stable, offer more features and security, and with the mood of the government right now they would absolutely be prevented from purchasing. They would destroy WhatsApp in weeks if they did that. Amazon is fine and doesn't need to grow. Facebook is in danger and growth was already priced in. Now it's not.
  - kazen44 5y ago
    heck, soms European politicians are calling for a split of WhatsApp from Facebook because Facebook did not honor their end of the deal when they bought WhatsApp. fb hilariously claims that this would be impossible, which is kind of proving they didn't hold up their end of the bargain.
erikpukinskis 5y ago
I remember when Facebook Platform came out. The super early version where you could embed your app on Facebook and engage with the social graph. I thought dang, this is smart. They’ll basically own the next level up the stack from the browser: they’ll own the “social chrome” of every application on the web. Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird social games for a while there. And every web dev was learning how to build Facebook apps. We wondered if we’d even really need a domain for much more than a landing page, if 99% of our engagement was going to come through Facebooks. And then they killed it because they wanted to own the entire experience inside Facebook. It became not a walled garden, but a walled flower pot. It always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they lost control allowing third party apps in their frame. But didn’t they want to be a Microsoft and not a WordPerfect? Looking back, I wonder if it was a missed opportunity. They have to go try to be the metaverse because social never became a platform.
- scarface74 5y ago
  They killed it because it didn’t work on mobile.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Maybe their desktop traffic wouldn't have tanked so much if they'd kept it a richer experience, and continue to enrich it. Instead they abandoned it completely once traffic patterns tipped towards mobile.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      How many people really use desktops that much in 2021 for personal use? Facebook is already seen as being “for old people”.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        78% of homes have a computer in them. [0] I don't know anyone who does not use a PC for personal use, and my non-work social circles are not at all techie dominated. Also I'm not talking about 2021: I'm talking about years ago when Facebook moved away from prioritizing the PC platform. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered, I don't know, but when FB became a primary entry point to the internet for many people, and FB then mostly ignored desktop experience, it certainly accelerated any decline already in place. But had they enriched that experience, maybe there'd still be a much stronger following there. [0]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer-internet-use.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer...
EGreg 5y ago
I think their Metaverse push was actually a great way for rats to escape a sinking ship ... by finding a new ship! Facebook just could never really capture the whole "facilitating real world interactions" thing, and for most people it became simply a way to maintain an online avatar / identity, argue about politics, comment on cat memes, and otherwise waste time in cyberspace. That's what they're good at, and maybe with the metaverse they can at least make people more productive with that. Now there are BENEFITS to MetaVerse. Less usage of fossil fuels. Facebook also facilitated conversations between people around the world, that would otherwise not meet. But its centralized nature and limited flexibility held back the whole space. But when it comes to making plans in real life, forming relationships, deal flow etc. you need open source software like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
yalogin 5y ago
I haven't followed the whole apple privacy push and how it impacted advertising. However, isn't everyone always logged into Facebook? If so they already know who is using it and any interaction will tell them exactly who used it. How does the Apple's platform level change effect them? Am I missing something?
- willio58 5y ago
  It’s not Facebook knowing who used their app, it’s restrictions on what data Facebook can pull from your phone. It’s also making it clear to users how often this data is being fetched, and the option to opt out of data collection is new too.
- strikelaserclaw 5y ago
  i had this same question, maybe someone can explain.
lovefeature 5y ago
unixbane 5y ago
bigyellow 5y ago
What's Meta? You mean Facecrook, the spying and surveillance network?
alanlammiman 5y ago
The problem isn't just Apple's action on IDFA. It's that Facebook seems to be so poorly managed on some fronts that its reactions, rather than mitigating problems, has caused further harm. For example - in a rushed effort to get their privacy issues in order, they are deactivating the live facebook integrations of customers based on cursory/mistaken/possibly machine-based readings of their privacy policies. They did that to us yesterday: https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-Apps-in-Production-while-Running-Ads-for-them-19ef0d87d97b4f739b1ba2c2ee0af7dd https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-A... We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app. If this is also happening to many other developers right now, that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be causing the drop in the share price. In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow, it's 'legal costs'.
- bagacrap 5y ago
  "we don't want to track individuals" --- right, but each ad FB places has a lower conversion rate if they don't know as much about the user, so while your goal may not be tracking per se, tracking does get you the same sales in fewer placements, and Facebook can sell those saved placements to other buyers the fact that they're cracking down on partner privacy in a hamfisted way surely doesn't help matters but I can't see how angry devs are driving the share price down
  - alanlammiman 5y ago
    I agree with your first point in the sense that having individualised targeting data necessarily improves advertising by some amount vs. merely contextual and aggregate data. For our specific case I'm not convinced that amount is as big as some people imagine it is, but I haven't found a good way to test that precisely given that facebook doesn't really have a "just give me a representative sample of your audience in this region" targeting feature (wish it did) to compare with the targeted alternatives. In our case, app ads that now use SKAN (the Apple solution that provides aggregated attribution) seem to be working well enough - that was my point. Regarding your second point, yes, I agree - it's not obvious. Assuming this did indeed affect many developers like us and that it happened to everyone at the same time (which may not be the case - that it happened to us and that it coincided with their earnings report may have just been a coincidence - I haven't seen a mass outcry on twitter or anything), I was wondering whether it might be hedge funds that buy/track aggregated ad spend or attribution data, perhaps from MMPs or media buying agencies. I know they buy app download data from the likes of App Annie, but don't know if equivalent data is available and timely for ad spend. In any case, my point is more that this is illustrative of how they make bad situations worse for themselves.
