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Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

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Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#191

Post by godelski »

notyourwork wrote: post #3

Why would anyone agree to this? I don’t see a benefit to letting Facebook or any company track me across the internet. When did we ever decide this was what consumers wanted? Every time this topic comes up I check Facebooks stock price and realize how detached people are from facebooks revenue driven by the advertisement market.

There's weird cases. In my DnD group only one person has not switched to Signal and they refuse to. Their answer is that "I can't fight them so why switch?" Which weirds me out since this is exactly how you fight tracking. Btw, this is someone who has a PhD in computer science so it isn't like they are tech illiterate. But I've seen several people like this and honestly I don't understand.

I think at this point a lot of people are now apathetic and have given up. And we know people like to double down on good or bad positions when faced with adversaries. Doing things like "switching to Signal" (when you already have most of your friends there) and "using an adblocker" seem like very simple things that easily respond to "what can I do about it?"

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#192

Post by toiletfuneral »

whammywon wrote: post #96
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would be a bit naïve to think that Apple is doing so out of the kindness of their hearts Good. If they were doing it out of charity, a bit profit pressure, shareholder activism or change in management and the move is reversed. Being grounded in sound business logic and self-interest makes me trust it.

I never meant to imply that I thought Apple's (possible) intent was a good thing. I just think that a significant number of people will see what they're doing and thing "Oh, they're looking out for me." I think it's best to be skeptical of any company's motives, whether their current business decisions seem to help their users or not.

Apple is openly trying to sell ‘premium’ privacy services at consumer costs, be as skeptical you want but this is an obvious business decision and in many ways they actually are looking out for people...at a price

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#193

Post by criddell »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #90
Nextgrid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ask App Not to Track" just means the app will be denied access to the IDFA (which you can already do by turning on "Limit ad tracking" in settings). It's worded like that because this can't prevent the app from using something else (IP address or device fingerprinting) to track you.

Is the discussion moot if users can be easily fingerprinted without IDFA? It makes life slightly more difficult for advertising partners and social media companies, but not impossible. It's just a small additional barrier to friction that buys Apple some good PR.

If it was irrelevant, Facebook wouldn't be worried.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#194

Post by bavent »

reggieband wrote: post #155
bavent wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that actually work though? I've been buying things on Amazon for over a decade. For a while I got my groceries through them, I watch a lot of stuff on Prime Video. You would think they, of all people, know what I like. I can't think of more than a couple times where anything suggested to me was actually something I wanted. Even when I used FB, the ads were so off target from things I am interested in as to be la…

> THIS is the best you can do with teams of engineers making > $200k/year throwing AI at everything? Maybe it is the best we can currently do and maybe it isn't objectively great. But the real question: is it better? I mean, better than the random shotgun approach that was TV, magazines, bus wraps, billboards, etc. Is it better than the spam flyers or "yellow pages" the post office delivered to every single household…

I don't buy that. For example - I bought a rowing machine on Amazon. It was the first piece of home gym equipment I'd ever purchased. For months after, other rowing machines were suggested to me. I already bought one, why would I buy another, especially if I hadn't returned the first one?

Ads like this are very common for me - a purchase that I would consider to be a one-off thing (at least, for several years, whatever the standard lifetime of that product is) just leads to more ads for different models of that same thing. Occasionally, accessories that only go to a different model or brand of that thing.

I don't see how this is any better than the random shotgun approach - these ads that are 100% irrelevant and not going to lead to a purchase are taking up space that ads that are possibly It seems like this would be a solvable problem for Amazon - aggregate the data of everyone who has purchased X model of rowing machine and see how many of them purchased a second rowing machine, which brand it was, and how long after purchasing #1 they bought #2. Don't show ads for rowing machines to people who have purchased X until time is >= avgTimeBetween1And2, with some fancy statistics in there somewhere.

Clearly I'm missing something in my logic, because plenty of people a lot smarter than me work on this adtech stuff.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#195

Post by purplecats »

godelski wrote: post #191
notyourwork wrote: post #3

Why would anyone agree to this? I don’t see a benefit to letting Facebook or any company track me across the internet. When did we ever decide this was what consumers wanted? Every time this topic comes up I check Facebooks stock price and realize how detached people are from facebooks revenue driven by the advertisement market.

