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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

#151

Post by api »

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.

To see the dancing bunny, of course.

(There's a term "dancing bunny attack" for putting interesting content behind a confirmation dialog you want people to click. Facebook kind of does that implicitly. All they have to do is hide appealing content behind this option.)

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#152

Post by kibwen »

bnj wrote: post #5

It's simultaneously remarkable and utterly unremarkable that Facebook has been dragged kicking and screaming into building a consent screen for this kind of tracking. Watching this tracking notification conflict unfold in the media has really helped me to refine where I stand on this: if a business depends on non-consensual tracking to be able to survive, then I'd prefer that the business has to fold before stripping…

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?

Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really. Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors. Companies have to spend money on ads because the competition is spending money on ads. It doesn't matter how absolutely effective the campaign is, as long as it's relatively more effective than your rival's.

Would consumers spend less money? No, a consumer has a budget that is independent of the relevancy of the ads they see.

The advertising industry thrived for a long time in the absence of individual user tracking. It could do so again.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#153

Post by OkGoDoIt »

randmeerkat wrote: post #34
meekrohprocess wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like you and I didn't decide that it was what we wanted. We just have no other options, because the companies which impose the terms aggressively snuff out or buy up their competition. I would argue that people are accepting these terms under duress; "consent" is the wrong word. The market believes that Facebook et al will be able to continue enforcing their will unilaterally, and that is good for the companie…

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

Actually I run a live theater venue and the vast majority of our tickets are purchased through a combination of Facebook advertising and Facebook event pages. There’s no getting around that. I had deleted Facebook but needed to reinstate my account once I got involved in the theater industry. It’s really frustrating actually. Facebook is the Comcast of social media, you don’t really want to use them and you know they’re abusing you, but you don’t really have a choice.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#154

Post by throwaway2245 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #44
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.

You're not the consumer here. You're not paying for anything.

You are quite literally the consumer - you consume the service.

You're just not the one paying for what the service is.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#155

Post by reggieband »

bavent wrote: post #45
naiveai wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that the ads are more personalized. I know this sounds weird, but if I'm going to get ads anyway, I'd like them to potentially be products I'm going to maybe have a use for and might make my life easier. I get the privacy implications, but asking "why would anyone agree to this" is kind of narrow-minded.

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 in some geographic area?

Rather than compare to some idealized perfect, we should compare to the practical alternatives. Maybe this is legitimately the best we can currently do given the state of AI and machine learning. If that is the case, the right question for both advertisers and consumers is whether or not it beats the available alternatives. Because if it does, and advertisers seem to think it does, then that explains why Google and Facebook are worth what they are worth and how they can afford to pay what they pay.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#156

Post by hobofan »

idreyn wrote: post #87
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember though that this doesn't replace Apple's prompt!

That's true, I forgot about that. I appreciate that those prompts don't highlight a particular option which tends to force you to read them. I wonder how often Apple will allow apps to re-request this permission when it's been denied; I have a handful of iOS apps that are constantly asking me to grant permission to see more of my photos, and I wish they'd rate-limit that kind of abuse.

If the notification consent prompt on iOS is any indication, it will only be shown the first time it is requested, which is the reason these notification requests usually already have a "testing screen" like the one described in the article.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#157

Post by [deleted] »

egypturnash wrote: post #120
idreyn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, I forgot about that. I appreciate that those prompts don't highlight a particular option which tends to force you to read them. I wonder how often Apple will allow apps to re-request this permission when it's been denied; I have a handful of iOS apps that are constantly asking me to grant permission to see more of my photos, and I wish they'd rate-limit that kind of abuse.

Shit, every time I reboot my iPad it asks for permission to connect to my phone for wifi calling, and I keep on saying "no" and I wish I could just say "never ask this again". It's just as annoying when Apple does it.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#158

Post by Havoc »

>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.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#159

Post by throwaway2245 »

lumost wrote: post #31
erentz wrote: 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…

There are a few factors at play here when it comes to advertising. 1) Digital is taking over all ad-channels 2) Digital ads can be tracked and attributed ways that were never possible with traditional media 3) It turns out most non-targeted ads aren't actually that effective, and aggregate ad spend is falling. FB ads are effective and high value because of tracking. If tracking goes away, FB ad revenue will fall to t…

> It turns out most non-targeted ads aren't actually that effective

Non-personalised television advertising is still doing great.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#160

Post by MonAlternatiu »

ryandrake wrote: post #133
umvi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collect alternative methods of staying in touch with friends you care about before leaving social media (phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, etc.)

Yea. If your friends will abandon you just because you’re not on social media anymore, then I have bad news for you: they probably aren’t really your friends. When I ditched Facebook about 10 years ago, I lost contact with a whole bunch of people who weren't really part of my life anyway, they were simply "names I recognized." My social life actually got better after dropping social media simply because I'm spending…

> If your friends will abandon you just because you’re not on social media anymore

That's a very binary view of the world that I don't share. But that's not a topic I want to get into.

Can you keep in touch with a certain group of friends through non-social media platforms? Absolutely. I do it daily, but that's not the point.

The point is that staying away from these social media platforms reduces your ability to have a social life. It's quite like saying that you decrease your chances of finding work without a driving license or cellphone number.

I could probably get away without social media today (modulo telegram/whatsapp). But at what point would I surrender? Most people of my generation use it, and it looks like newer generations will have even higher usages.

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