“Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#341

Post by jodrellblank » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:32 PM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #218

sdegutis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but I've had some thoughts on ads for a while that I've never shared: 1. Ads ruins user experience. This is pretty much an objective fact. People can and do adapt, but it's moving away from the ideal. 2. Ads often manipulates the user (emotionally, psychologically) to get clicks, which is just downright unethical. 3. Often unethical things are advertised, things that shouldn't even be on the market. These are…

Just as context, the vast majority of ad budgets are not tied to click through metrics. Ford & Coca Cola do not care a whit if you click on their ads. The vast majority of advertising dollars are around a) brand recognition and b) spending to make sure that it’s the people they want to have brand recognition (for coke everyone, for Ford F-150 a particular demographic). They believe this is important. They have years…

The very fact that it works, is the reason it shouldn't be allowed.

They pay, your life changes, for their benefit. You have no say in it. It provably works even if you try to resist it, and don't consent to it.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#342

Post by criddell » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:38 PM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #44

criddell wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they ban third-party advertising in particular? It seems like advertising should be allowed as long as it's display only with no outward information flow. Basically ads equivalent OTA television or magazine ads should be allowed.

Children are not mature enough to understand that advertisements are lies meant to sell products, and can believe the content of the advertisements are true. This is harmful to society, particularly as young children are not capable of making purchasing decisions anyways - this is adversarial brainwashing of the most vulnerable.

That's true of advertising in general and not third party advertising in particular.

Somebody else posted what I think is the correct answer - it removes the possibility of a third party showing inappropriate content to kids.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#343

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #260

dllthomas wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only people who try to mount a case that the answer is yes are people whose livelihoods depend on everyone being OK with ads. Playing devil's advocate... Advertising helps the world in the case where a person has a need and they see an ad that informs them of a way they hadn't considered to address that need, and that solution proves to be better than available alternatives. ... I'm sure that happens ever. I am…

I wish I saw more ads for local entertainment options. Preferably diverse. I don't need 100 ads all telling me to do the same thing at different venues. But an ad informing me that hey, this weekend there will be a model train convention or if you'd rather there is a big chess boxing game you could go see. That'd be cool.

[deleted]

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#344

Post by mcv » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #225

meowface wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in the app market, but I run a few user-content-oriented websites which get millions of monthly hits. They're funded only by community donations. I decided to never add any ads to any of them. I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking. (In my case, my websites are aimed at adults and there are no concerns about children seeing inappropriate content.) It's not about the morality or even the…

> I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking. This seems to me like one of those spots where one's approach to ethics can play a big part in the conclusions you draw. From a sort of Kant-style, deontological perspective, where you have to be able to say with confidence that something is morally wrong in order to make much of a judgment at all about it, yeah, it seems hard to mount a strong case agai…

Originally, in the days of doubleclick, before Google cornered the internet ad marktet, I absolutely hated online ads. They were annoying, distracting and intrusive.

Then Google conquered the market with very low-key unobtrusive ads, and I was fine with them. I had no problem with tracking, because it lead to more relevant and less annoying ads.

But in the past couple of years, tracking and ads are touching on absolutely everything I do online. Google for an accountant, and for the next month all videos on Youtube have ads for accountants. Read an article on something, and suddenly all ads are about that.

And with these ad companies also controlling our social media and our online search results, suddenly my entire view of the internet, and therefore my view of the world, becomes controlled by people who want to show me ads to sell me stuff.

It's too controlling and too intrusive, and I have no control over it. Maybe if they make it more transparent and gave me more control over what they show me, I'd be fine with it, but at the moment it's too much.

Only seeing informative ads about things I'm interested in is good. Having my entire experience controlled by people who want to monetize my information is not.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#345

Post by bunderbunder » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #267

bunderbunder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking. This seems to me like one of those spots where one's approach to ethics can play a big part in the conclusions you draw. From a sort of Kant-style, deontological perspective, where you have to be able to say with confidence that something is morally wrong in order to make much of a judgment at all about it, yeah, it seems hard to mount a strong case agai…

The problem I have with the anti-advertising crowd is that none of them take their philosophy to the required ethical conclusion: Stop using free ad-supported resources. Google and Facebook are easy examples of this. The position would be far more ethically aligned if they unplugged from all ad-supported products and services.

I'm not exactly presented with that option.

