Live data from Hacker News

Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

axios.com

221–230 of 339 posts

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#221

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.

I think a big factor is that you don't have an easy choice. Notice it's not "Allow" or "Reject", it's "Allow" or "Ask us not to".

The only "Reject" is to flat out not use Facebook, and probably throw a few related domains into a blackholed HOSTS file. That's a steeper price than most are willing to pay.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#222
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors. This is absolutely not the case. Google’s biggest ad clients achieve pretty incredible ROI (called ROAS) on each dollar they spend. And they track these obsessively—I supported a large travel client that had a small (but highly skilled) engineering team dedicated exclusively to their…

Companies obsess about these metrics because they don't want their ROI to be less than their competitors', because that would put them at a competitive disadvantage. It's not in doubt that individual-targeted advertising is more effective than than the alternatives; by eliminating user tracking you would be decreasing ROI across the board, but that's fine because, again, all that you're fighting for is a higher ROI t…

This model is based on the assumption that ads are for things the consumers already know about. This is not correct.

Example: I type “housing insurance” into Google and the “organic” results are dominated by the mega insurance companies.

Without targeted advertising, the ads are also dominated by mega insurance companies because they have the biggest advertising budgets.

With targeted advertising, I can see an ad from a provider specific to my location that I didn’t know existed who offers way better rates because of the different risk pool.

The same applies for thousands of other products/services that are localized.

Similarly, the ads for someone interested in DIY vs someone who is happy to pay for skilled labor are drastically different when you search “drywall repair”.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow! Really. I'm currently working on a nascent dating business and that's kind of disappointing to hear as I was counting on being able to advertise through that channel. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#224
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

>> 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

Agreed, this is where the incentives of the users are misaligned with the incentives of the ad tracking companies. But users don't have a choice, hence individual ad tracking.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#225
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual ad targeting is needed only as soon as someone does it. It is not “needed” per se.

For sure there are some advertisers, they would not be able to advertise if there is no individual targeting. Problem is for one of those honest businesses, there are 10 dishonest ones abusing the individual targeting.

If it is targeted without explicit direct consent of the targeted individual, it is not honest, at least from my personal point of view. If it was for me, targeted advertising would illegal.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#226
if FB stops using IDFA completely and just create the profile out of the logged in user ID, wouldn't that be enough? At the end of the day, mobile Facebook app gets most of its data from FB servers? So, If someone has liked /YellowBirds page and spent 2 hours on /BirdsBirdsBirds page, you kinda get they are into the birds? Wouldn't that already provide looots of information?

If they don't use IDFA, I guess they would loose capability of linking the events from different apps. I don't know targeted advertising world that much, but is that a big deal? I think even without cross app tracking, FB has capability to provide quite detailed targeting. I'm not sure why they reacted this aggressive, feels to me like there is egos involved, possibly Zuck struggling to accept Tim can force him to do something.

Other thing I wonder is how this notification going to look like in the apps using FB SDKs.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#227
post #158

>Ask App Not to Track Gotta love how they flipped that phrasing around from facebook asking you for permission to you requesting something from them. This whole thing reeks of having been A/B tested to death for max psychological manipulation without straying into territory where they can be accused of aggressive dark patterns.

That's the text provided by apple.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#228
post #18

What would happen if legislation were passed to ban all tracking, across the board? Perhaps also inclusive of limits on targeted advertising also (to reduce the incentive to gather personal data). It seems this kind of universal disarmament (so to speak) still leaves FB in the same dominant position from an advertising perspective. It has the same huge audience, and it’s advertising product is the same as everyone el…

> ban all tracking

That's a whole can of worms. Does the existence of things like your website's Apache request log count as "tracking"? Or does it only count if it's multiple domains? Maybe we'd need to say multiple organizations, to account for applications with multiple domains (e.g. facebook.com, fbcdn.com, etc.) But then what is an organization? If I sign an agreement with you to sell you my Apache request log, is that now illegal? If so, what was it about that that made it illegal? How do you make that illegal without also making it illegal to share these otherwise benign logs with people for the purpose of debugging website issues? Are you going to base this on "intent"? That is, "you're free to share this data with X as long as X does not intend to use it for advertising, or to share it with anyone else who might [...] who might intend to use it for advertising"? These kinds of intent-chains are spectacularly ineffective, in part because the advertising ecosystem is set up to make these chains as convoluted as possible, and suddenly someone just has some data there and why not make profiles out of it? etc.

:\

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#229
post #69

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.

I'm a simple man -- if I see a button with a primary intent color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it, often before I realize what I'm doing or reading the accompanying text. Probably tens of millions of people will do the same here.

used to be like this but these days there's so many dark patterns that try to make you pay for extra shit (or sign up for prime), i instinctively look for the non highlighted button if the button stands out a little too much

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#230
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a simple man -- if I see a button with a primary intent color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it, often before I realize what I'm doing or reading the accompanying text. Probably tens of millions of people will do the same here.

used to be like this but these days there's so many dark patterns that try to make you pay for extra shit (or sign up for prime), i instinctively look for the non highlighted button if the button stands out a little too much

Same here. If I understand correctly, the GDPR states that if the user is tricked into clicking that they give consent, that doesn't count as them truly giving consent. Despite this, many otherwise reputable websites try to deceive you into 'agreeing'. Disappointingly, TomsHardware is one such.

These dark patterns will only go away once there are properly enforced laws against them.

Post reply on HN