echopurity 5y ago
btdmaster 5y ago
This "privacy push" is only a change with respect to IDFA -- something specifically built by Apple to compete with Google's advertising ID. Opting out system-wide was already possible, but unsurprisingly its existence is not something that's well-known since Apple has established themselves as Goddess of Privacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers. To me, this is closer to "Apple spying technology becomes opt-in and no one uses it anymore".
martini333 5y ago
Why is every journalist blaming Apple's Privacy. Like, use your brains, get a life.
- bell-cot 5y ago
  I'd guess that desperate-to-stay-employed journalists feel far more need to suck up to Zuck than to suck up to Cook. And the "why Apple is in the right" case takes a whole lot more & longer words and concepts to explain. Vs. "Big meanie Apple took $10B from every's-favorite-site Facebook".
1024core 5y ago
Archive link: https://archive.ph/cyxRR https://archive.ph/cyxRR
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Looks like I jumped on the iPhone bandwagon just in time to cost facebook some money! (got my iphone ~1.5 yrs ago). What I don't get is why iphone needs to scan your phone at all. I mean they literally have a treasure trove of information of most of their users, why do they need to sell that? Why don't they just act use the megatons of info they already have on you from scanning your page and your messages to other users? They should be rolling in ad revenue without needing to spy on data on phones.
- slenk 5y ago
  What about just not using Facebook...
  - babypuncher 5y ago
    Before this change, Facebook could still track you in non-Facebook apps that use their software. Even if you are not a Facebook user.
    - slenk 5y ago
      This change actually eliminates/ed that? (never used iOS, unsure of how things are)
      - babypuncher 5y ago
        It made it considerably more difficult, because there is no legitimate user/device specific identifier that Facebook can use to track usage across different apps that use their SDK, unless the user opts in to IDFA, or logs in with their Facebook account in every app that uses it. This won't necessarily stop them from using other personally identifying information that you might share with multiple apps (phone number, email address, etc.) Sign In With Apple helps mitigate this to an extent.
paxys 5y ago
Snap is still somehow up 50% today. Google is similarly doing great. The problem is more on Facebook's end than Apple's. TikTok did way more damage than Apple ever could.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- curious_cat_163 5y ago
  What they need to realize is that there are advantages _and_ responsibilities that come with sheer scale. Their apps are rife with misinformation and gaslighting. Facebook has become associated with argument, fight and social misery in the minds of their consumers. They need to take some substantial steps to change that. Merely wishing these issues away with posts, launching new products or changing the company name does not cut it.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Snap still down 11% this month
- piggybox 5y ago
  Could you expand your time frame a little bit then look Snap again?
annoyingnoob 5y ago
If you were to physically track someone and catalog everything they do in meatspace, we'd call that stalking. Why is that behavior acceptable when done by software? It should not be okay, its still stalking - no matter your intentions or end goals.
sebow 5y ago
Correction: Apple's war on FB/Meta/Zucc cost Meta $10B. Let's not disingenuously pretend they did it out their own good hearts and for people's privacy: they did not. Also more people overly attribute this loss of Meta to Apple measure's than general Meta trends.Meta's rebranding, dystopian vision about the future and it's anti-society effects though their business model which promotes less trust in the population is what brings up this number, not entirely Apple, not entirely Android.Then again outlets and people who do these kind of oversimplifications might aswell do it for sensationalism, since we need the same people to be explained the truth when something changes.
calebm 5y ago
This is quantitative proof that Facebook is extracting value directly from people's private data.
dmitriid 5y ago
> Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B It's a false narrative that Facebook is pushing out: "It' snot us that are bad, it's this big bad Apple who are hurting our poor business".
honkycat 5y ago
There was a great tweet today: https://mobile.twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1489274079685136385 https://mobile.twitter.com/kevinroose/status/148927407968513... Kevin Roose: Can't imagine why this platform is shrinking Facebook top ten: The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from: 1. Breitbart 2. Ben Shapiro 3. Dan Bongino 4. NPR 5. Ben Shapiro 6. Ben Shapiro 7. Ben Shapiro 8. Steven Crowder 9. Ben Shapiro 10. Franklin Graham I won't touch the platform anymore. It's so out of touch.
gigatexal 5y ago
How can they make that number 10x bigger hrmm
asiachick 5y ago
I find it sad that Google's response to privacy is FLoC / Topics API instead of just embracing privacy like Apple. I know Google is an ad company. Still, they mostly control both Android and Chrome which means if they followed Apple's example on privacy they wouldn't be losing much of competitive advantage because if both Android and Chrome were privacy oriented that means there'd be no OS where some competitor could track. In other words, it still seems like they'd be #1 if they switched to content based ads and context (search) but zero tracking.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
Can we say that this puts a value on the non-consensual privacy violations that facebook’s business model depends on?
citizenpaul 5y ago
Its 100% because FB/meta is a growth stock and they lost users. This made all the finance projections break and institutions had th liquidate based on their new projections. That is how finance works at scale.
ece 5y ago
Twitter killed Vine.
darthrupert 5y ago
If you think that manipulating people is evil, then ads are evil and hence Meta and Alphabet are evil. If you think that some manipulation is evil, then it's about how they manipulate and on which issues. Perhaps manipulating people to buy something is ok but manipulating them to harm the society (something which Meta is clearly guilty of) is not. Then these companies could turn good if they just turned down a lot of their profit. Which of course won't happen because as companies their prime directive is to make money. If you think that all manipulation is ok then your opinion should be dismissed.
- fulafel 5y ago
  I think expecting nothing wrt ethics, aka the "companies are amoral and will never let ethics affect profit making" meme is too cynical. It starts off as a criticism but we then accept and normalize the idea. That benefits the amoral corporations. There are better outcomes if hold them to society's moral standards and to their own goals and claims they make to the public or shareholders. Those organisations are made up of people that mostly aren't that amoral, after all.

