161–170 of 206 posts
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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?
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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.
Some would say this is the entire point of Apple blocking cross-app tracking.
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Wait, what?
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.
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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.
As someone who does not build mobile apps, none of that was clear from the earlier comment. I appreciate the additional explanation - I wonder if there's a way to find out which apps include this so I can avoid them...
Unfortunately Apple and Google work extremely hard to make this somewhere between difficult and impossible.
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…
A lot of people forget that Facebook ends up on your iphone via dylibs included in almost every other app.
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A lot of people forget that Facebook ends up on your iphone via dylibs included in almost every other app.
Is this the app-equivalent of the Facebook pixel?
Do not install apps, unless absolutely necessary.
I stopped reading when I counted ten grammatical errors and colloquialisms. Not coincidentally, the article is empty of content.
Ad driven journalism is not great for readers. Lots of clickbait, very little substance, baseless conclusions, hand wavy numbers, etc. But it made the frontpage of HN so I guess their SEO is spot on. As others are pointing out, people sign in to Facebook apps. As soon as they do, that apple & google device ID are kind of redundant. The only place where these ids are useful is when users use other application to acces…
The issue has always been that Facebook is tracking you on non-Facebook websites and apps, even if you don't have a Facebook account. From a user's perspective, they never told Facebook what products they were looking at on Etsy, so Facebook collecting that data feels like a violation of their privacy. Things like GDPR and Apple's new IDFA policy do neuter this considerably.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, what?
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.