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

181–190 of 206 posts

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

#181

Post by [deleted] »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #36
pavlov wrote: post #16

The article manages to contradict itself at every turn. For example: "Only yesterday, Google announced its plans to make advertising ID an opt-in feature." A few paragraphs later: "Google’s opt-out ad-tracking popup isn’t on the forefront like in iOS. Instead, it’s buried deep in the Google Play Service settings — which could be difficult for the non-tech savvy user to find out." And this opener: "Facebook has a mark…

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…

[deleted]

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

#182

Post by ad8e »

Here's a link from Sept 2020 about how this was expected long in advance: https://mobiledevmemo.com/what-will-googles-deprecation-of-g... The key word here is "consensus". He's reporting that others held this expectation, not just himself. This step by Google does not yet go as far as predicted; there is a big difference between a modal opt-in/opt-out and an opt-out in settings.

Here's a link speculating on the impact of Apple's IDFA deprecation on Facebook, from January: https://mobiledevmemo.com/facebook-may-take-revenue-hit-from... It carries strong parallels to what is in-process at Google.

A few ad experts I follow say that Facebook and Google will claim increasing dominance in the ad space. Their logic is that as each ad vendor loses third party information, comparative advantage will favor companies with strong first party information. This will drive more ads toward Facebook as a relative share, even if they are still losing overall. I have no information to judge to what extent this claim holds.

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

#183

Post by randomdata »

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…

> Their last earnings report shows significant growth and is the opposite of a struggling business.

It helps when governments have given out huge grants specifically earmarked for social media advertising in an effort to help struggling brick and mortar business through the COVID landscape. It will be interesting to see if those earnings continue when businesses are back to paying for their own ads. In my business, which received one of those grants, I'm not sure the payback justified the spend, to be honest.

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

#184

Post by manigandham »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #162
manigandham wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apple can do it: https://searchads.apple.com/ Some would say this is the entire point of Apple blocking cross-app tracking.

That's true, and it probably is. Or at the very least, Apple knows that app installs are still in demand and greatly helps the ecosystem.

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

#185

Post by throwaway3699 »

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.

Well, I mean, people used to feel queasy after classic FPS games back in the day, but generally people adapted. I expect VR will be similar.

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

#186

Post by pmontra »

beagle3 wrote: post #121
pmontra wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like FB as anybody else but FB was not alone there at that time. There were many other social networks and FB was the one that succeeded. Other social networks were born later on and FB is still here. Beating the competition and surviving almost 20 years is quite great enough IMHO.

They weren’t prescient, but they were functionally equivalent: they were spying on users (e.g. through Onavo) and knew stats about Instagram, snap and WhatsApp very early on, that let them respond well early (and price an offer, or build a competitor). I think Zuck, having taken the market from Orkut, Friendster and MySpace, decided he will not let anyone take it from him, no matter what. E.g. Skype was still on ever…

I didn't know or didn't remember about Onavo. Thanks.

WhatsApp is a social network because of groups. I think I never had a group with Skype. I don't even know if they are a thing there.

I'm currently using WhatsApp and Telegram groups to chat and exchange pictures and links with groups of friends and colleagues. I'm trying to move from WA to Telegram starting with the most technical friends (as always has been with new things.) I'm basically not using Facebook anymore. I appreciate that those apps let me partition people in groups with well defined boundaries. I believe FB has something like that but the UI was more about posting something and let all contacts see it.

Anyway, everything I post there is meant to be lost. I'm backing up images, messages not so much. Definitely not on WA which is pretty much hostile to backups as it doesn't give us the key to decrypt the local databases. Maybe it is not to break E2E encryption and not let other apps decrypt messages, but I should be able to download the key from somewhere if I ask for it. Uploading to Google Drive an unencrypted database is not good.

On the other side Telegram has a kind of distributed database on all my devices. Probably bad for E2E encryption unless every devices has its own key and messages are encrypted for all of them, or another equivalent system. I didn't investigate how it works.

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

#188

Post by dougmwne »

spideymans wrote: post #137
dougmwne wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuck is personally all in on capturing the VR and AR market and making it the next ubiquitous computing platform. They already have their own OS. One fifth of the company is working on VR and AR, 10,000 employees. They are pouring billions into it. Zuck likely understands that he missed the platform boat last time around and doesn't intend to miss the next one. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-rea…

I cannot imagine that Facebook will be able to compete with whatever Apple has planned in the AR space. Every platform advantage that made the Apple Watch incredibly difficult to compete with will be so much more important with AR. This is particularly evident when considering Apple's lead in silicon, which will allow Apple's AR products to be lighter, faster and longer lasting than their competitors. Apple's vertica…

I believe the key moment that Facebook is racing towards is an AR conversation with a loved one sitting across the table from you, as there and present as real life. We'll see if Apple can get there first.

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

#189

Post by clairity »

JW_00000 wrote: post #149
clairity wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hopefully covid sensationalism will open the eyes of more folks to this kind of emotionally-wearing manipulation. simple phrases like "could have" and "may" are simultaneously designed to be outwardly innocuous, seemingly informative, and highly effective in leading people to jump to overblown conclusions that keep readers heightened (i.e., stressed) so that they desire more information. it's the same primal anxiety…

Hasn't this been going on for a very long time (possibly forever)? I'm thinking of the stress about North Korea launching nukes that would end the world, the stories about the EU banning curved bananas and thereby introducing totalitarianism, the idea that Brexit would eventually lead to WW3, the fear by some that Trump would cause the collapse of the US, the fear by others that Obama was a Muslim who would dismantle…

sure, it's been going on a long time, but younger humans tend to have to relearn this for themselves. hopefully the relentless fearmongering around covid reveals the mechanisms of sensationalism for more people.

practically all projections of power, as a critical feature of organizations, reach for heightened exaggeration to drive complicity. in that way, i'd reject 'both sides' as a false dichotomy. rather, any side--any significant organization, as a consolidation of power--will inevitably project misleading hyperbole, news media being no exception, and political parties being explicitly designed for it.

the bit that we need to keep relearning is the intertwining relationship between media and other organizations in shaping narratives for their own benefit, in opposition to the ideal of media keeping other organizations honest by disseminating information they'd otherwise wish to keep private. we the people have to continually keep organizations honest.

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

#190

Post by colejohnson66 »

danaris wrote: post #172
colejohnson66 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard of them. They certainly sound like garbage. Was there a point to this, or did you just want to note that there are really terrible (but non-harmful) apps on the App Store?

My point was really that ads are allowed. I didn’t make that clear enough
Post reply on HN