489 points by robteix 5y ago

https://archive.fo/ZasjX https://archive.fo/ZasjX

Apple probably has the power to kill the advertising industry. Wish it would use its gatekeeper position to do good for once.

throwaway4good 5y ago
Apple has the power to extort massive amounts from the advertisement industry. Case in point: Google.
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  I think FB is understating the cost (the drop in revenue growth is more and Google's revenue growth hints on what it could have been); maybe because they are negotiating a deal with Apple.
friedturkey 5y ago
I doubt it. Even with universal ad blocking on their platforms, iPhones are the minority worldwide and Macs even more so. Websites would just make sites painful to use for Apple users and force them into exceptionally expensive subscriptions (which most people won’t pay for) or onto cheap devices that allow endless ads.
- dodgerdan 5y ago
  Users of iPhones are many many times more valuable to advertisers than Android users.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    iPhone users spend much more money on Apps per user - but the vast majority of advertising is not for apps. It's to buy real things. Android Users spend similar amounts as iOS users on everything besides apps. Even in-app purchases for games isn't "many many times more" - it's close to 2x.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      How is this possibly true when the average household income of iOS users is higher in every country that has any significant iPhone presents
      - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
        It's not "many many times" higher... It's ~40% more: https://www.comscore.com/ita/Public-Relations/Infographics/iPhone-Users-Earn-Higher-Income-Engage-More-on-Apps-than-Android-Users#:~:text=14%20Agosto%202014-,iPhone%20Users%20Earn%20Higher%20Income%2C%20Engage%20More%20on%20Apps%20than,an%20annual%20income%20of%20%2461%2C000 https://www.comscore.com/ita/Public-Relations/Infographics/i....
        scarface74 5y ago
        That 40% gives you a lot more discretionary spending ability …
  - ecdouvhr 5y ago
    Average iPhone users may be more valuable to the average advertiser when compared to the average Andoid user, but there are plenty of markets where I'd say there are plenty of advertisers who'd benefit from targetting the lower end of the income spectrum.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    Only if they see the ads.
- smileysteve 5y ago
  > make sites painful to use for ... users and force them into exceptionally expensive subscriptions I think you just described AdBlock, YouTube, Netflix, Washington Post, NyTimes, Spotify, and Amazon services, with of paid apps on the side.
YmiYugy 5y ago
They could obviously forbid apps to show ads and implement a powerful, default-enabled adblocker into Safari. But why would they? The outfall would likely see many important developers pull their apps at least temporarily. Of the Top 10 Downloaded Apps of 2021 (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/02/apple-most-downloaded-apps-2021 https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/02/apple-most-downloaded-a...) only a single one doesn't have ads. This could be Pyrrhic victory for Apple. It would most likely also seal the deal on sideloading regulation.
viktorcode 5y ago
I think you are under impression that ad industry depends on tracking of individuals. That's incorrect. It just a tad less efficient without tracking.
- scim-knox-twox 5y ago
  ~4% less effective https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-extra-value-for-online-publishers-study-suggests/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
  - mcv 5y ago
    I'm totally fine with ads being 4% less effective. I wish it was more.
pcardoso 5y ago
Yes, but let's not get over excited. I'm fed up with their ads to subscribe to their services in macOS/iOS: the App Store, on Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Fitness+... I'm getting tired of clicking "no thank you".
mrweasel 5y ago
Don’t confuse advertising with tracking. I believe that the true advertising business and the people who really understand marketing is going to have a lot of success in the coming years. The business that will hurt are those who only know how to click around in Google AdWords or Facebooks Ads. Those business but all their eggs in a rather small basket. Facebook isn’t going away anytime soon, but it will fail more quickly that some expect. If 50% or more of your business is coming from Facebook, start making plans for the future now.
tirpen 5y ago
Ads were around for hundreds of years before Apple even existed. The advertising industry will survive just fine.

mojuba 5y ago

I'm going to ask the same question here: If I run a Facebook ad campaign for my app and given that Apple already provides the SKAdNetwork attribution mechanism, does enabling IDFA benefit my app, or it benefits only Facebook? Marketing people are trying to convince me IDFA is important for ad efficiency and thus should be enabled (with the spooky ATT popup in the beginning), but something is telling me it's not. I might be wrong and would really like to know.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
If you want the Ad optimisation from FB/Google/whoever to work, it's important. More generally, if you want to be able to track your own users and where they come from, it matters. If all of your traffic is organic, then it's irrelevant.
- mojuba 5y ago
  So if there's SKAdNetwork attribution, why do I need to give the unique device ID to FB or Google in addition to that? They will know which ad led to the install via SKAdNetwork calls anyway, right? I know IDFA benefits them because they can connect the dots and know which apps are installed on a given device. But does my app's campaign benefit from that so much that I should go for the ATT popup?
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    > So if there's SKAdNetwork attribution, why do I need to give the unique device ID to FB or Google in addition to that? They will know which ad led to the install via SKAdNetwork calls anyway, right? Nope, they'll only know that some percentage of impressions of an ad lead to installs. With their SDK, they'll know who installed, and they can then feed this back into their ML models to find more similar people for you.
    - mojuba 5y ago
      Thanks. I still doubt it though. Firstly even without the IDFA they can heuristically identify devices in vast majority of cases, in fact even more accurately compared to the IDFA method given the current opt-in rates of 30-50%. Branch does this with deep linking and it's pretty successful despite the tightened privacy on the iOS side (I can imagine how Branch and similar services irritate Apple). My hypothesis is that Facebook pushes developers to enable IDFA because it saves them some effort: of course it's faster and easier than heuristics. Therefore, apps don't benefit from enabling the IDFA. But I might be terribly wrong and am open to counter-arguments.

