“Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#331

Post by tclancy » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:12 AM UTC

fhsm wrote: post #315

the_unknown wrote: post #108

As a parent of 3 children and owner of multiple iPads and Android devices (including a kids edition Fire Tablet) this really strikes a chord with me. We buy the Toca Boca and Sago Mini games and the occasional game from other providers that strike the kids fancy. But this is a huge development. Big enough that I'll be dropping the Android devices and switching my kids over to Apple ones completely. As it is I have lo…

What do those conversations sound like with Thomas age kids? If you’ve got tips, metaphors, known failure, anything at all on how to create a class level understanding that short circuits per instance debates I’m all ears.

Because I am weird and because most of our video consumption on the TV does not involve old school ad blocks, I started my daughter pretty early (late 3/ early 4) on the idea that ads are “trying to sell us things we don’t need” when we saw them on TV. Then it was ... fairly easy to extrapolate that to the idea we don’t buy apps/ games that are covered in ads. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well and she seems to understand there is a whole class of apps we will not buy even if she doesn’t have a deep appreciation of Why. We shall see how long that works.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#332

Post by tclancy » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:15 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #250

scarface74 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard is it really to add your own analytics? Isn’t it just logging what your users are doing and sync it to your server when you get a signal? I was writing stuff like this for enterprise field service Windows CE devices over a decade ago.

Logging is easy. Waiting for a connection and syncing reliably and testing that it works is a little harder -- annoying but not too bad. Provisioning a database to store the data, maintain backups, index properly for queries etc., and maintain so it doesn't run out of space or degrade in performance as datasets grow by many orders of magnitude is an entirely separate skillset and harder still. Visualizing it -- comin…

But the last two steps can happen on your side. The data can go to a data store someone else maintains like AWS and you can use any number of packaged visualization tools on top of it.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#333

Post by josefresco » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:16 AM UTC

panpanna wrote: post #9

Google please steal this idea. Edit: current policy is "Ads in your app that are served to children need to be appropriate and served from an ads network that has certified compliance with our families policies." See https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/05/building-s...

My anecdotal experience shows this policy is complete bullshit or not enforced at all. Last summer spent time using a Google Play game for kids ages 10+ - The ads we overtly sexual and completely inappropriate for kids under 18. I screenshotted and tweeted it at Google and ... crickets. The developer who made the game was Pixonic: https://pixonic.com

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#334

Post by wj » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:41 AM UTC

rusk wrote: post #310

Guest0918231 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a user-content website, and hate advertising too. But, the website costs $15,000 a year in expenses to run, and community donations bring in $3,000. Advertising generates $50,000. I stay with safe ad categories (no drugs, alcohol, gambling, adult content, etc), and use standard display sizes. No audio ads, background ads, popups, etc. I'm sure the site could generate twice the revenue with background advertisem…

Do you serve the ads yourself or do you defer to third party ad networks? I have no problem with the former, but with the latter I think it's very hard to control what gets displayed, and you're also opening your users up to various attack vectors. There has got to be a niche available for somebody to do plain old non-evil advertising??? EDIT $15,000 a year sounds like a tremendous amount of money to run a web site i…

He said user content so that might be users uploading images, audio, or video with the associated storage and bandwidth costs not to mention workers for generating thumbnails.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#335

Post by matt_morgan » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:45 AM UTC

low_poly_shiba wrote: post #221

Guest0918231 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a user-content website, and hate advertising too. But, the website costs $15,000 a year in expenses to run, and community donations bring in $3,000. Advertising generates $50,000. I stay with safe ad categories (no drugs, alcohol, gambling, adult content, etc), and use standard display sizes. No audio ads, background ads, popups, etc. I'm sure the site could generate twice the revenue with background advertisem…

Never ran something like this, but always wondered: why not have a visible counter saying "this is what it costs to run, please donate!" and let people donate to keep it up? Some kinda big progress bar somewhere or whatever. How do you know it "doesn't work with community donations" when you have no measures to help deal with the tragedy of the commons?

Have you ever worked at a nonprofit? I have, my whole career, lots of them. Don't say this. Nonprofits use strategy after strategy, tested and untested and rational and intuitive, to increase donations in every way they can. They know what they're doing. Do they get it 100% right? No. Do they do it all day, every day, and know a ton about it? Yes.

I can't tell you how many times someone has said to me "why do you guys send out those letters? Everyone just throws them out." Do you know why? Because we see how much they cost, and how much they make, and it's worth it.

