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Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

bloomberg.com

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Re: Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

#51

Post by orangepanda »

danbruc wrote: post #3

That sense of entitlement makes me sick. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we would have to spend way too much on ads. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise my small business can not survive. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not understand who our customers are. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not identify new customers. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not evaluate the e…

While I dont mind some tracking and telemetry, platforms have abused that trust and track everything they can now. I'm all for going scorched earth policy.

Similar to how if an app sends just one spam notification, it's an uninstall and a 2 star rating.

Re: Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

#52

Post by danbruc »

melomal wrote: post #44
danbruc wrote: post #3

That sense of entitlement makes me sick. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we would have to spend way too much on ads. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise my small business can not survive. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not understand who our customers are. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not identify new customers. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not evaluate the e…

I love the personal entitlement people have when using free email, free social media, free search engines and everything else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends meet by making profit. Do you think Y Combinator investments don't use tracking? You would get laughed out of a room if you said you track nothing and have a solid product. A phone call to ask about your product is tracking because it all…

I love the personal entitlement people have when using free email, free social media, free search engines and everything else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends meet by making profit.

Those are not free, the users are paying for them with their share of the ad budget in the price of all the products they buy. And I am not complaining about ads per se - even though I would personally prefer if they disappeared and I could directly pay for the services I use - but about the tracking behind them.

Re: Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

#53

Post by danuker »

throwawaycuriou wrote: post #48
melomal wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the personal entitlement people have when using free email, free social media, free search engines and everything else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends meet by making profit. Do you think Y Combinator investments don't use tracking? You would get laughed out of a room if you said you track nothing and have a solid product. A phone call to ask about your product is tracking because it all…

The irony you manufacture doesn't hold. Yes, these products are cheap (currently free) no small part due to the market aberration caused by the tracking and advertising. But it's not certain that they would go away if advertising had to revert to a model less driven by privacy intrusion. I welcome the day such intrusions are rendered illegal or impractical, so that the market can price these offerings appropriately.…

> such intrusions are rendered illegal or impractical

The GDPR was an attempt. Guess what happened? Everyone implemented it in such a way as to appear compliant but not necessarily be compliant, and to cause maximum annoyance to the user.

What the solution is here is to have an educated population and powerful privacy tools, like uBlock Origin. [1]

But of course, the surveillance oligopoly is developing its own browser [2], specifically to maintain control and make it hard to implement such tools [3].

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

[2] https://news.softpedia.com/news/google-chrome-microsoft-edge...

[3] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338

Re: Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

#54

Post by jlkuester7 »

melomal wrote: post #44
danbruc wrote: post #3

That sense of entitlement makes me sick. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we would have to spend way too much on ads. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise my small business can not survive. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not understand who our customers are. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not identify new customers. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not evaluate the e…

I love the personal entitlement people have when using free email, free social media, free search engines and everything else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends meet by making profit. Do you think Y Combinator investments don't use tracking? You would get laughed out of a room if you said you track nothing and have a solid product. A phone call to ask about your product is tracking because it all…

Sure, if you are not paying for a service you are the product. I get that. You get that. We can make informed decisions about balancing cost/privacy. But the same cannot really be said for the average consumer. This is not because the average consumer is too stupid to understand, but more so because the services themselves deliberately obfuscate their data collection and its consequences forcing users to do their own research to try and understand what is happening.

Honestly what would be really interesting to me would be to give users a clear-cut choice between tracking vs paying. E.g. replace the dialog in the article with a choice between allowing Facebook to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites or paying a $2/mo subscription fee. I am not so delusional as to think that 75% of people will opt for the subscription, but it would be really interesting to see how many actually would!