samwillis 5y ago

As a rough datapoint, I run a consumer targeted e-commerce site. We ran a campaign before Christmas were we were selling a new product that was only marketed on Facebook, we are certain that (almost) all customers found it though that Facebook campaign. Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. This then meant that Facebooks estimated CPA was effectively double what it actually was. Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS device, which is a little higher than the global average but matches the market segment we are in in the UK. The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns running. So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.

wizzwizz4 5y ago
> Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. Word-of-mouth exists. It's possible Facebook wasn't making it up. Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?
- samwillis 5y ago
  > Word-of-mouth exists True. However in this case we are confident, based on our own internal tracking and metrics, that this is correct.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    >True. However in this case we are confident, based on our own internal tracking and metrics, that this is correct. I'm really curious what you sell now. Can you tell us? If not, can the rest of HN create fun speculations?
    - SllX 5y ago
      > If not, can the rest of HN create fun speculations? Human armpit-scented cat toys.

tromp 5y ago

> But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked. It seems most do not: a study in December by AppsFlyer, an ad-tech company, suggested that 54% of Apple users who saw the prompt opted out. Hard to believe that nearly half of all people is ok with being tracked...

sneak 5y ago
I believe that most people live relatively uneventful lives, and truly believe that they have nothing to hide from anyone, and resultantly do not value their own privacy whatsoever. The loss of privacy from surveillance capitalism does not bother them at all, and practically it is all upside, because they lost nothing of value to themselves. It does not enter their minds that mass abandonment of privacy means that it renders privacy harder and harder, or even impossible, for the tiny minority of society that needs it to operate: human rights advocates, investigative journalists, labor organizers, political upstarts, et c.
- gnfargbl 5y ago
  I agree to an extent, but I think you're grossly oversimplifying the way that the average non-technical user views their privacy online. It's true that many people don't really care about advertisers tracking them, but they do care about other privacy-related aspects of their digital experience such as having their location tracked or the content of their communications monitored. As evidence of the latter, I present the enduring popularity of Signal and the fact that WhatsApp thought E2EE was an important enough feature to roll out across their entire user base. The small minority of society that needs privacy (we should be honest and say that it includes some really nasty criminals as well as the good guys) really needs that kind of privacy, the kind that the average user is at least somewhat interested in. Ad-tracking isn't a huge concern to your average union organizer.
- scatters 5y ago
  On the contrary, they do realize that loss of privacy makes life harder for "troublemakers", and they see that as a benefit. Don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone shares your moral code.

firechickenbird 5y ago

-$10bn is not enough. They are still able to read my brain somehow

00000000005 5y ago

Facebook failed to pay the big money to Apple that they should have been paying for years. If Zuck had been handing Apple $5,000,000,000 per year as google does, then Apple would never have kneecapped Facebook. Larry and Sergei know how the protection racket works. You pay your dues to the local mob, you get to do business in their street corners. What do google pay Apple $5b for? Ummm… to be in the search of Safari. Yeah right. They all know google simply pays Apple because they don’t want no trouble, so they say “Safari”, write a huge cheque, and google gets to keep doing business in Apple devices. Tim is The Godfather. He who owns the platform owns the city. Everyone must respect and pay their dues, if they want to do business in this city. Apple has sent Facebook to sleep with the fishes because zuck didn’t show no respect and didn’t pay no dues.

GeekyBear 5y ago
Users have the same privacy options with Google's apps that they have with Facebook's apps.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  But Google are much, much less dependent on apps because they get all that sweet juicy search data from each iPhone (which they can then use to track you across their apps, potentially (this is possible to implement, I have no idea if they do it)).
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    So antitrust regulators should break up Google?
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      They should regulate them better, certainly. I'm agnostic on whether that means they should be broken up.
nojito 5y ago

scim-knox-twox 5y ago

> For years, Apple helped by offering an “identifier for advertisers” (IDFA), giving advertisers a way to track people’s behaviour on its devices. (...) But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked. And everyone praised Apple for it. But if Apple really care about privacy, they'd never allowed for IDFA in the first place… > Google will soon offer most users of Android, its mobile operating system, the ability to opt out of ad tracking. I'll believe it when they pass some independent audits from EU countries xD