This guy is actually running a community site that's paying for itself. Do not question him, especially by proposing one tiny little strategy among the thousands that might work.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#336

Post by gmueckl » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:47 AM UTC

hueving wrote: post #252

edmundsauto wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another argument would be that advertising allowed the internet to develop as it is, to the scale it is. It's impossible to separate the accessibility, progress, UX, and information available from the core business model that enabled so much of it. If ads had never been allowed, would search be more like AOl's keywords? Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage? Think what you will, but Google has developed…

IBM and Microsoft both contribute more to open source than Google. In fact, the explosion of the internet occured during their primes moreso than Google. What Google really pushed forward was SaaS and the free price tag was a trick to make it seem as good as open source. But when it comes down to it, Gmail is worse than Windows 7 when it comes to user power. At least you can use windows 7 without a constant connectio…

Microsoft is in the open source game to domimate it. They want to be in a position where you can't realistically run an open source project without their involvement. Their recent moves around github all point in that direction.

IBM has more of a consultancy perspective: they want rheur business customers to pay for services provided on top of existing solutions. And open source platforms make it easier to sell custom extensions.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#337

Post by low_poly_shiba » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:13 PM UTC

matt_morgan wrote: post #335

low_poly_shiba wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never ran something like this, but always wondered: why not have a visible counter saying "this is what it costs to run, please donate!" and let people donate to keep it up? Some kinda big progress bar somewhere or whatever. How do you know it "doesn't work with community donations" when you have no measures to help deal with the tragedy of the commons?

Have you ever worked at a nonprofit? I have, my whole career, lots of them. Don't say this. Nonprofits use strategy after strategy, tested and untested and rational and intuitive, to increase donations in every way they can. They know what they're doing. Do they get it 100% right? No. Do they do it all day, every day, and know a ton about it? Yes. I can't tell you how many times someone has said to me "why do you guy…

Yes, I have, but didn't deal with this issue.

I don't think this advice of "if you haven't done it you can't criticize or ask questions about it" is very good. It would bar me from commenting on and criticizing Michael Bay movies, so no thank you.

I'd also like to know if the guy shuts off the ads when he makes more than is needed for maintenance costs.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#338

Post by low_poly_shiba » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:15 PM UTC

bredren wrote: post #231

low_poly_shiba wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never ran something like this, but always wondered: why not have a visible counter saying "this is what it costs to run, please donate!" and let people donate to keep it up? Some kinda big progress bar somewhere or whatever. How do you know it "doesn't work with community donations" when you have no measures to help deal with the tragedy of the commons?

I ran a content forum and blog that needed $6k at cost back in pre vps days and raised it several years in a row off community donations. I refused to show ads because they were all ticket brokers / scalpers. It is actually kind of a pain and takes work to raise money this way. For me, I had to do a personal appeal, email drips, and I even added membership status indicators to usernames and gave access to “exclusive”…

Yeah I suspect it could work with some savvy and pluck. I have some ideas that will probably lead me to face off with this issue myself, I'm kinda looking forward to it.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#339

Post by jodrellblank » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:16 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #267

bunderbunder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking. This seems to me like one of those spots where one's approach to ethics can play a big part in the conclusions you draw. From a sort of Kant-style, deontological perspective, where you have to be able to say with confidence that something is morally wrong in order to make much of a judgment at all about it, yeah, it seems hard to mount a strong case agai…

The problem I have with the anti-advertising crowd is that none of them take their philosophy to the required ethical conclusion: Stop using free ad-supported resources. Google and Facebook are easy examples of this. The position would be far more ethically aligned if they unplugged from all ad-supported products and services.

Advertising is a pollution on social space. A deliberately attention-grabbing advertisement represents a very real theft from people, and a public space covered in it, even more so. Advertising is designed to exploit inherent human weaknesses and biases, to manipulate behaviour. It's abusive. Seen from this position, Google is an abuser.

The required ethical conclusion is not "inconvenience yourself so you can be more respectable", it's far more extreme than that. What about saving other people from it, or activism to ban it completely, like we restrict noise pollution and physical manipulation of strangers?

Using ad-supported services and an ad-blocker might be unethical theft, but the anti-advertising position is against-adverts not how to treat Google fairly; it's not about being "ethically aligned".

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#340

Post by Aaargh20318 » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:22 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #240

move-on-by wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem, its just convenient and free. People are not thinking about the costs to the end consumer - which in this case is our children. I don't really fault PBS, but I do fault the advertising companies for our general lack of privacy and control over our own data. I also fault the politicians for turning a blind eye to it. I hope Apple's new strategy to go after privacy pays off in a big way and more co…

I think most people do realize the cost, and are simply unconcerned with giving google such critical information as "kids watch sesame street".

But it's not 'kids watch sesame street' that you're sending to Google. What you're sending is:

* This phone is used by a kid

* $user has children (through association with other devices used at the same location and IP)

* $kid lives at $address (even when it doesn't know the location of $kid's phone, it knows the location of other devices using the same IP)

* $kid goes to $school (using location data from your or your SO's phone when dropping of your kid).

* etc. etc.

A lot of information can be inferred by knowing which other users are associated with a child.