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Regarding below comments, and Apple's desire to enter the ad business and still keeping data/not respecting privacy, that's definitely a bad thing, but I still

Regarding below comments, and Apple's desire to enter the ad business and still keeping data/not respecting privacy, that's definitely a bad thing, but I still am really happy Apple did this to Facebook/Zuck. Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users. It's entirely corrupt. If you took the same ability away from Apple, they would be fine, because most of their business model is actually trying to provide something of value to the world, instead of profiting off of catalyzing it's downfall like Meta. I wish we could do the same thing to Google.

colechristensen 4y ago
>I wish we could do the same thing to Google. Sell computers with chrome preinstalled with a good adblock extension.
- mlyle 4y ago
  You can't, because the Chrome license is personal and non-assignable. If you enter into a contract with them to deploy them on computers, I assume this is precluded explicitly by the terms. You could with Chromium, but that's problematic and annoying in minor ways. (Some of the things consumers value involve Google integrations).
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    What about selling computers that prompts to install ad blockers the moment the user downloads and installs Chrome?
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Firefox then.
- irrational 4y ago
  I thought google was changing chrome so that adblockers can’t work anymore on that browser?
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Your chrome id still is used to link you and the sites you visit.
- barbacoa 4y ago
  I someday hope to see pihole like dns filtering built into residential routers.
- account-5 4y ago
  I still dream of a Firefox OS device in the vein of a Chromebook. I was gutted when Mozilla abandoned Firefox OS.
ipaddr 4y ago
Apple kills many small businesses/apps unrelated to privacy but often wearing that shield as a defense. Why celebrate taking down another multinational when the reasons are self serving and creates bigger privacy issues?
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  If Apple's self-serving reasons are "because our users want it" then I am all for it. That 2/3 of users opted out of being tracked suggests Facebook has no similar reasoning for their business model.
  - imachine1980_ 4y ago
    the point is they aren't, they say we are against ads, and the whisper "except ours". if this will be they true purpose you may say what can they do?, don't sell ads.
    - asimpletune 4y ago
      They never said they were against ads though.
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      I was referring to privacy, not ads. But I agree that as Apple moves toward advertising they will lose the loyalty of their base (myself included).
    - fooblaster 4y ago
      Apple never cared about privacy to begin with. as soon as they are in a position to use their monopoly power to force their way into the ad eco system they will do so in force. I look forward to seeing how apple will market or more likely choose to hide this approach from their users.
    - askafriend 4y ago
      They never said they're against Ads - that's silly, digital advertising is here to stay and it will continue to grow. They are against building specific profiles of people while tracking them across 3rd party sites without consent. Here's Tim Cook talking about it: https://www.webpronews.com/tim-cook-were-not-against-digital-advertising/ https://www.webpronews.com/tim-cook-were-not-against-digital...
smoldesu 4y ago
We could do the same to Google; it would require Apple working with the government, though, and adding more regulations is the last thing Apple wants. This is a shame, because we're never going to make lasting change by having private corporations do our battles for us. Furthermore, we have no way of holding Apple accountable if they're doing the same thing as Facebook. I don't care if you're the biggest company in the world, you still have to play by the rules. > If you took the same ability away from Apple, they would be fine, because most of their business model is actually trying to provide something of value to the world Sure, they make money hand-over-fist by exploiting Uighur labor for your shiny metal laptop. Bettering the world is just their nature! Pragmatically, though, none of these companies will ever champion true privacy. What's the point of even arguing over this stuff when every one of these corporations is compliant in PRISM? Here on HN we love to white-knight for multi-trillion dollar companies and quibble over whitepapers, but everyone has lost. Privacy is unattainable. Security is feasible, but privacy? It doesn't matter if you're on iPhone or Windows or MacOS; you're not in control of your data. Period.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  > they make money hand-over-fist by exploiting Uighur labor for your shiny metal laptop. your case would be stronger if you don't overreach .. overall component assembly business is race-to-the-bottom for worker rights, in China now.. that ethnic cleansing you mention is horrible but not exactly the same thing, and intelligent readers may know that. From my point of view, it is the Tibetans to be concerned with, not Uighur. And that is possible a more potent insight .. that Apple knowingly profited from race-to-the-bottom worker conditions, orchestrated under a government responsible for Tibetan cultural genocide. But, it is not the Tibetans that did the assembly, nor to my knowledge the Uighur.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  > Furthermore, we have no way of holding Apple accountable if they're doing the same thing as Facebook. Not buy their products?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
pete_nic 4y ago
> Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users. >I wish we could do the same thing to Google. You’re assuming Google’s core business would not exist without spying on users and I disagree. You can run a search business and still protect privacy, this is DuckDuckGo’s whole model. This is a fundamental difference between a search product and a social product.
- tpetry 4y ago
  Google is not a search product. Their revenue come from Adwords, which is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users.
  - s17n 4y ago
    Of course we'll never know how much of a difference targeting makes to the bottom line, but I doubt that it's huge. Google's revenue comes from people searching for queries like "good traffic ticket lawyer", and from competitors bidding up each others' brand names. It would probably work just fine without targeting.
  - criddell 4y ago
