Facebook is 21st-century cigarettes. Thousands of brilliant scientists and engineers testing and optimizing their product to be as addictive as possible. No concern for the effects on their users or on society. The only concern is making money. Just like with cigarettes, at first it was cool, then it became mainstream, then the dangers became better known, then the CEO was ordered to appear before Congress and gave a…
Too bad you had to ruin an otherwise good post with
>now it's used primarily by laggards and poorly-educated demographics
I dislike Facebook too (and don't use it) but the above statement is a clear lie. Normal people are who use Facebook, like it or not.
I think we have to get away from calling these things "ad tracking." They're not tracking ads, they're tracking people, and their response to the ads. If Facebook was a guy with a notepad and a trench coat doing what it does in meatspace, you could get a restraining order against him.
yeah, and almost everyone would You take a normal parent and tell them - This guy from Facebook is going to follow your teenage daughter around high school, the mall, her room, everywhere she goes, and keep a record of every single thing she does on the computer and they would be running for their guns or their lawyers Online, Facebook does all that and most people don't even have a clue
What Facebook (and adtech writ large) does is sniff your farts trying to figure out what you had for breakfast. If you shoo them away, they sniff your friends' farts to indirectly infer that.
I'm sure the folks who work on this are proud of their accomplishments.
This is a tsunami for ad tech. Facebook just being the tip of the iceberg here. Tracking or not tracking is not really the topic here. Rather, this is yet another proof of how abusive Apple is. They claim killing IDFA is for the sake of users' privacy, while they do track users and their behavior and feed them sponsored search results on the App Store (via Apple Search Ads). This ability is just too good to share! Ap…
Seems like they have to overcompensate for the PR to appear as the good guys after all the PR damage they took lately. Nothing more, nothing less. Perfunctory privacy efforts.
so if epic wins their lawsuit, will facebook just make their own app store and track as much as they want?
I don’t think Epic are asking to be able to add their own APIs to iOS so I doubt it, unless Apple’s implementation of these permission requests is tied to the App Store for some reason and disappears if the app is distributed some other way.
I bet they're talking about how the heck they can own their own platform/browser.
Facebook is too big to be under the thumb of the operating system and browser vendors, who are possibly hostile towards Facebook's way of doing things.
Not a rhetoric question, I'm honestly curious: Has there been any case where an entity who complained about Apple's restrictions, turned out to genuinely be in the favor of users, instead of just trying to make more money?
I doubt there’s anyone pouring their charitable money into suing Apple, so there will probably always be a profit motive.
I think in some situations if users see value in the opt-in then it can be ok. E.g. your phone asking you if you're happy to share your location with an app. I sure as hell want my mapping app to know where I am, but I also feel very comforted that I still get a say in the process. The thing about this tracking opt-in is that no user would ever want it because it's solely there to exploit them. So in this case I thin…
Wouldn't the value in this situation be "you get to use Facebook"? If they didn't make money off their users, Facebook wouldn't exist. Would you be ok if they did it that way? A warning that says "by using Facebook, you are agreeing to be tracked", at which point the user could either continue or uninstall the app?
Facebook is 21st-century cigarettes. Thousands of brilliant scientists and engineers testing and optimizing their product to be as addictive as possible. No concern for the effects on their users or on society. The only concern is making money. Just like with cigarettes, at first it was cool, then it became mainstream, then the dangers became better known, then the CEO was ordered to appear before Congress and gave a…
Welp, don't hold your breath. Facebook has 1.79B people on the side daily, 2.7B on monthly, and $18B in revenue in the last 3 months alone. It's going to be a while before that momentum slows down and/or collapses.
... And nothing of value was lost. If it's detremental to your business to not be able to track users on such a granular level, it's a bad business. I'm sure Facebook will survive here. 100% biased, can't stand that company.
"... And nothing of value was lost." This is definitely not true. There is considerable value in advertising, it's just not apparent to you. In fact - advertising that is 'well targeted' is considerably less annoying than ads that are poorly targetted. The economic value of a well targeted ad is probably 10x otherwise. Ergo - unless you are willing to pay for apps - you might now see 10x more ads appearing on pages t…
I agree that relevant ads are better than completely random ones for everyone involved. But there is a significant middle ground between “show this user a random ad” and “show this user an ad based on data collected through tracking”. There’s also “show this user an ad similar to what they’re currently looking at”, like the search ads on DuckDuckGo. I find that these kinds of ads are just as relevant as targeted ads. The big disadvantage compared to using tracking is the inability for advertisers to select demographics directly (instead, they would have to choose pages or search terms to appear near).
agree 100% with you To me it's a miracle Facebook is allowed to do business given how many scummy things they do The Western World claims to be honest and transparent and talks a lot about ethics etc However, you never see stuff like Facebook or the Tik Tok ban in countries like China and INdia which are supposedly riddled with corruption America it seems corruption is completely OK as long as there is enough bread a…