Re: Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

#55

Post by danbruc »

jlkuester7 wrote: post #54
melomal wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the personal entitlement people have when using free email, free social media, free search engines and everything else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends meet by making profit. Do you think Y Combinator investments don't use tracking? You would get laughed out of a room if you said you track nothing and have a solid product. A phone call to ask about your product is tracking because it all…

Sure, if you are not paying for a service you are the product. I get that. You get that. We can make informed decisions about balancing cost/privacy. But the same cannot really be said for the average consumer. This is not because the average consumer is too stupid to understand, but more so because the services themselves deliberately obfuscate their data collection and its consequences forcing users to do their own…

[...] paying a $2/mo subscription fee. I am not so delusional as to think that 75% of people will opt for the subscription [...]

Which is weird in itself, not exactly sure how we ended up in this spot. People in a restaurant or a bar are never thinking whether they should order another drink that will be gone in a couple of minutes based on the costs but they refuse to spend one dollar on buying a mobile game that they play for hours and hours and that forces them to watch an ad every minute.

Re: Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

#56

Post by melomal »

danbruc wrote: post #52
melomal wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the personal entitlement people have when using free email, free social media, free search engines and everything else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends meet by making profit. Do you think Y Combinator investments don't use tracking? You would get laughed out of a room if you said you track nothing and have a solid product. A phone call to ask about your product is tracking because it all…

I love the personal entitlement people have when using free email, free social media, free search engines and everything else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends meet by making profit. Those are not free, the users are paying for them with their share of the ad budget in the price of all the products they buy. And I am not complaining about ads per se - even though I would personally prefer if the…

But 1000 HN readers paying $X per month for a web browsing service is not going to pay for the R&D needed to overcome Google's amazing ability to search the web.

ex. $5 per month from 1000 HN readers is only $5000. This is petty money if you want and all swinging, all dancing product, profit and work/life balance.

You should check out Indie Hackers which is essentially a graveyard of products, ideas and people asking why their $3 per month product is not being purchased or used.

You using software for free and in return providing some data in return is the old barter system. Which many people would love to go back to...

Re: Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

#57

Post by melomal »

danbruc wrote: post #55
jlkuester7 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you are not paying for a service you are the product. I get that. You get that. We can make informed decisions about balancing cost/privacy. But the same cannot really be said for the average consumer. This is not because the average consumer is too stupid to understand, but more so because the services themselves deliberately obfuscate their data collection and its consequences forcing users to do their own…

[...] paying a $2/mo subscription fee. I am not so delusional as to think that 75% of people will opt for the subscription [...] Which is weird in itself, not exactly sure how we ended up in this spot. People in a restaurant or a bar are never thinking whether they should order another drink that will be gone in a couple of minutes based on the costs but they refuse to spend one dollar on buying a mobile game that th…

Because people like products and tangible things. Look at the Apple accessories - overpriced, overengineered yet people will happily overpay, lose it and then pay for it again.

Ask someone for £3 for a full vehicle check to know if it's been stolen, crashed, written off, still on finance (basically major headaches) is way too much of an ask.

An example that I have is my project that does the above. 300 free checks and 5 premium checks 6 months later, I still scratch my head at how people are scared of buying 2nd hand cars but literally do nothing to protect themselves.

Re: Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

#58

Post by intended »

melomal wrote: post #44
danbruc wrote: post #3

That sense of entitlement makes me sick. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we would have to spend way too much on ads. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise my small business can not survive. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not understand who our customers are. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not identify new customers. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not evaluate the e…

I love the personal entitlement people have when using free email, free social media, free search engines and everything else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends meet by making profit. Do you think Y Combinator investments don't use tracking? You would get laughed out of a room if you said you track nothing and have a solid product. A phone call to ask about your product is tracking because it all…

This is a little, cart before horse; obviously, nothing is free.

Charge customers. Go ahead. In the first place, Advertisers are the actual customers. Freemium models for retail consumers are a business choice.

People are notoriously bad at processing obscured costs. You see it with things like plastic pollution and waste - that cost is never added to the price of M&M packaging. Tomorrow if it were, people would respond logically and change their buying habits.

To call this entitlement, when its an issue of market structure, is to drive this conversation into identity and morality arguments.

The dominant models in tech are some version of freemium, because “network effects”.

Solve for that either technically or legally and you don’t have to start attributing blame where none exists.

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