    Google's ads do not seem particularly well targeted, even with the 20+ years of information they have collected on me. I feel like I've given up way, way too much of my privacy for what I've been given in return. By far, the best targeting is to show an ad as I explicitly search for something and that's not going to go away for them anytime soon.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    > which is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users You talk like that’s the only way. Instead of fitting the ad to users, we could fit the ad to the content, like we’ve always done. Tracking users isn’t necessary.
  - 111111101101 4y ago
    > is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users This isn't true in my experience. When I was an affiliate marketer in a past life, it was extremely profitable to promote health and fitness products on generic search terms such as "basketball" and "football scores". User demographic data wasn't required. Unfortunately, Google decided that they don't like affiliate marketers.
soperj 4y ago
> provide something of value to the world Just for a limited time when the purposely made their phones unusable through OS updates.
- Swizec 4y ago
  Apple in my experience has a marvelous track record with this sort of thing. I upgraded from an iPhone 4 to X because it worked fine for so long. This summer I updated my mom’s 8 year old Macbook Air to Monterey and it works great. And I’m starting to think about upgrading my 2018 iPad only because of memory issues with 3rd party apps dumping context when multitasking.
  - soperj 4y ago
    They were fined 5 years ago for this very reason (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724), so not so marvelous.
    - astrange 4y ago
      European fines are entirely cope, it doesn’t mean they’ve actually done anything. Similarly laws like the GDPR and DMA aren’t made with the intent of being followed, just with the hope they’ll get fines or lead to the breakup of foreign tech companies. There was no slowdown of devices; what happened is the devices didn’t randomly turn off anymore.
      - soperj 4y ago
        Then why did they go about replacing batteries for free? https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne4a8d/apples-iphone-slowdown-scandal-is-now-a-full-blown-federal-investigation-report-says https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne4a8d/apples-iphone-slowdow...
        astrange 4y ago
        Cause old batteries are why the devices were randomly turning off. Nevertheless, the "slowdown" is in fact faster than the alternative, because if your device turns off the task never completes.
benreesman 4y ago
There are plenty of legitimate gripes with the consumer Internet megacorps. All of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more have done user-hostile and privacy hostile things. I was just taking them to task for their bullshit about AI ethics on the big language models yesterday. But as someone working on my own Internet hyperbole problem, I’ll gently suggest that rabid-sounding hyperbole is just going to turn off the zillion employees at those companies who are also HN users and might be able to do something about it. “Third-party cookies” === “spying”, a bit of a reach in 2022. “Grandma” knows about cookies now. It’s not an absurd argument, but it’s a bit extreme. FAANG is “catalyzing the downfall of the world”? We’re in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” territory.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  I don't agree. Third party cookies exist almost entirely for the purpose of spying. SSO is an exception but a minor one
  - benreesman 4y ago
    Reasons why cookies get dropped exist along a gradient. I like that Stripe knows who I am and only needs my CVV to buy something. I like that I can make a StackOverflow account with my GitHub. Within limits, I even like that the ads I see are relevant to me at least some of the time as opposed to the statistically roughly never that they would be without some basic demo stuff. HN remembering that I'm logged in is unambiguously not spying. The Five Eyes dumping all my phone calls into a giant complex in Utah unambiguously is spying. Everything else is somewhere along that line. Like most users on this forum, I have control over when and how I'm cookied and/or tracked bounded only by my "give a shit" factor, it's not technically advanced to send unwanted cookies to `/dev/null`. Likewise, because I live in the US, all my basic demo information is a matter of public record because I've like, bought a house and interacted with the police and been born and stuff. I know that the ad-supported Internet is extremely unpopular around here, but jump over to Reddit and people are flipping their shit that Netflix went from $10/month to $15 (or whatever it was): it's not hard to see why there's a certain skepticism that people will pay for Google in large numbers so it could be ad-free. I'd pay 50 or 100 bucks (or more) a month for Google because I'm a computer programmer and it saves me literally hours every day, but I'm demonstrably in the minority on that, and it would be a little narrow of me to project my preferences onto Internet users at large.
Gibbon1 4y ago
My thinking of late is we need to change the laws of incorporation to prevent product and service companies from making money off ads.
remarkEon 4y ago
Breaking up Google and Meta would be a huge boon to all of us. Think of all the extremely intelligent and driven people who are being paid dump trucks of money to build internet surveillance or psychological manipulation technology at scale. They could be working on so, so many more interesting and important problems.
- biztos 4y ago
  I'm sure there are some extremely intelligent and driven people working on internet surveillance or psychological manipulation, but if the only reason they're doing it is for the dump-trucks of money then I have zero confidence they will go work on interesting and important problems should MetaGoo somehow tank. They'll just go wherever the largest dump-trucks are offered. Because they already did that, and it made them relatively wealthy, and yet there they still are.
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    I don’t disagree with you, but the destruction of those particular business models would still be a net good for society, no? And these people, ostensibly smart and driven, would seek their dump trucks somewhere else. It’s a guess that those other places with the dump trucks up for grabs are better then Metagoo, but I’ll take it.
ksec 4y ago
That is exactly what is wrong. When Apple does it, it is all good. As if other business provides zero value to the world. And to answer your last point. Apple are already doing it to Google. Apple collect $10+ Billion per year from Google just to be the default search engine. Squeezing Google left and right, partly forcing Google to increase the amount of Ads around the web.

