Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

thebigtech.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 206 posts

Re: Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

#151

Post by manigandham »

hedora wrote: post #146
manigandham wrote: post #64

10+ year adtech veteran here. This article is nonsense, written by someone without any industry experience. Facebook has billions of users on several different apps. And people log into these apps to use them. FB, Instagram, Whatsapp. Cross-app tracking is not a big deal, they already know who you are. The big hits are going to be a reduction in data collected by other apps fed to Facebook, and in measurement and att…

I only log into Facebook to tighten the privacy settings (I probably should just delete it, but they obviously had already built a large shadow profile for me before I created my account; presumably they’d keep doing that after I deleted it.) They gather tons of my information from third parties, often through data sharing deals. For instance, when I bought a car, the manufacturer somehow linked it to my Facebook acc…

If you do business and give data to a company, whether through an app or some offline interaction, then they know who you are and can sync that data with Facebook or other ad companies as long as it follows regulations.

This change only stops easy syncing of a profile based on a stable device-level identifier, often used in (semi-)anonymous situations (like app install ads). It doesn't mean companies can't share data ever again.

Re: Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

#152

Post by prepend »

dannyw wrote: post #41
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is common for Substack articles recently: It delivers a conclusion readers want to hear (Facebook bad! Zuckerberg going to lose a lot of money! Business model destroyed!) but the reality doesn’t quite match the pitch once you decipher the underlying facts. It feels like Substack authors got started in an ultra-competitive world where they knew clickbait journalism was the norm, so they’ve gone all-in on saying w…

It's not just substack. It's a plague that has infected regular journalism; they're just more cunning in disguising it. Think about all the "Sources say" articles you've read at 'respected publications' over the past few years. How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?

I had a friend who had a friend in journalism. For some reason, my friend’s mom was used over and over for “person on the street” or “sources say” when the source was just some general perception on a current event like Michael Jackson dying or whatever.

I used to follow this friend of friend journalist just to see the unnamed sources. It was funny because the articles frequently presented them as authoritative like “knowledgeable sources familiar with Mr Jackson say…” Funny because I knew the mom and she just read the same material anyone else could read.

Re: Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

#153

Post by alert0 »

nottorp wrote: post #70
throwaway3699 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sickness thing has been solved on the hardware side. It's only software that is the issue. Remember when FPS games would never take off because they gave people motion sickness?

Well, my one data point is i never got sick from a FPS (anything from Wolfenstein for Dos till the present) but I did get sick when I borrowed a PSVR for a weekend. Couldn't use it more than 20-30 mins no matter what i tried, and i had a stack of different games with it to try. Maybe Occulus does it better, I'll never know though.

I get motion sick from Minecraft and nothing else. I have thousands of hours in other FPS, even watching someone else play Minecraft in person makes me nauseous.

Re: Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

#154

Post by prepend »

prox wrote: post #78
oefrha wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're just more cunning in disguising it. Are they? For instance, Ars Technica used to be a source of high quality tech journalism for nerds, where the journalists seemed to really “get it”. There’s still some of that left, but in the recent years, I observed more and more bland nothingburger articles coated in clickbait titles popping up in my feed; to add insult to injury, the comment section was sinking deeper…

I would wager that advertisement income and quality of journalism go hand in hand?

I don’t buy this since journalism has been ad supported for a long time.

Ars Technical in particular has been around for a long time and always as funded.

There’s something different now that is maybe compounded by only being ads.

I think the friction is between cost structures from a different revenue time and just constantly using short term tactics to hold onto declining revenue.

So the issue isn’t as revenue per se, but the bad business models associated with ads.

Re: Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

#155

Post by manigandham »

jmole wrote: post #96
manigandham wrote: post #64

10+ year adtech veteran here. This article is nonsense, written by someone without any industry experience. Facebook has billions of users on several different apps. And people log into these apps to use them. FB, Instagram, Whatsapp. Cross-app tracking is not a big deal, they already know who you are. The big hits are going to be a reduction in data collected by other apps fed to Facebook, and in measurement and att…

I wonder how big the hit is from paid app installs via facebook ads. This is a much bigger market than a lot of people understand, and it's nontrivial to track conversions unless you have that mobile app ID.

It'll hurt attribution but if Facebook can't do it then nobody can, so overall spend might not change significantly.

Re: Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

#157

Post by colejohnson66 »

danaris wrote: post #136
amelius wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I was under the impression that the AppStore guidelines prohibit the use of ads.

Not even a little bit. There are vast numbers of free, ad-supported apps in the iOS App Store. This is accepted, intentional, and mostly fine (because it's nearly impossible for malicious in-app ads to either compromise your device, or exfiltrate data the app itself doesn't already have access to, due to iOS security & sandboxing).

Ever see ads for games that say “99% CAN’T BEAT THIS LEVEL!!??” or similar garbage? Those games show full screen ads after every level or even every move.

Re: Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

#158

Post by dannyw »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #147
swiley wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm not sure what part of that wasn't clear. Facebook ships useful libraries to app developers as binaries and they use that to get code on everyone's phone in order to add to their data collection apparatus. I'm pretty sure they're not the only ones who do that either. It's a pretty effective method to get around app sandboxes.

My stock camera app pings FB on startup because of this. Fortunately it can be blocked on Android.

How do I block this on Android?

Re: Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

#159

Post by lupire »

bun_at_work wrote: post #132
defaultname wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?" The overwhelming majority have turned out to be true. So, what now? The faux equivalency "they're all the same" (usually pointing to a tiny, minuscule fraction of stories where something was errant) is exactly how we ended up with the rise of overtly fake news. In the same way we have normalized politicians who lie overtly and repeatedly by casting them all th…

Not all the news publications have the same ideals or strategies or tendency to bend the truth the same way, but all news (so far as I can tell) is impacted by the same negative incentive: advertising. If your business model generates revenue through advertising, you are incentivized to attract attention, as we all know very well. News is no different; news publications are incentivized to write outrage-generating co…

Why would a "right-wing" ideology's outrage be one a bigger level than a left-wing outrage?

You are making a false equivalence. Fox publishes outright nonsense like "Texas has 0 deaths from Covid now, showing mask mandates are unnecessary" (asterisk: for one fluke day in the metrics, so we're not technically lying, even though we know members of Congress will cite while paraphrasing into huge lies).

Re: Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs

#160

Post by smoldesu »

spideymans wrote: post #133
swiley wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people forget that Facebook ends up on your iphone via dylibs included in almost every other app.

I have to imagine that at some point Apple will be targeting these frameworks as part of their privacy push.

I wouldn't think so. Apple has notoriously [0] ignored [1] any any security threats [2] that don't pose any immediate interest [3] to the end user.

[0] https://www.gizchina.com/2021/05/26/researcher-found-a-secur... [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/25/researcher-accuse... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2014/09/04/creat... [3] https://www.wired.com/story/macos-malware-shlayer-gatekeeper...

Post reply on HN