Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

developers.facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 157 posts

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#91

Post by headsoup »

IBM wrote: post #83
headsoup wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing Apples to oranges (I'm sorry) Apple doesn't have a social network. They also don't rely on advertising and 3rd party data brokering. It's easy for Apple to be the 'good guys' here when they have physical products as their profit generators. FOSS would have worked better in the Facebook case too as people and developers would know/discover a) where their data is and b) what risks it faces

Apple operated iAd before shutting it down. One of the former iAd execs said this to the WSJ [1]: >“I don’t believe they are interested in this capability because they have a strict policy around what they do with user data,” Crawford said. “IAd has great assets and great capabilities, but they are going to follow Apple’s policy to the letter of the law.” So they crippled a potential new revenue stream because of the…

Exactly, Apple just doesn't need ads because of their physical product and brand strength. If you rely on ads, what actual value are you (or could you be) providing that you're not charging for. And then, why not, why choose ads instead and data harvesting? If Facebook started charging for their services, would people happily start paying or would they suddenly realise there are equal/better alternatives once cost is a factor?

Will be interesting to see what happens with Apple if the i-products do ever decline significantly. (I believe their Brand is strong enough to sell their other services effectively so long as they get the price right).

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#92

Post by craigsmansion »

IBM wrote: post #49
miracle2k wrote: post #30

The so-called "data breach" was always in reality a by-product of an open platform that hundreds of thousands of developers could easily build apps on top. You may err on the side of "more reviews" or "less powerful API", but in the end, those ideals are in tension. The more open the platform, the more open to this kind of "breach". People who believe in the idea in this kind of platform having an API should have lon…

Apple got this right from the beginning despite years of criticism about the "walled garden". They took arrows for years: all the "open always wins" from the FOSS types, all the press coverage of some app developer crying about App Store rejections or onerous rules. They didn't get it wrong because they know who butters their bread: customers. Developers are rightly prioritized last. Fun to give this Paul Graham essa…

> all the "open always wins" from the FOSS types

Can you produce any quote from any Free Software or Open Source developer or advocate that supports your statement in this context of Facebook being better than Apple because they're "open"? Because even though both companies are terrible at freedom, they're terrible in very different ways, turning any comparison into a false equivalence.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#93

Post by aylmao »

IBM wrote: post #49
miracle2k wrote: post #30

The so-called "data breach" was always in reality a by-product of an open platform that hundreds of thousands of developers could easily build apps on top. You may err on the side of "more reviews" or "less powerful API", but in the end, those ideals are in tension. The more open the platform, the more open to this kind of "breach". People who believe in the idea in this kind of platform having an API should have lon…

Apple got this right from the beginning despite years of criticism about the "walled garden". They took arrows for years: all the "open always wins" from the FOSS types, all the press coverage of some app developer crying about App Store rejections or onerous rules. They didn't get it wrong because they know who butters their bread: customers. Developers are rightly prioritized last. Fun to give this Paul Graham essa…

> Apple got this right from the beginning despite years of criticism about the "walled garden".

Being a walled garden is independent of privacy. The calendar app on macOS Calendar app allows me to share my calendars in an open format (ICAL) and interoperates with other calendar apps through that specification. It respects my privacy by not sharing anything I don't ask it to without being "walled".

Signal is open and secure; iMessage could be a non-proprietary format and remain just as private.

> all the press coverage of some app developer crying about App Store rejections or onerous rules.

As far as I'm aware a lot of these weren't for privacy matters [1] and are sometimes a little much [2] (this one is specially absurd: [3]).

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/apples-widened-ban-on-temp...

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16992830/apple-emoji-crack...

[3]: https://medium.com/@alariccole/apple-literally-stole-my-thun...

PS:

> all the "open always wins" from the FOSS types

I don't think that means what you think it means. FOSS and privacy are tangential matters.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#94

Post by downandout »

orf wrote: post #88
downandout wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story isn’t that they used data obtained through the Facebook API to microtarget ads on Facebook? That’s the story I’ve read at every major media outlet.

> The story isn’t that they used data obtained through the Facebook API to microtarget ads on Facebook? Yes, that is exactly it. You seem to assume that the only way you can achieve this is by advertising to individual people by Facebook ID's and use this as the basis of your argument that the whole story is fraudulent and instead there is some media conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Can you see where your logic…

I’ve looked, and I manage a relatively large Facebook ad budget so I know exactly what is and is not possible to do through it. I’ve also been both advertising and writing software that interacts with both the ad API and the graph API since the beginning of both. What is being claimed in the media simply isn’t possible to do today. I’ve seen the term “audience of one” thrown around so much it makes me sick.

So yes, the story is fraudulent. The (years old) data that Kogan scraped and sold to CA years after the fact could possibly be used in aggregate to formulate campaign strategy (although because of its age even that use wouldn’t have been very effective). It couldn’t be used to target specific individuals or anything resembling that. If you’re saying they were able to target zip codes heavily populated by people in a given political party sure, they could. But that’s not remotely close to what is being described in the articles.

Also, since you and your friends at the Guardian are implying that they used this data in other ways, see here:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17138854/cambridge-analyt...

Even that part of your/their narrative is inaccurate.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#95

Post by ericflo »

nl wrote: post #89
ericflo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have used Monero as an example instead of Bitcoin, but I thought less people would have heard of it. Privacy can also be achieved with these primitives.