If, when clicking on a hyperlink, I were presented with a landing page where I'd be presented a diagram of what the page would look like, in order to inform me that 70% of the initial data mass of the page would be chumbox, and that there'd be a video that expands out of the middle of the article and starts playing automatically as I scroll past, etc etc, then I'd happily rely on that instead of an adblocker. But that's not what happens - instead, I click the link, and the page immediately starts eating up my data budget (which costs me money, yo) and attempting to track me. My best defense here is to use some sort of adblocker.

At which point, the equilibrium point seems to be, some sites I don't even necessarily know they're trying to serve ads to me. Other sites give me a little popup saying, "Disable adblock or GTFO," so I politely GTFO.

It's less possible to do anything on that front with outdoor advertising; annoying as a lot of it is, I can't very well stop consuming the world itself.

TV, radio, stuff like that, that's at least getting easy nowadays.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#346

Post by wayneftw » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:32 PM UTC

asaddhamani wrote: post #312

gnopgnip wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple force's you to use their platform if you have an Apple device. You can't install fdroid, or anything else.

And that is why Apple devices are more secure, faster, more privacy-respecting, and last much longer with good performance. That trade-off is absolutely worth it to me.

Nope. Kids demand Apple devices because of the cool factor.

"Survey: 83% of US teens have an iPhone, Android 9%" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19610357

Seems like they're abusing their monopoly to me.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#347

Post by move-on-by » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:32 PM UTC

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #340

notatoad wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people do realize the cost, and are simply unconcerned with giving google such critical information as "kids watch sesame street".

But it's not 'kids watch sesame street' that you're sending to Google. What you're sending is: * This phone is used by a kid * $user has children (through association with other devices used at the same location and IP) * $kid lives at $address (even when it doesn't know the location of $kid's phone, it knows the location of other devices using the same IP) * $kid goes to $school (using location data from your or you…

Depending on the apps, you could make some age assumptions of the kid too. Even more, perhaps extrapolate the number of children in the household based on the age-ranges of the apps and the behavior of how they are using the apps. A 3 year old and and a 5 year old are going to have very different usage patterns. The number of children and their age ranges could be a very important metric when considering targeted advertising to the parents. The fact is, this information is used against the consumer to manipulate them into doing things they wouldn't otherwise do - click an ad and perhaps make a purchase. Any bit of information to further that goal will be used, even better if its information about the children since that's a major purchasing factor for parents.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#348

Post by paulcole » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:48 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #289

paulcole wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These publicly funded apps are siphoning data about me and my little one off to 3rd parties. If you need some pearls to clutch, there’s an app for that. Unfortunately it contains Google Analytics and ScorecardResearch analytics. I mean how much can there be to know about a kid? Loves Elmo? Oh better show it ads for Elmo lmao.

You can know who their contacts are and where they are for instance. Apps do request these permissions, sometimes for legitimate reasons and analytics frameworks then take advantage of that data: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca...

What contacts does a toddler have?

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#349

Post by Const-me » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

edmundsauto wrote: post #238

dllthomas wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only people who try to mount a case that the answer is yes are people whose livelihoods depend on everyone being OK with ads. Playing devil's advocate... Advertising helps the world in the case where a person has a need and they see an ad that informs them of a way they hadn't considered to address that need, and that solution proves to be better than available alternatives. ... I'm sure that happens ever. I am…

Another argument would be that advertising allowed the internet to develop as it is, to the scale it is. It's impossible to separate the accessibility, progress, UX, and information available from the core business model that enabled so much of it. If ads had never been allowed, would search be more like AOl's keywords? Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage? Think what you will, but Google has developed…

> Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage?

Are you sure ads are related?

If you calculate the cost of 10MB of hard drive space in the good old days of Yahoo mail, adjust for inflation, calculate how much hard drives you can buy now for that money, you’ll get at least 100GB. I don’t think average gmail mailbox approaches that size.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#350

Post by kalleboo » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #86

kerng wrote: post #26

I totally agree with this! I built a game and naively added ads to it as it seemed a good way to monetize. The game started to be really liked, and had 300k+ downloads overall. Many kids started playing it also. Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate! Then I removed all ads, I'd rather make less money but have people play and…

>Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate! That was exactly what happen to my kids yesterday. I don't mind ads, but when they are inappropriate for the 5 years old I get really pissed off. And I wish Apple Arcade could come sooner so they don't get distracted with Ads. It is the same reason I don't really allow them to watch You…

We use Hulu Kids, since it's just proper kids shows and not the mind-numbing unboxing and algorithmic crap on YouTube Kids.