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Apple invented IDFA at the time as a compromise to prevent companies from building much more complicated and invasive tracking systems of their own. But of course they did anyway, Apple's ability to control those systems increased, and so it was time to stop providing it so easily.
FearlessNebula 5y ago
Why does Facebook even need the IDFA? Isn’t your Facebook account UUID also a unique ID that only you have? It’s not like people are browsing Facebook without logging in.
- ajayyy 5y ago
  to link between the facebook app and other apps with the facebook ads sdk
  - FearlessNebula 5y ago
    They can’t use your Facebook account or something else for that? I’m pretty ignorant about ad tech, it’s something I’d like to learn more about.
    - babypuncher 5y ago
      So here's how IDFA works. User logs in to the Facebook app, and Facebook ties the user's IDFA to their Facebook account. User opens non-Facebook app X that uses the Facebook SDK for ads/tracking. App X sends the IDFA to Facebook, who then looks it up in their database and sees it on your account. They can now tie all user activity tracked by app X to the user's Facebook account. Without IDFA, this kind of cross-app tracking becomes considerably more difficult.

isodev 5y ago

All Apple did was give users the choice. Users choosing to deny Facebook the permission to share their data? That's entirely on Facebook.

hotpotamus 5y ago
I see this in the thread but I have to say that I disagree a bit. I'm certainly glad Apple gave users a choice, but you have to consider "the tyranny of the default" which is a great phrase I think. Most people will simply use the default option, so Apple's choice of default says something.
- nickthegreek 5y ago
  If they tyranny of the default is to protect my privacy, I see no tyranny at all.
  - hotpotamus 5y ago
    I just like the phrase. Tyranny probably brings along a bad assumption, but it really just means that most people will stick with the default. It's something I learned independently, though it had been realized many times before I did. I'm also happy with the outcome in this case.
    - travisporter 5y ago
      Tyranny definitely has a negative connotation
      - hotpotamus 5y ago
        I agree, but default connotes that you are able to change it. Maybe it's that sort of built in contradiction that appeals to me.
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  Right and the previous default was to allow all tracking.

hollowdene 5y ago

There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years. I used to work at a publisher where 80% of their website traffic came from Facebook. They haven't seen audience growth in years and their audience is skewing older and older, which is bad for their advertising business Businesses like that are going to get steadily squeezed both by Facebook's declining audience share and Facebook's own efforts to change what people see.

altdataseller 5y ago
Yeah publishers like BuzzFeed are in deep trouble, as less ppl are discovering content on FB
Nextgrid 5y ago
Good riddance? People will keep finding & buying things they need. If nobody’s buying anything from these businesses without invasive advertising & tracking then maybe whatever goods they were selling aren’t actually necessary? Of course there is nuance and edge cases to this, but in general I wouldn’t be surprised if society and the planet was better off once we stop producing useless garbage.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  I don't know... I've seen some interesting products thanks to Facebook that I wouldn't have otherwise. Life would be pretty boring if we all only bought what we need.
  - OzCrimson 5y ago
    The question is more about the trade-off. 1. I see an ad for some really nice pens. COOL! 2. I go to a website that allows me to opt out of tracking but I'd have to opt out of their 300 affiliates one at a time. 3. The privacy policies that state: we do not honor do-not-track signals because we don't know if it was the user or a browser default. For me: not worth the tradeoff.
  - 5y ago

lvl100 5y ago

What I don’t understand is why is this hitting them now? Those privacy features were turned on for awhile.

zahma 5y ago

Apple knows where the future of technology is going, and Meta is getting in the way. Meta, appropriately renamed to reflect the trend toward augmented and virtual reality, would eventually become a threat to Apple’s walled garden business model. Apple gives lip service to privacy so long as it attracts users to their platform. However the moment we’re in is when the their invasion of privacy is meant to benefit their vision for keeping a customer totally content from home, to work, to play; they have a service for everything, and the data with which they have determined hidden markets, pain points, and markets of desire is coming at a cost for Facebook/Meta. In the future, whether that’s 5, 10, or 20 years, the biggest companies will produce their own platforms of walled garden experiences. Meta isn’t there yet and has suffered a setback, but the reports that Meta is trying to poach Apple devs is telling about where this is all headed. The “metaverse” is nascent and mockable, but my kid will probably grow up in it just like I grew up on AIM, chat rooms, and texting.

52-6F-62 5y ago
Do you think the past 2 years of digital-only communications has really enticed kids into the arms of Facebook/the like and their live-your-life-in-a-headset plan? I get a sense of the opposite. Bloody cassette tapes and boomboxes are back in style. It's not just a gimmick. Kids are nostalgic for a past they didn't even know—one without such intense and obligatory interconnection—one where they can run around and get dirty and mess up and not have it broadcast to everyone and monetized by international corporations. I don't blame them.
- sfink 5y ago
  Ironically, I think they're looking for (and finding) a life with more interconnection by rejecting one with "such intense and obligatory interconnection" as you put it well. I guess it's the natural evolution of things: 1. we seek connectedness. 2. we invent a set of reductionist mechanisms for achieving connectedness 3. we discover that the reductionist aspect really matters and the connectedness we've achieved is hollow and fake 4. we (or rather our heirs since we're too stubborn to change) adapt to the new reality and build some degree of real connectedness on top of the old and a warped version of the new. "warped" meaning either "adapted to actual needs" or "perverted to serve unintended purposes" depending on whether your interests are being served or not.

