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Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

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Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#151

Post by heavyset_go »

tomcar288 wrote: post #142
goalieca wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does not have a tracking pixel on half the popular web. Apple's main source of income is through luxury hardware and subscription services. Facebook sells your information and attention to willing buyers.

I don't understand why people are so against Advertisers targetting people based on their data? what are people so afraid of? the way i see it, the worst case scenario is you get an Ad for something you might actually like...

> the way i see it, the worst case scenario is you get an Ad for something you might actually like...

That's hardly the worst case scenario when there are countless stories like "Facebook Allowed Advertisers to Target Users Interested in “White Genocide” — Even in Wake of Pittsburgh Massacre"[1].

There's also the time Facebook's targeted ads were used to facilitate genocide in Myanmar[2][3].

[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/02/facebook-ads-white-supre...

[2] https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/r...

[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#153

Post by thinkling »

tomcar288 wrote: post #142
goalieca wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does not have a tracking pixel on half the popular web. Apple's main source of income is through luxury hardware and subscription services. Facebook sells your information and attention to willing buyers.

I don't understand why people are so against Advertisers targetting people based on their data? what are people so afraid of? the way i see it, the worst case scenario is you get an Ad for something you might actually like...

For one reason, because the data lives on forever, and these companies merge or go out of business eventually, at which point the data ends up in the hands of someone else.

Data is also shared with data brokers (Acxiom and the like) which collect unknown quantities of data about you, linked to your actual identity. That data can then affect whether you get a loan or a job.

Most importantly, we don't know what's done with the data and have no control should we want it to be forgotten.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#154

Post by gaucheries »

The author’s point about Threads’ privacy/data usage seems moot. Presumably they already use Instagram, and that app’s “Data Linked to You” section in the iOS App Store is comparable to Threads.

I thought that they made a good point about how the Threads screen that links to the privacy policies doesn’t highlight the links very well. But it seems to me that the average social media user probably doesn’t care and would gloss over it anyway.

I liked their suggestion that the App Store use a “privacy rating” feature.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#155

Post by hotnfresh »

tomcar288 wrote: post #142
goalieca wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does not have a tracking pixel on half the popular web. Apple's main source of income is through luxury hardware and subscription services. Facebook sells your information and attention to willing buyers.

I don't understand why people are so against Advertisers targetting people based on their data? what are people so afraid of? the way i see it, the worst case scenario is you get an Ad for something you might actually like...

1) The data are the privacy equivalent of nuclear waste. A company having it is also barely different from the government having it, directly. The data ought not be collected, period. It’s astonishingly dangerous.

2) Someone following you around writing notes about everything you do doesn’t stop being creepy-as-fuck harassment just because it’s online and “at scale”. And actually a lot of this transcends the Internet and gets connected with real world activities, blurring the difference even more. It’s wrong when someone does it to a single person for some personal reason, and it’s even more wrong when a megacorp does it to everyone to make a buck.

3) It harms the function of markets. Massive nearly-impossible-for-a-small-business-to-attain data-moats protect monopolies and discourage competition. It adds to the already-harmful-to-market-function information imbalance between individuals and companies.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#156

Post by Draiken »

sumeno wrote: post #113
dazc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Apple's main source of income is through luxury hardware and subscription services.' So why not keep it that way? I understand the temptation of veering from the path of 'do no evil' but Apple are not exactly short of revenue? Apple, Google and Meta are currently all three sides of the same coin. Take your pick but don't claim any virtue for doing so.

> So why not keep it that way? Because capitalism incentivizes unsustainable growth at all costs.

Dead on. No corporation in the world can stop this once they are big enough.

Maybe if you had an already rich individual keeping his company private and making an active effort to not be evil. But come on, let's be real...

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#158

Post by dwaite »

Kwpolska wrote: post #20
phailhaus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that your Threads account is your Instagram account. They're not separate.

Okay, but there is some flag that means that going to https://www.threads.net/@instagram works but https://www.threads.net/@nasa doesn’t (even though https://instagram.com/nasa/ is a perfectly valid public Instagram account). This flag is toggled when the Instagram user first signs into Threads. Why can’t Meta just set this flag to false and delete all Threads posts while leaving the Instagram account intact?

That Meta is investigating how to make deletion of your threads history possible without deleting your instagram account is actually in the linked slideshow.

So it may very well wind up being 'just' setting a flag to false, starting a selective deletion and informing the user that the deletion may take several .

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#160

Post by Draiken »

tomnipotent wrote: post #133
factorialboy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the point. Apple tracks every app launch. And reports it to an external server. Not localized. Not anonymized.

You didn't make a point. App telemetry is absolutely benign compared to the kind of invasive ad tracking that Facebook participates in. There's no shortage of horror stories of poorly implemented Facebook Pixel integrations passing sensitive user data that marketers then use to create custom ad campaigns. Most recent examples that come to mind: https://www.extremetech.com/internet/341111-tax-filing-websi... https://g…

It might be less awful, but in no way, shape or form it is benign.
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