141–150 of 632 posts
Facebook: “We believe that personalized ads and user privacy can coexist.” No-one else does.
How would this even be theoretically possible? I mean, if you know someone’s personal details, they per definition has lost that privacy towards you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If subscriptions were always as easy to manage in one place like they are on an iPhone, I would have absolutely no problem with 20 subscriptions. Where’s the subscription management startup model?
I highly doubt that most users would be comfortable paying for 20 subscriptions—or even 1.
The key word here is "programmed" - and what has been programmed can be deprogrammed. I honestly believe that we can re-rehabilitate people to no longer automatically give away their privacy for a service, and instead consciously and carefully assess the financial cost vs. utility of a service.
This could lead to both a reduction in the amount of available services (as smaller ones go out of business because people realized that it wasn't really worth it for them) and an increase in the number of services people are actually willing to pay real money for.
Also, if the subscriptions were far cheaper (say, $2/month), I think that 20 concurrent subscriptions would be acceptable to many people.
If people opt out of what you're doing to them as soon as they're made aware you're doing it, then perhaps that's a sign that you shouldn't have been doing it in the first place. I don't even believe that 25% of users actually wanted tracking. I think a lot of people just blindly tap buttons to make annoyances go away, and these guys just hit the wrong button.
As soon as ad supported free services start shutting down because of ad blocking and lowered clickthrough rates on ads because of targeting being blocked, most people will probably start changing their minds. (The alternative being maintaining 10-20+ paid subscriptions.) For now, all this change means is that users who are opted-in to tracking are subsidising those who aren't.
Bonus: Maybe this will be an opportunity for content providers to reset the decline of advertising prices that has happened over the last decade. (Remember the blooming blogger scene in the 2000s, when you could still make substantial revenues? Remember the thriving online news papers? We could get back there, if advertising became less invasive and less aggressive and also more profitable for content providers, e.g., how it had been in print.)
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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 resp…
This. If something has commercial value, then put a price on it. We've had currency for thousands of years now. It's a really useful way of signaling value in a commonly understood way. Much more efficient than barter.
Stop asking us to barter away data for services. If the service is truly worth something, then put a clear price on it and show some respect to your customers instead of trying to trick them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As soon as ad supported free services start shutting down because of ad blocking and lowered clickthrough rates on ads because of targeting being blocked, most people will probably start changing their minds. (The alternative being maintaining 10-20+ paid subscriptions.) For now, all this change means is that users who are opted-in to tracking are subsidising those who aren't.
This is not destroying the whole concept of ads, it is only pushing back against awful variants. It is definitely possible to have “nice” ads, like simple text or images, with no creepy or CPU-draining elements in them. Nothing is preventing those ads from supporting free services.
(Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your perspective.)
The only aspect of this story which surprises me is that 25% of iOS users opted in to tracking.
I’m surprised it’s so low. These sites are used mostly for indulging in narcissism, and people who tend that direction generally prefer to have their lives be less private.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 brows…
You're right that GDPR hasn't been enforced strongly enough. It is actually quite a good law (imperfect, but pretty good).
I donate money to NOYB (https://noyb.eu/en/our-detailed-concept) to fight for enforcement of the law.
Quality for consumers has only ever been truly won by regulation - all major economies heavily regulate all industries. The market didn't make food safe, regulation was needed (see history e.g. https://www.hygienie.org/a-brief-history-of-uk-food-safety-l...).
For the past year I've had this ritual of clicking on every advertising tile as soon as it appears and mark it as irrelevant and that I don't want to see any more from that company. Currently this happens for a couple of days at the start of some months. So far I feel like this strategy has worked fine, 90% of the time I don't get served any unwanted content and I can view a decent timeline.
I own an advertising agency. I've tracked ios impressions % over time on all of our remarketing campaigns (as a proxy), its down about 30% from peak and stabilized. Not a huge deal. LOL at this below: "Seufert estimated that in the first full quarter users see the prompt, the iOS changes could cut Facebook’s revenue by 7% if roughly 20% of users agree to be tracked. If just 10% of users grant Facebook tracking permis…
I own an advertising agency. I've tracked ios impressions % over time on all of our remarketing campaigns (as a proxy), its down about 30% from peak and stabilized. Not a huge deal. LOL at this below: "Seufert estimated that in the first full quarter users see the prompt, the iOS changes could cut Facebook’s revenue by 7% if roughly 20% of users agree to be tracked. If just 10% of users grant Facebook tracking permis…