Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#271

Post by fingerlocks » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

Closi wrote: post #265

fingerlocks wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least someone in this thread gets it. Ad tracking really is about attribution, personalized ads are secondary nice-to-have. This is how small businesses figure out their advertising budget. Where are our customers coming from, or more importantly, where are they not coming from, so we know where to spend or not spend our limited resources? But I’m not surprised this isn’t pointed out more often. The hardcore priva…

So you mean their REAL purpose is attribution, but they just chose to build giant databases covering peoples locations, friend groups, hobbies, desires, careers, sex, sexual preferences, relationship statuses, political alignment, voting probability, race and more in order to implement a 'secondary nice-to-have'? And that's better? As a side point, I don't see why attribution tracking requires any form of cross-site…

None of that has anything to do with this topic. This is about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA. There are no web URLs involved[0] when you click an ad on instagram and it launches another app on your phone. These are separate issues, and I don't entire disagree with the others you brought up.

[0] Before someone comes in to correct me, I know I'm handwaving here. The point stands.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#272

Post by zepto » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #260

zepto wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it’s essentially a false equivalence: > Nobody needs a smart phone" or "No family of 4 needs a >2000sq/ft house" or the like as examples. Even these are in a totally different class of ‘need’ to Facebook which is trivially substituted by comparison.

I think you miss the point the point I was trying to make (i.e. I didn't articulate it well). Regardless of how trivial you think it is, the fact that so many people demonstrate a preference not to should make you think harder about the problem. It's not just the technology, and many tech people tend to get this wrong consistently. Let's put it another way: if it was actually as trivial as you seem to think, it proba…

That makes the point a lot worse, and really just comes across as you responding to a set of assumptions nobody is actually making.

What is the ‘it’ which you imagine people think is trivial?

Who is saying anything is trivial?

Where is anyone saying it’s just technology?

Who said people don’t have a preference to use Facebook?

How do you know how hard people have thought about this?

I don’t think Facebook is trivial to replace, but that isn’t because people are dependent on it in a way that is comparable to the other examples you mentioned.

Unlike the examples you listed, people can easily do without Facebook. There just isn’t much incentive for most people to do so, since they don’t perceive the downsides adequately.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#273

Post by bluelu » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

I know that this is unpopular here, but a lot of people (including me) don't mind that they get targeted ads.

If you fear for abuse, then there should be clear laws what should not be allowed and severe punishment for this.

But forbidding facebook to track behaviour and then allowing apple to do so (e.g. they even track what programs you run, is just wrong. Who knows, maybe apple will even start its own "privacy" network later on.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#274

Post by acchow » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #152

bnj wrote: post #5

It's simultaneously remarkable and utterly unremarkable that Facebook has been dragged kicking and screaming into building a consent screen for this kind of tracking. Watching this tracking notification conflict unfold in the media has really helped me to refine where I stand on this: if a business depends on non-consensual tracking to be able to survive, then I'd prefer that the business has to fold before stripping…

You're more forgiving than I am. As far as I'm concerned, individual-targeted advertising has such inherently perverse incentives that even those starting out with good intentions (e.g. consensual opt-in) will eventually find themselves engaged in unethical, privacy-eroding behavior as a matter of course. Consider what would happen if you outlawed individual-targeted advertising. Ad relevancy falls overall. What then…

> Would ad companies like Google make less money? Not really.

I disagree. Currently, targeted advertising is able to hold a premium over non-targeted advertising. The more targeted, the higher the premium. Facebook wants to keep up in the arms race with Google (and others) in how targeted it can be.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#275

Post by AlphaSite » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 10:10 PM UTC

prostoalex wrote: post #209

imheretolearn wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors I would like to know how this conclusion was reached. By that logic, the advertising industry would not really need individual targeting at all

This would just return to 2000-esque state of affairs, where the ad model was based on selling page views, clicks or actions. That model favors small publishers (as niche advertisers flock to niche publications) and disadvantages large generic publishers (social networks, email clients, portals).

I’m not entirely convinced this is true, but equally if it is I see it as an absolute win.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#276

Post by danShumway » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

fingerlocks wrote: post #269

danShumway wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because (all other concerns and objections aside) the intent doesn't matter. Apologies for the crude analogy, but if I install a camera in your bathroom and say, "okay, technically I could watch you poop, but the only reason I'm actually doing this is to figure out when you're out of toilet paper", that explanation won't leave you satisfied. Similarly, if someone is tracking me across the web and trying to link my id…

Filming me defecating in the privacy of my home is not comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value traveling from my computer to another. Also, please remember that this conversation is very specifically about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA, not about general web tracking or other data vacuuming issues. The fact that these two separate issues get conflated is part of the problem.

> about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA

Which is used to uniquely identify me across apps, a totally equivalent level of tracking as identifying me across websites. It is the same result, just on a different platform.

And all of this data gets combined and utilized with the "other data vacuuming issues" you're talking about. You can't treat those like isolated issues, the unique identifiers across websites/apps enable the data vacuuming.

You're arguing that these identifiers aren't primarily being used to build profiles, that they're mostly innocuous, and then you're saying that the fact that profiles are being built and data vacuuming is happening is a separate issue that's not relevant to the current conversation? No, the data vacuuming wouldn't be possible to nearly the same degree without persistent identifiers. That makes it relevant.