colechristensen 4y ago

>I wish we could do the same thing to Google. Sell computers with chrome preinstalled with a good adblock extension.

mlyle 4y ago
You can't, because the Chrome license is personal and non-assignable. If you enter into a contract with them to deploy them on computers, I assume this is precluded explicitly by the terms. You could with Chromium, but that's problematic and annoying in minor ways. (Some of the things consumers value involve Google integrations).
- mrtksn 4y ago
  What about selling computers that prompts to install ad blockers the moment the user downloads and installs Chrome?
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Firefox then.
irrational 4y ago
I thought google was changing chrome so that adblockers can’t work anymore on that browser?
ipaddr 4y ago
Your chrome id still is used to link you and the sites you visit.
barbacoa 4y ago
I someday hope to see pihole like dns filtering built into residential routers.
account-5 4y ago
I still dream of a Firefox OS device in the vein of a Chromebook. I was gutted when Mozilla abandoned Firefox OS.

ipaddr 4y ago

Apple kills many small businesses/apps unrelated to privacy but often wearing that shield as a defense. Why celebrate taking down another multinational when the reasons are self serving and creates bigger privacy issues?

JKCalhoun 4y ago
If Apple's self-serving reasons are "because our users want it" then I am all for it. That 2/3 of users opted out of being tracked suggests Facebook has no similar reasoning for their business model.
- imachine1980_ 4y ago
  the point is they aren't, they say we are against ads, and the whisper "except ours". if this will be they true purpose you may say what can they do?, don't sell ads.
  - asimpletune 4y ago
    They never said they were against ads though.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    I was referring to privacy, not ads. But I agree that as Apple moves toward advertising they will lose the loyalty of their base (myself included).
  - fooblaster 4y ago
    Apple never cared about privacy to begin with. as soon as they are in a position to use their monopoly power to force their way into the ad eco system they will do so in force. I look forward to seeing how apple will market or more likely choose to hide this approach from their users.
  - askafriend 4y ago
    They never said they're against Ads - that's silly, digital advertising is here to stay and it will continue to grow. They are against building specific profiles of people while tracking them across 3rd party sites without consent. Here's Tim Cook talking about it: https://www.webpronews.com/tim-cook-were-not-against-digital-advertising/ https://www.webpronews.com/tim-cook-were-not-against-digital...