d12bb 5y ago

Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing to back it up, but the whole press jumps on it. Apple is not Facebook's problem, all they did was giving users a choice, which should have happened ages ago. So Facebook just says Apple kills our business without ever thinking that maybe users don't like the way they do business. If they did, they wouldn't opt out…

throw0101a 5y ago
> Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing to back it up, but the whole press jumps on it. If Zuck knowingly gave investors bad guidance, I don't think that would go over well with the SEC: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5#Forward-looking_statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5#Forward-looking... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement
- ARandumGuy 5y ago
  Yeah, the CEO of a company saying numbers on official communication to investors is pretty compelling evidence on its own, especially if it's bad news. Executives don't generally lie about specifics to their investors, unless they're doing something completely fraudulent. And if you think that's the case for Facebook, you're going to need more evidence then just a gut feeling.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    Not to mention supporting data for announcements like these tend to come up in discovery requests for lawsuits so I highly doubt they'd make such a definitive statement w/o the points to back it up.
- 1024core 5y ago
  Wilson Sonsini (the consiglieri to the Valley CEOs) has entered the chat..
- bradleybuda 5y ago

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

mattkevan 5y ago
He looks utterly haunted. It’s tough to have sympathy for him, but if I’d built a website to rate women at my uni for a laugh, then accidentally found myself in charge of one of the world’s most powerful companies that’s destroying society from the inside out - and personally one of the world’s most hated people, I’d look pretty haunted too.
pestatije 5y ago
It´s a known effect. The older you get, the more difficult your true persona to disguise.
xboxnolifes 5y ago
Eh, the picture in the article seems to actually be a better picture of him than a lot of articles use. That being said, I think the biggest issue is his eye brows are very thin and fair, which combined with his pale skin, lips, and no facial hair gives his face very few defining features.

deleted 5y ago

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eric4smith 5y ago

Lies. Don’t you all see it? Facebook has been declining over the past year and this is a convenient way to blame someone - anyone. Let’s face it, what are your friends all using now? That’s right - video - YouTube and TikTok. Facebook had no answer for video and thus lost a lot of eyeballs. Instagram is a poor clone of TikTok and most people just repost their popular TikTok videos on Instagram reels anyway - hardly any original videos show up there. As the world transitions to short form video even YouTube is going to feel the pinch. Don’t you notice every one of your favorite content creators starting “clip” channels which are blowing up with YouTube shorts and reposts to TikTok? Facebook is beginning its long inevitable decline. Who knows if it will accelerate or just be a slow death? And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse and so he’s trying to make Facebook be the epicenter of it. Who knows if it will work. But this has nothing if anything to do with Apple. And everything to do with the long term trends of history… or if you will, psychohistory.

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krono 5y ago
Yes to everything, but what even is a metaverse? I still have no idea.
- rgbrenner 5y ago
  It's the same thing the marvelverse is... a way of referring to all of facebook's products. They're just trying to generate some hype and make their products look more forward thinking.. even though they're exactly the same as always.
  - sporkland 5y ago
    Metaverse is a concept originally popularized by Neal Stephenson in his book snowcrash. It's an online VR based world that is very cool and fun and most people spend there times there instead of the real world.

sixhobbits 5y ago

Maybe off topic but super ironic that I had managed to read the first sentence "POP-UP NOTIFICATIONS are often annoying." and then got punched in the face by a huge cookie popup from Economist

vincentmarle 5y ago

As the Dutch say: a cat that is backed into a corner, makes unpredictable jumps. And Zuckerberg is one really smart cat, with a lot of money at his disposal. So I wouldn’t rule him out yet.

intrasight 5y ago

FB is one of the most developer hostile platforms that I've worked with. For example, their API tokens expire in 60 days, so users of automated reporting tools are constantly having to re-grant. Why? No good reason. And the documentation is garbage. FB can't blame Apple or anyone else for those failings. They should fix the things that are under their own control.

worik 5y ago
> FB is one of the most developer hostile platforms that I've worked with Have you done development on Apple platforms? That might push FB into second place....
ferdowsi 5y ago
FB has been making their API increasingly useless for a decade now. They don't want you building integrations, they want you in their walled garden using their tools.

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sjs382 5y ago

Alternatively, "How Apple Closed the Privacy Hole that Facebook Was Exploiting to the Tune of $10bn"

footlose_3815 5y ago

[dead]

skizm 5y ago

Facebook's revenue up 35% year over year: -26% (P/E ~16) Amazon's revenue up 15% year over year: +12% (P/E 60+) I don't get the stock market. Facebook can simply turn on billions in revenue whenever they want still with WhatsApp, which has north of 2 billion MAU, and has not been monetized at all yet. Facebook is a reverse meme stock.

colinmhayes 5y ago
Facebook's guidance was shit. Amazon's was not.
coldpie 5y ago
> I don't get the stock market. There's nothing to get, it's just gambling for rich people.
- altdataseller 5y ago
  This. The market is just a bunch of random ppl and robots who are have different motivations and opinions. Some are long term oriented, some just wanna make a quick buck. It’s just a chaotic casino.
pessimizer 5y ago
WhatsApp has competitors that in Telegram/Signal etc. that are financially stable, offer more features and security, and with the mood of the government right now they would absolutely be prevented from purchasing. They would destroy WhatsApp in weeks if they did that. Amazon is fine and doesn't need to grow. Facebook is in danger and growth was already priced in. Now it's not.
- kazen44 5y ago
  heck, soms European politicians are calling for a split of WhatsApp from Facebook because Facebook did not honor their end of the deal when they bought WhatsApp. fb hilariously claims that this would be impossible, which is kind of proving they didn't hold up their end of the bargain.

