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Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

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Re: Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

#111
post #91
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue, that the target demographic here are the ones that likely consume their news through physical mediums, like news papers. I'd imagine younger politicians (there are sadly not many 'old' non-white politicians) consume their news online. No stats for this, or any sources, but I think it's a fairly reasonable assumption to make.

Yes I suppose it's a question of ad demographics here, though why place a newspaper ad if you just want to reach politicians, then just use your lobbyists. I'm sure they want to reach voters, not politicians. But either way, why say "old white" when the point is that they are old enough to read print media. They are targeted because they are old, not because of their color. Why bring race into it, except for virtue s…

Of the 100 sitting senators, 9 are considered "minorities". Their average age is 56. The average age in the senate is 65, oldest is 87, and it is overwhelmingly white males, which is point being made.

I doubt that a full-page broadsheet add carries the same impact online. It's very clear that the target demographic is older white men.

Re: Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

#112
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being pro-Small Business doesn’t meant you have to be pro-Advertising. Facebook makes a killing taking money from small businesses through advertising, yet it is consistently one of the lowest ROI marketing techniques, not to mention generally creates the worst UX. Can you build a successful business on advertising? Yes. But I’d argue that you don’t need to. Almost every service I pay for came to me by word of mouth.…

Word of mouth doesn't work for super niche services/products where e.g. there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product It also favours more established businesses that are more known, making it harder for new businesses to gain any traction. I'm not keen on advertising (I use adblockers on all my devices etc.), but there are definitely some (in my…

> Word of mouth doesn't work for super niche services/products

Nonsense.

See, there are (were?) lots of niche specific publications and communities. They'd actually know about a subject, and provide informed and largely unbiased advice, and carry advertisement, of course. Similarly, there were regional newspapers, carrying information and advertisement of regional interest.

TV and other broad media could not steal their advertisement dollars, because that was the only way to reach the niche or region.

What Facebook is doing is to usurp all of that and monopolise advertisement, driving smaller niche and regional publishers out of business. Their hypocrisy is astounding.

> there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product

I think the trust problem has gotten much worse. As I said, there used to be niche publishers supporting communities (by interest or region) that were interested in keeping these sustainable long term, and therefore would not be interested in scamming their audience. Now, these publishers have been bled dry, and you have to find your information on the world wild web, where any scammer and fly-by-night producer can target you and link farm and buy fake reviews etc.

Re: Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

#113
post #67
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am extremely torn about this thing, especially as I work in the privacy space. But it's hard to ignore the argument put forward by Ben Thompson that better tracking for facebook, actually tends to help small businesses. If you can't hyper target, you get ads for tooth paste, cars and deodorant (TV ads). If you can then you get ads for boutique florists in your area or gadgets you might actually like. I don't know w…

> If you can't hyper target, you get ads for tooth paste, cars and deodorant (TV ads). Why should I be forced to give tracking information to allow people to 'hyper-target' me? I don't want to be hyper-targeted regardless of how small the business is.

Well, or how about letting yourself being hyper targeted by reading a magazine aimed at, say, parents or pilots or knitters or golfers or whatever. No need to give up your privacy for that, and you still get pertinent advertisement, and those specialised small businesses can still reach their target audience.

Re: Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

#114

Since everyone has the FB/Insta/WhatsApp apps installed, how can Apple prevent users from being tracked? I would think when a user visits a web page, that page can deliver an insane amount of fingerprinting data along with the IP to FB. So it is easy for FB to correlate it with the users accounts which are phoning home on the same IP. Other apps can send even more data to FB then a website. Seems hard to imagine FB c…

Easy to imagine a world where not everyone has those apps installed - my home is a great example. Also, it’s easy to imagine a huge building full of people who all connect to the internet using one (or maybe a small handful) of nat’d IPs. Maybe we could call that an ‘office’...

I look at it this way - if this cross-app tracking BS wasn’t so important to FB, they wouldn’t have their panties so wadded up about it.

Re: Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

#115
post #104

They seem to be going all-in with this campaign, complete with video cuts of reactions of "small business-owners" and whatnot: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ios-14-apple-privacy-... This update seems to have touched a nerve for FB, and that to me means it's a good thing. I'm not a fan of Apple's restrictive ecosystem, but things like this that act in favor of user privacy deserve praise.

From the link: > They’re not playing by their own rules. Apple’s own personalized ad platform isn't subject to the new iOS 14 policy. Is this true?

No, it is not.

Re: Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

#116
post #113
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can't hyper target, you get ads for tooth paste, cars and deodorant (TV ads). Why should I be forced to give tracking information to allow people to 'hyper-target' me? I don't want to be hyper-targeted regardless of how small the business is.

Well, or how about letting yourself being hyper targeted by reading a magazine aimed at, say, parents or pilots or knitters or golfers or whatever. No need to give up your privacy for that, and you still get pertinent advertisement, and those specialised small businesses can still reach their target audience.

I'm assuming hyper-targeting in this context means targeting me as an individual, rather than targeting the content.

I'm absolutely fine with making ads relevant to the content I'm looking at. If I'm reading a blog about baldness and someone advertises some sort of hair transplant on the page that's totally fine!

What I'm not cool on is an advertiser tracking this page, cataloguing me as someone that suffers from hair loss, fingerprinting my device to follow other pages I visit to further target me, then placing advertisements for herbal remedies for baldness on every single page I visit, then changing the advert based on machine learning about the most effective advert based on my other attributes (a single young male living in a city).

These two things are not the same.

Re: Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

#117
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please include the other faces of facebook: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Oculus all deserve your boycott.

React, ReasonML, Folly,...

React is far beyond that now. Facebook could implode 10 minutes from now and React would live on successfully.

Re: Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

#118
post #111
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I suppose it's a question of ad demographics here, though why place a newspaper ad if you just want to reach politicians, then just use your lobbyists. I'm sure they want to reach voters, not politicians. But either way, why say "old white" when the point is that they are old enough to read print media. They are targeted because they are old, not because of their color. Why bring race into it, except for virtue s…

Of the 100 sitting senators, 9 are considered "minorities". Their average age is 56. The average age in the senate is 65, oldest is 87, and it is overwhelmingly white males, which is point being made. I doubt that a full-page broadsheet add carries the same impact online. It's very clear that the target demographic is older white men.

I’m not really contesting the demographics of the senate here.

Re: Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

#119
post #44

> But in today’s world, it’s kind of transparent whom Facebook is targeting here: old white politicians. Why doesn't Facebook care about younger or non-white politicians? Are they already anti-tracking? Or hopelessly pro-Facebook? Seems pretty racist to ignore them.

Well, a) this is probably just one facet of Facebook's campaign against privacy, but b) younger, more savvy politicians are much more likely to already see through Facebook's BS. The ones who are reading newspapers regularly are the ones who Facebook can just transparently lie to and have them eat it up, because they don't understand technology (but they do understand lobbying in all its forms).

Old I understand, white just seems racist to mention.

Re: Facebook Takes Out Newspaper Ads to Attack Apple's Strengthening iOS Privacy

#120
post #7

> Users can easily choose to keep providing Facebook (and anyone else) with all the information they want. Or they can choose not to. This part hits the nail on the head. Facebook is intentionally being misleading in this campaign. I’ve had the IDFA turned off on my phone for years. Now apps have to ask for it individually. If apps have to prompt to access it, and this benefits small businesses so much, wouldn’t peop…

I would not put it out of the realm of possibility of facebook and others working with Congress on a privacy protection act which basically handcuffs Apple and others.

It will come with some protection sounding name and in effect make it easier for companies to get users back into the reflex habit of clicking away any protections they may have had

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