smoldesu 4y ago

We could do the same to Google; it would require Apple working with the government, though, and adding more regulations is the last thing Apple wants. This is a shame, because we're never going to make lasting change by having private corporations do our battles for us. Furthermore, we have no way of holding Apple accountable if they're doing the same thing as Facebook. I don't care if you're the biggest company in the world, you still have to play by the rules. > If you took the same ability away from Apple, they would be fine, because most of their business model is actually trying to provide something of value to the world Sure, they make money hand-over-fist by exploiting Uighur labor for your shiny metal laptop. Bettering the world is just their nature! Pragmatically, though, none of these companies will ever champion true privacy. What's the point of even arguing over this stuff when every one of these corporations is compliant in PRISM? Here on HN we love to white-knight for multi-trillion dollar companies and quibble over whitepapers, but everyone has lost. Privacy is unattainable. Security is feasible, but privacy? It doesn't matter if you're on iPhone or Windows or MacOS; you're not in control of your data. Period.

mistrial9 4y ago
> they make money hand-over-fist by exploiting Uighur labor for your shiny metal laptop. your case would be stronger if you don't overreach .. overall component assembly business is race-to-the-bottom for worker rights, in China now.. that ethnic cleansing you mention is horrible but not exactly the same thing, and intelligent readers may know that. From my point of view, it is the Tibetans to be concerned with, not Uighur. And that is possible a more potent insight .. that Apple knowingly profited from race-to-the-bottom worker conditions, orchestrated under a government responsible for Tibetan cultural genocide. But, it is not the Tibetans that did the assembly, nor to my knowledge the Uighur.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> Furthermore, we have no way of holding Apple accountable if they're doing the same thing as Facebook. Not buy their products?
- smoldesu 4y ago

pete_nic 4y ago

> Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users. >I wish we could do the same thing to Google. You’re assuming Google’s core business would not exist without spying on users and I disagree. You can run a search business and still protect privacy, this is DuckDuckGo’s whole model. This is a fundamental difference between a search product and a social product.

tpetry 4y ago
Google is not a search product. Their revenue come from Adwords, which is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users.
- s17n 4y ago
  Of course we'll never know how much of a difference targeting makes to the bottom line, but I doubt that it's huge. Google's revenue comes from people searching for queries like "good traffic ticket lawyer", and from competitors bidding up each others' brand names. It would probably work just fine without targeting.
- criddell 4y ago
  Google's ads do not seem particularly well targeted, even with the 20+ years of information they have collected on me. I feel like I've given up way, way too much of my privacy for what I've been given in return. By far, the best targeting is to show an ad as I explicitly search for something and that's not going to go away for them anytime soon.
- eastbound 4y ago
  > which is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users You talk like that’s the only way. Instead of fitting the ad to users, we could fit the ad to the content, like we’ve always done. Tracking users isn’t necessary.
- 111111101101 4y ago
  > is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users This isn't true in my experience. When I was an affiliate marketer in a past life, it was extremely profitable to promote health and fitness products on generic search terms such as "basketball" and "football scores". User demographic data wasn't required. Unfortunately, Google decided that they don't like affiliate marketers.

soperj 4y ago

> provide something of value to the world Just for a limited time when the purposely made their phones unusable through OS updates.