erikpukinskis 5y ago

I remember when Facebook Platform came out. The super early version where you could embed your app on Facebook and engage with the social graph. I thought dang, this is smart. They’ll basically own the next level up the stack from the browser: they’ll own the “social chrome” of every application on the web. Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird social games for a while there. And every web dev was learning how to build Facebook apps. We wondered if we’d even really need a domain for much more than a landing page, if 99% of our engagement was going to come through Facebooks. And then they killed it because they wanted to own the entire experience inside Facebook. It became not a walled garden, but a walled flower pot. It always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they lost control allowing third party apps in their frame. But didn’t they want to be a Microsoft and not a WordPerfect? Looking back, I wonder if it was a missed opportunity. They have to go try to be the metaverse because social never became a platform.

scarface74 5y ago
They killed it because it didn’t work on mobile.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Maybe their desktop traffic wouldn't have tanked so much if they'd kept it a richer experience, and continue to enrich it. Instead they abandoned it completely once traffic patterns tipped towards mobile.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    How many people really use desktops that much in 2021 for personal use? Facebook is already seen as being “for old people”.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      78% of homes have a computer in them. [0] I don't know anyone who does not use a PC for personal use, and my non-work social circles are not at all techie dominated. Also I'm not talking about 2021: I'm talking about years ago when Facebook moved away from prioritizing the PC platform. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered, I don't know, but when FB became a primary entry point to the internet for many people, and FB then mostly ignored desktop experience, it certainly accelerated any decline already in place. But had they enriched that experience, maybe there'd still be a much stronger following there. [0]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer-internet-use.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer...

EGreg 5y ago

I think their Metaverse push was actually a great way for rats to escape a sinking ship ... by finding a new ship! Facebook just could never really capture the whole "facilitating real world interactions" thing, and for most people it became simply a way to maintain an online avatar / identity, argue about politics, comment on cat memes, and otherwise waste time in cyberspace. That's what they're good at, and maybe with the metaverse they can at least make people more productive with that. Now there are BENEFITS to MetaVerse. Less usage of fossil fuels. Facebook also facilitated conversations between people around the world, that would otherwise not meet. But its centralized nature and limited flexibility held back the whole space. But when it comes to making plans in real life, forming relationships, deal flow etc. you need open source software like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

yalogin 5y ago

I haven't followed the whole apple privacy push and how it impacted advertising. However, isn't everyone always logged into Facebook? If so they already know who is using it and any interaction will tell them exactly who used it. How does the Apple's platform level change effect them? Am I missing something?

willio58 5y ago
It’s not Facebook knowing who used their app, it’s restrictions on what data Facebook can pull from your phone. It’s also making it clear to users how often this data is being fetched, and the option to opt out of data collection is new too.
strikelaserclaw 5y ago
i had this same question, maybe someone can explain.

lovefeature 5y ago

unixbane 5y ago

bigyellow 5y ago

What's Meta? You mean Facecrook, the spying and surveillance network?

alanlammiman 5y ago

The problem isn't just Apple's action on IDFA. It's that Facebook seems to be so poorly managed on some fronts that its reactions, rather than mitigating problems, has caused further harm. For example - in a rushed effort to get their privacy issues in order, they are deactivating the live facebook integrations of customers based on cursory/mistaken/possibly machine-based readings of their privacy policies. They did that to us yesterday: https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-Apps-in-Production-while-Running-Ads-for-them-19ef0d87d97b4f739b1ba2c2ee0af7dd https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-A... We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app. If this is also happening to many other developers right now, that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be causing the drop in the share price. In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow, it's 'legal costs'.

bagacrap 5y ago
"we don't want to track individuals" --- right, but each ad FB places has a lower conversion rate if they don't know as much about the user, so while your goal may not be tracking per se, tracking does get you the same sales in fewer placements, and Facebook can sell those saved placements to other buyers the fact that they're cracking down on partner privacy in a hamfisted way surely doesn't help matters but I can't see how angry devs are driving the share price down
- alanlammiman 5y ago
  I agree with your first point in the sense that having individualised targeting data necessarily improves advertising by some amount vs. merely contextual and aggregate data. For our specific case I'm not convinced that amount is as big as some people imagine it is, but I haven't found a good way to test that precisely given that facebook doesn't really have a "just give me a representative sample of your audience in this region" targeting feature (wish it did) to compare with the targeted alternatives. In our case, app ads that now use SKAN (the Apple solution that provides aggregated attribution) seem to be working well enough - that was my point. Regarding your second point, yes, I agree - it's not obvious. Assuming this did indeed affect many developers like us and that it happened to everyone at the same time (which may not be the case - that it happened to us and that it coincided with their earnings report may have just been a coincidence - I haven't seen a mass outcry on twitter or anything), I was wondering whether it might be hedge funds that buy/track aggregated ad spend or attribution data, perhaps from MMPs or media buying agencies. I know they buy app download data from the likes of App Annie, but don't know if equivalent data is available and timely for ad spend. In any case, my point is more that this is illustrative of how they make bad situations worse for themselves.

echopurity 5y ago

btdmaster 5y ago

This "privacy push" is only a change with respect to IDFA -- something specifically built by Apple to compete with Google's advertising ID. Opting out system-wide was already possible, but unsurprisingly its existence is not something that's well-known since Apple has established themselves as Goddess of Privacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers. To me, this is closer to "Apple spying technology becomes opt-in and no one uses it anymore".

martini333 5y ago

Why is every journalist blaming Apple's Privacy. Like, use your brains, get a life.

bell-cot 5y ago
I'd guess that desperate-to-stay-employed journalists feel far more need to suck up to Zuck than to suck up to Cook. And the "why Apple is in the right" case takes a whole lot more & longer words and concepts to explain. Vs. "Big meanie Apple took $10B from every's-favorite-site Facebook".