That's still not the point though. How do I openly share social information with some people without sharing it with everyone? These principles are in conflict. I did some work way back when FB got popular on the idea of using probabilistic data structures (ie, Bloom filters) to store contact lists, which could then be shared so that (in theory) only people who knew the same people would also know that they knew them…

We've accepted trusted computing as a society, many phones have a secure element now, and I think this can migrate down to that level.

That's the real trade-off: we reclaim ownership of our data with knowledge of where it goes and who's using it for what, but that means a full embrace of DRM (something our community has typically been against.)

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#96

Post by r00fus »

dragonwriter wrote: post #71
headsoup wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing Apples to oranges (I'm sorry) Apple doesn't have a social network. They also don't rely on advertising and 3rd party data brokering. It's easy for Apple to be the 'good guys' here when they have physical products as their profit generators. FOSS would have worked better in the Facebook case too as people and developers would know/discover a) where their data is and b) what risks it faces

> Apple doesn't have a social network. They tried, and failed. > They also don't rely on advertising They tried that, too.

Is it wrong that I feel glad they failed?

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#97

Post by FireBeyond »

IBM wrote: post #83
headsoup wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing Apples to oranges (I'm sorry) Apple doesn't have a social network. They also don't rely on advertising and 3rd party data brokering. It's easy for Apple to be the 'good guys' here when they have physical products as their profit generators. FOSS would have worked better in the Facebook case too as people and developers would know/discover a) where their data is and b) what risks it faces

Apple operated iAd before shutting it down. One of the former iAd execs said this to the WSJ [1]: >“I don’t believe they are interested in this capability because they have a strict policy around what they do with user data,” Crawford said. “IAd has great assets and great capabilities, but they are going to follow Apple’s policy to the letter of the law.” So they crippled a potential new revenue stream because of the…

You don't consider it at all possible that "because privacy" is the PR spin on it?

When iAd launched, it required mid six digit buys for ads. Users complained that they only would see the same half-dozen ads. Over the course of the next two years, that was steadily reduced, low six digits, fifty thousand, and the complaints stayed the same.

Before iAd shut its doors, you could get ad buys for a minimum of _fifty dollars_.

I tend to be a bit skeptical that instead of the platform being a failure, Apple realized after a few years of cutting buy prices that "hey, privacy is important".

That sounds a lot more like a PR soundbite.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#98

Post by orf »

downandout wrote: post #94
orf wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The story isn’t that they used data obtained through the Facebook API to microtarget ads on Facebook? Yes, that is exactly it. You seem to assume that the only way you can achieve this is by advertising to individual people by Facebook ID's and use this as the basis of your argument that the whole story is fraudulent and instead there is some media conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Can you see where your logic…

I’ve looked, and I manage a relatively large Facebook ad budget so I know exactly what is and is not possible to do through it. I’ve also been both advertising and writing software that interacts with both the ad API and the graph API since the beginning of both. What is being claimed in the media simply isn’t possible to do today. I’ve seen the term “audience of one” thrown around so much it makes me sick. So yes, t…

As various news sites have clearly and repeatedly reported they used the data to build highly detailed and specific psychological profiles of target voters then created content which would broadly appeal to people that match that profile. Kind of like buyer personas[1], but with rich detailed data on 50,000,000 people and their connections to play with.

None of this implies in any way that they even took out a Facebook advert (in fact they preferred content that looked organic, seeded through various Facebook groups/Twitter accounts), so I'm not sure why your experience with using the Facebook self-serve advertising portal gives much insight here.

In short: they used the dataset to target people, but they did not specifically target people in the dataset.

1. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#99

Post by ucaetano »

coliveira wrote: post #90
ucaetano wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His and his wife's is a proper foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat... The money is out of their hands, and can't be distributed back to them.

Even in that case, he and his family will for a long time have the political benefit of deciding how the money will be spent. And political advantages usually translate into economical advantages, so it can also be viewed as a scheme at some level.

Oh, sure, I'm not saying he is a saint or anything. But Gate's actions are very, very different than "I'm donating to a company I own and calling it an 'initiative'" Zuckerberg. That's a whole new level of dishonesty.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#100

Post by IBM »

FireBeyond wrote: post #97
IBM wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple operated iAd before shutting it down. One of the former iAd execs said this to the WSJ [1]: >“I don’t believe they are interested in this capability because they have a strict policy around what they do with user data,” Crawford said. “IAd has great assets and great capabilities, but they are going to follow Apple’s policy to the letter of the law.” So they crippled a potential new revenue stream because of the…

You don't consider it at all possible that "because privacy" is the PR spin on it? When iAd launched, it required mid six digit buys for ads. Users complained that they only would see the same half-dozen ads. Over the course of the next two years, that was steadily reduced, low six digits, fifty thousand, and the complaints stayed the same. Before iAd shut its doors, you could get ad buys for a minimum of _fifty doll…

Those ads were priced that high for a reason, to keep garbage off the iPhone. iAd only really made sense as a way to enable developers to make money from their apps in a high quality way. All the stipulations don't make sense for a pure ad-tech business.

And I don't think a former iAd exec has any reason to be doing PR for Apple when the purpose of that WSJ story and his cooperation with it was to pimp his new job/startup.

Post reply on HN