There's weird cases. In my DnD group only one person has not switched to Signal and they refuse to. Their answer is that "I can't fight them so why switch?" Which weirds me out since this is exactly how you fight tracking. Btw, this is someone who has a PhD in computer science so it isn't like they are tech illiterate. But I've seen several people like this and honestly I don't understand. I think at this point a lot…

wow what a weak mindset your friend has

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#196

Post by 0x0 »

So I guess you should click "Allow" in the first facebook-designed prompt, to trigger the second Apple iOS level system prompt, and click "Don't allow" there, to actually register the do-not-track request to be enforced on the OS/API level?

If you just click "Don't allow" on the first FB screen, it doesn't look like iOS will know about the do-not-track preference at all?

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#197

Post by kibwen »

imheretolearn wrote: post #161
kibwen wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're more forgiving than I am. As far as I'm concerned, individual-targeted advertising has such inherently perverse incentives that even those starting out with good intentions (e.g. consensual opt-in) will eventually find themselves engaged in unethical, privacy-eroding behavior as a matter of course. Consider what would happen if you outlawed individual-targeted advertising. Ad relevancy falls overall. What then…

>> Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors I would like to know how this conclusion was reached. By that logic, the advertising industry would not really need individual targeting at all

> By that logic, the advertising industry would not really need individual targeting at all

You're right, they don't. But the point is not to argue that ad relevancy itself is bad. In a vacuum, improved ad relevancy is good! However, the improved relevancy of individually-targeted advertisements is not offset by the social detriment of user tracking.

To use an example, on a Facebook group for gamers, it would be fine and dandy for Facebook to establish a market where PC hardware and video game companies bid to show ads to users browsing the group page. Note that this doesn't have to involve advertisers receiving any identifiable data about who the ad was shown to, and nor does it have to involve Facebook tracking your behavior online in order to show ads based on other sites you've visited, e.g. gaming communities on Reddit. The targeting is as simple as "show the game ads to the people in the game group"; it's extremely coarse demographic-based targeting that doesn't require any sort of persistent user profiling. It's no more of a privacy issue than back in the old-timey days when a company would buy an ad in an enthusiast magazine.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#198

Post by zepto »

ska wrote: post #104
randmeerkat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has options. I deleted FB years ago. No one actually needs FB.

> No one actually needs FB. No one actually needs a car either. Or to eat industrially produced food. Or etc. etc. "Nobody actually needs X" where X is a thing that empirically a huge percentage of people do, is I suspect never a compelling argument. edit: bordercases brings up a good point, I picked particularly entrenched/difficult areas for examples but it wasn't necessary. My point was more about the futility of…

“No one actually needs a car either. Or to eat industrially produced food. Or etc. etc.“

This is a false equivalence.

Facebook is nowhere near at that level of need yet.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#199

Post by purplecats »

1123581321 wrote: post #22
ArmandGrillet wrote: post #13

Wow, those encouragements are very weak. "Get ads that are more personalized", "Support businesses that rely on ads to reach customers": why would I support businesses relying on that when only 1 out of 5 ads in my feed is not garbage? These encouragements make me think that Facebook seems to believe that their ads are useful, which is a bit insane from a user perspective.

I’m not on Facebook so I can’t speak to what you personally see. However, I think the “support small business” angle is going to be somewhat compelling. I have, for example, two friends who are starting a niche business, offering a good and ethical service, and reaching people in that niche through Facebook and Instagram ads. The customers they find love what they’re doing and happily paying. If I had Facebook, I cou…

I have no empathy for them. I tried to advertise my dating business on there, and got insta-banned both times because they basically don't let you compete with their dating services.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#200

Post by VRay »

munchbunny wrote: post #2

I'm glad Apple is at least making sure users are aware that this is even a thing. While people on HN are much more likely to follow the issue and do something about it, a lot of laypeople are just vaguely aware that Facebook might be a privacy problem without really understanding what levers they have to manage it themselves.

all I hear from my non-tech friends is "Oh yeah, the government and companies have 'my data' nothin I can do"

they basically just assume they're living in a totalitarian society already and don't even think having any semblance of privacy is possible (or understand how easy it is for sinister, small-time third parties to spy on them via publicly-purchasable advertising data..)

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