1024core 5y ago

Archive link: https://archive.ph/cyxRR https://archive.ph/cyxRR

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Looks like I jumped on the iPhone bandwagon just in time to cost facebook some money! (got my iphone ~1.5 yrs ago). What I don't get is why iphone needs to scan your phone at all. I mean they literally have a treasure trove of information of most of their users, why do they need to sell that? Why don't they just act use the megatons of info they already have on you from scanning your page and your messages to other users? They should be rolling in ad revenue without needing to spy on data on phones.

slenk 5y ago
What about just not using Facebook...
- babypuncher 5y ago
  Before this change, Facebook could still track you in non-Facebook apps that use their software. Even if you are not a Facebook user.
  - slenk 5y ago
    This change actually eliminates/ed that? (never used iOS, unsure of how things are)
    - babypuncher 5y ago
      It made it considerably more difficult, because there is no legitimate user/device specific identifier that Facebook can use to track usage across different apps that use their SDK, unless the user opts in to IDFA, or logs in with their Facebook account in every app that uses it. This won't necessarily stop them from using other personally identifying information that you might share with multiple apps (phone number, email address, etc.) Sign In With Apple helps mitigate this to an extent.

paxys 5y ago

Snap is still somehow up 50% today. Google is similarly doing great. The problem is more on Facebook's end than Apple's. TikTok did way more damage than Apple ever could.

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curious_cat_163 5y ago
What they need to realize is that there are advantages _and_ responsibilities that come with sheer scale. Their apps are rife with misinformation and gaslighting. Facebook has become associated with argument, fight and social misery in the minds of their consumers. They need to take some substantial steps to change that. Merely wishing these issues away with posts, launching new products or changing the company name does not cut it.
colinmhayes 5y ago
Snap still down 11% this month
piggybox 5y ago
Could you expand your time frame a little bit then look Snap again?

annoyingnoob 5y ago

If you were to physically track someone and catalog everything they do in meatspace, we'd call that stalking. Why is that behavior acceptable when done by software? It should not be okay, its still stalking - no matter your intentions or end goals.

sebow 5y ago

Correction: Apple's war on FB/Meta/Zucc cost Meta $10B. Let's not disingenuously pretend they did it out their own good hearts and for people's privacy: they did not. Also more people overly attribute this loss of Meta to Apple measure's than general Meta trends.Meta's rebranding, dystopian vision about the future and it's anti-society effects though their business model which promotes less trust in the population is what brings up this number, not entirely Apple, not entirely Android.Then again outlets and people who do these kind of oversimplifications might aswell do it for sensationalism, since we need the same people to be explained the truth when something changes.

calebm 5y ago

This is quantitative proof that Facebook is extracting value directly from people's private data.

dmitriid 5y ago

> Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B It's a false narrative that Facebook is pushing out: "It' snot us that are bad, it's this big bad Apple who are hurting our poor business".

honkycat 5y ago

There was a great tweet today: https://mobile.twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1489274079685136385 https://mobile.twitter.com/kevinroose/status/148927407968513... Kevin Roose: Can't imagine why this platform is shrinking Facebook top ten: The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from: 1. Breitbart 2. Ben Shapiro 3. Dan Bongino 4. NPR 5. Ben Shapiro 6. Ben Shapiro 7. Ben Shapiro 8. Steven Crowder 9. Ben Shapiro 10. Franklin Graham I won't touch the platform anymore. It's so out of touch.

gigatexal 5y ago

How can they make that number 10x bigger hrmm

asiachick 5y ago

I find it sad that Google's response to privacy is FLoC / Topics API instead of just embracing privacy like Apple. I know Google is an ad company. Still, they mostly control both Android and Chrome which means if they followed Apple's example on privacy they wouldn't be losing much of competitive advantage because if both Android and Chrome were privacy oriented that means there'd be no OS where some competitor could track. In other words, it still seems like they'd be #1 if they switched to content based ads and context (search) but zero tracking.

andrei_says_ 5y ago

Can we say that this puts a value on the non-consensual privacy violations that facebook’s business model depends on?

citizenpaul 5y ago

Its 100% because FB/meta is a growth stock and they lost users. This made all the finance projections break and institutions had th liquidate based on their new projections. That is how finance works at scale.

ece 5y ago

Twitter killed Vine.

darthrupert 5y ago

If you think that manipulating people is evil, then ads are evil and hence Meta and Alphabet are evil. If you think that some manipulation is evil, then it's about how they manipulate and on which issues. Perhaps manipulating people to buy something is ok but manipulating them to harm the society (something which Meta is clearly guilty of) is not. Then these companies could turn good if they just turned down a lot of their profit. Which of course won't happen because as companies their prime directive is to make money. If you think that all manipulation is ok then your opinion should be dismissed.

fulafel 5y ago
I think expecting nothing wrt ethics, aka the "companies are amoral and will never let ethics affect profit making" meme is too cynical. It starts off as a criticism but we then accept and normalize the idea. That benefits the amoral corporations. There are better outcomes if hold them to society's moral standards and to their own goals and claims they make to the public or shareholders. Those organisations are made up of people that mostly aren't that amoral, after all.