211–220 of 311 posts
At this point you have to assume a round of antitrust lawsuits once the US govt returns to normal. But you have to wonder how they will divide the big tech or whether DC will even have the expertise required to implement something credible and effective.
I mean, I can see a viable anti-trust action for the Hey.com/Epic fiascoes and the ongoing 30% app revenue fees...
> We believe that industry consultation is critical for changes to platform policies, as these updates have a far-reaching impact on the developer ecosystem. Why should platform makers consult the advertising industry? It's not like the advertising industry consulted anybody before they started collecting every bit of data they could.
It’s also a conflict of interest: when they’re interacting with that industry and advocating for things are they doing so on behalf of selling ads for Facebook or for the publishers on their platform?
This is what Mark Zuckerberg says at government hearings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The scandal in Cambridge Analytica was roughly that they were able do this stuff after FB made it officially against the rules.
"able" is bearing a lot of load. FB never built technical countermeasures, merely asked app devs to pinky-swear not to siphon user data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. As long as the flip side of that argument is equally appreciated - ad revenue pays for the apps, so less revenue will necessarily lead to fewer "free" apps and/or fewer "free" features and/or worse quality. It's a rational response of the intermediary (i.e. app makers) to the customers (i.e. advertisers) having less access to the product (i.e. us).
Newspapers had plenty of ad revenue before tracking. Apps could be monetized by ads that are targeted based on the in-app content only.
> We believe that industry consultation is critical for changes to platform policies, as these updates have a far-reaching impact on the developer ecosystem. Why should platform makers consult the advertising industry? It's not like the advertising industry consulted anybody before they started collecting every bit of data they could.
Any given platform succeeds or dies based on its applications.
In the case of mobile, many of those applications survive based on advertising.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure about "healthy", but un-targeted advertising is a total waste of money, unless you're some big generic brand. High-value advertising revenue generally comes from very specific brands targeting very specific users. Of course you can do certain kinds of targeted advertising without user profiles, but I don't see how that would work on Facebook.
Does it not depend on context? For example, you don’t need to know anything about the user of a recipe website to know they are hungry and once they pick a recipe, some basic notion of what they are looking for. On top of that, extremely course information can be gathered without tracking users. For example, you can probably get a country level location and maybe even language from the request the browser sends.
However, if you sell, say, artisanal hot sauce, you'd pay more to target an affluent person that likes spicy food, rather than some random person that may be just be googling how to make macaroni and cheese.
> Ultimately, despite our best efforts, Apple’s updates may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14. Seems like Apple is really backing up their rhetoric with real action. Awesome news for anyone that values privacy. Kudos to Apple.
Only if they made this accessible to everyone. You need a thousand dollar phone which is useless in 3 years
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way is Apple a competitor to Facebook or Google Ads?
Facebook’s top ad business on iOS is promoting other apps. The tracking being blocked by this change is how they attribute app sales to the Facebook ad. Apple has a competing service: https://searchads.apple.com/ I think the purpose of this change is to redirect the revenue from FB to Apple.
The real purpose of this change is to continue to drive home to Apple users, who are increasing aware of privacy issues, that Apple has their back. Anything else is gravy.