Swizec 4y ago
Apple in my experience has a marvelous track record with this sort of thing. I upgraded from an iPhone 4 to X because it worked fine for so long. This summer I updated my mom’s 8 year old Macbook Air to Monterey and it works great. And I’m starting to think about upgrading my 2018 iPad only because of memory issues with 3rd party apps dumping context when multitasking.
- soperj 4y ago
  They were fined 5 years ago for this very reason (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724), so not so marvelous.
  - astrange 4y ago
    European fines are entirely cope, it doesn’t mean they’ve actually done anything. Similarly laws like the GDPR and DMA aren’t made with the intent of being followed, just with the hope they’ll get fines or lead to the breakup of foreign tech companies. There was no slowdown of devices; what happened is the devices didn’t randomly turn off anymore.
    - soperj 4y ago
      Then why did they go about replacing batteries for free? https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne4a8d/apples-iphone-slowdown-scandal-is-now-a-full-blown-federal-investigation-report-says https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne4a8d/apples-iphone-slowdow...
      - astrange 4y ago
        Cause old batteries are why the devices were randomly turning off. Nevertheless, the "slowdown" is in fact faster than the alternative, because if your device turns off the task never completes.

benreesman 4y ago

There are plenty of legitimate gripes with the consumer Internet megacorps. All of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more have done user-hostile and privacy hostile things. I was just taking them to task for their bullshit about AI ethics on the big language models yesterday. But as someone working on my own Internet hyperbole problem, I’ll gently suggest that rabid-sounding hyperbole is just going to turn off the zillion employees at those companies who are also HN users and might be able to do something about it. “Third-party cookies” === “spying”, a bit of a reach in 2022. “Grandma” knows about cookies now. It’s not an absurd argument, but it’s a bit extreme. FAANG is “catalyzing the downfall of the world”? We’re in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” territory.

GekkePrutser 4y ago
I don't agree. Third party cookies exist almost entirely for the purpose of spying. SSO is an exception but a minor one
- benreesman 4y ago
  Reasons why cookies get dropped exist along a gradient. I like that Stripe knows who I am and only needs my CVV to buy something. I like that I can make a StackOverflow account with my GitHub. Within limits, I even like that the ads I see are relevant to me at least some of the time as opposed to the statistically roughly never that they would be without some basic demo stuff. HN remembering that I'm logged in is unambiguously not spying. The Five Eyes dumping all my phone calls into a giant complex in Utah unambiguously is spying. Everything else is somewhere along that line. Like most users on this forum, I have control over when and how I'm cookied and/or tracked bounded only by my "give a shit" factor, it's not technically advanced to send unwanted cookies to `/dev/null`. Likewise, because I live in the US, all my basic demo information is a matter of public record because I've like, bought a house and interacted with the police and been born and stuff. I know that the ad-supported Internet is extremely unpopular around here, but jump over to Reddit and people are flipping their shit that Netflix went from $10/month to $15 (or whatever it was): it's not hard to see why there's a certain skepticism that people will pay for Google in large numbers so it could be ad-free. I'd pay 50 or 100 bucks (or more) a month for Google because I'm a computer programmer and it saves me literally hours every day, but I'm demonstrably in the minority on that, and it would be a little narrow of me to project my preferences onto Internet users at large.

Gibbon1 4y ago

My thinking of late is we need to change the laws of incorporation to prevent product and service companies from making money off ads.

remarkEon 4y ago

Breaking up Google and Meta would be a huge boon to all of us. Think of all the extremely intelligent and driven people who are being paid dump trucks of money to build internet surveillance or psychological manipulation technology at scale. They could be working on so, so many more interesting and important problems.

biztos 4y ago
I'm sure there are some extremely intelligent and driven people working on internet surveillance or psychological manipulation, but if the only reason they're doing it is for the dump-trucks of money then I have zero confidence they will go work on interesting and important problems should MetaGoo somehow tank. They'll just go wherever the largest dump-trucks are offered. Because they already did that, and it made them relatively wealthy, and yet there they still are.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  I don’t disagree with you, but the destruction of those particular business models would still be a net good for society, no? And these people, ostensibly smart and driven, would seek their dump trucks somewhere else. It’s a guess that those other places with the dump trucks up for grabs are better then Metagoo, but I’ll take it.

ksec 4y ago

That is exactly what is wrong. When Apple does it, it is all good. As if other business provides zero value to the world. And to answer your last point. Apple are already doing it to Google. Apple collect $10+ Billion per year from Google just to be the default search engine. Squeezing Google left and right, partly forcing Google to increase the amount of Ads around the web.