> is not comparable to a quasi-anonymous unique value traveling from my computer to another.

You're arguing about a matter of degree. The point I'm making is that violating my privacy doesn't become automatically OK just because the advertising industry promises me they won't look at the extra data they're getting. And I think the reasoning behind why it's not OK is the same in both scenarios -- because in both scenarios, it's not reasonable to trust the person gathering that data to keep it secure or to never misuse it.

People bring up "quasi-anonymous" as if it's some kind of perfect defense that puts these identifiers into a separate category of information, but it's not. If it was actually anonymous, you wouldn't need to put the "quasi" in front of it. But if it makes you feel better, I'll put a camera in your bathroom and then disassociate the video stream from your home address or name, and then I'll blur your face with an AI. Then the video stream will be quasi-anonymous too. I promise I won't ever try to link it to a real identity, you can trust me.

The point is, it is a violation of my privacy to track every website I visit and every app I use. The reason why a company is doing that doesn't matter.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#277

Post by svachalek » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

reggieband wrote: post #155

bavent wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that actually work though? I've been buying things on Amazon for over a decade. For a while I got my groceries through them, I watch a lot of stuff on Prime Video. You would think they, of all people, know what I like. I can't think of more than a couple times where anything suggested to me was actually something I wanted. Even when I used FB, the ads were so off target from things I am interested in as to be la…

> THIS is the best you can do with teams of engineers making > $200k/year throwing AI at everything? Maybe it is the best we can currently do and maybe it isn't objectively great. But the real question: is it better? I mean, better than the random shotgun approach that was TV, magazines, bus wraps, billboards, etc. Is it better than the spam flyers or "yellow pages" the post office delivered to every single household…

Is it one tiny increment better? Maybe? I'm with others who are not really impressed. For years the best Facebook could do were "Hot single [your gender preference] in [your city] are looking for [your age] [your gender]". Thanks, Mad Lib ads.

But for the sake of argument let's say there is some small increment. What is the cost we are willing to pay for that? Databases that know exactly how much time we spend on the toilet? Political disinformation campaigns? Insurrection attempts?

It's like making baby monitors a little bit more convenient, but in the process opening the door for pedo hackers to speak directly to your children's cribs. Tiny conveniences aren't worth sacrificing everything we have.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#278

Post by mqus » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

idreyn wrote: post #69

notyourwork wrote: post #3

Why would anyone agree to this? I don’t see a benefit to letting Facebook or any company track me across the internet. When did we ever decide this was what consumers wanted? Every time this topic comes up I check Facebooks stock price and realize how detached people are from facebooks revenue driven by the advertisement market.

I'm a simple man -- if I see a button with a primary intent color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it, often before I realize what I'm doing or reading the accompanying text. Probably tens of millions of people will do the same here.

I propably already learned the "don't klick the obvious button asap" lesson pretty early, when websites had like 5 "Download now" buttons (ads) and you had to search for the small text with a link to actually get the download.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#279

Post by danShumway » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

fingerlocks wrote: post #271

Closi wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you mean their REAL purpose is attribution, but they just chose to build giant databases covering peoples locations, friend groups, hobbies, desires, careers, sex, sexual preferences, relationship statuses, political alignment, voting probability, race and more in order to implement a 'secondary nice-to-have'? And that's better? As a side point, I don't see why attribution tracking requires any form of cross-site…

None of that has anything to do with this topic. This is about Facebook's access to the Apple IDFA. There are no web URLs involved[0] when you click an ad on instagram and it launches another app on your phone. These are separate issues, and I don't entire disagree with the others you brought up. [0] Before someone comes in to correct me, I know I'm handwaving here. The point stands.

The apps on your phone would not have the ability to suck up isolated pieces of data about your usage and combine them into a single profile with your age/gender/etc... if they didn't have a set of shared identifiers that they could use to associate that data across multiple sources.

It seems very relevant to me. The larger privacy problems wouldn't be quite as bad if there was no way to tell what device an app was running on or who was using it. That seems like it would limit data collection in a pretty significant way.

Re: Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes

#280

Post by dylan604 » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

imheretolearn wrote: post #161

kibwen wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're more forgiving than I am. As far as I'm concerned, individual-targeted advertising has such inherently perverse incentives that even those starting out with good intentions (e.g. consensual opt-in) will eventually find themselves engaged in unethical, privacy-eroding behavior as a matter of course. Consider what would happen if you outlawed individual-targeted advertising. Ad relevancy falls overall. What then…

>> Overall advertising budgets are not dominated by the effectiveness of advertising, but by adversarial spending by their competitors I would like to know how this conclusion was reached. By that logic, the advertising industry would not really need individual targeting at all

Have you ever spent time around advertising people? This is exactly how they talk to each other. An agency shooting a commercial for a hospital in Houston, TX shot in Amsterdam because the director wanted to. Another agency person bragged to a person in another agency about how much they spent. It's a game to these people. Once you become a brand, it is less about advertising a product/lifestyle as much as it is to keep the name prevelant in people's mind.