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Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

economist.com

391–400 of 579 posts

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They killed it because it didn’t work on mobile.

Then they lacked the imagination. The Facebook app would have become a web browser where Facebook controls user auth, contacts and then payments. Big $$$

By 2009, Apple and Amazon already had more credit cards on file than any other company in the US if not the world. In Apple’s case because of iTunes, before the App Store and Amazon because Amazon. Why would you use FB for payments when you were probably either shopping on Amazon, Apple or EBay using PayPal?

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People confuse the arguments made out of political expediency for political gospel. Even though many points made about the constitution were rooted in political theory, and make good sense even today, that doesn’t change the fact that the people involved were politicians who were looking to make the best deal possible within the context of a rapidly failing state under the articles of confederation.

See also - slaves being counted as 3/5ths of a person…

The irony is that always gets brought up as though it was actually meant to represent the value of the slave’s humanity.

The large slaveholding states actually wanted 5/5ths whereas states will small slave populations wanted 0/5ths. Slaves couldn’t vote, their interests were ancillary to the whole discussion. The compromise was about pure political power for those that dominated them.

The repeal of the 3/5ths clause along with the subsequent legal restrictions and terrorism against the black population of the south that followed, gave the south more power, and subsequently made it harder to dislodge Jim Crow.

But your point is still very valid. Somehow people are comfortable compartmentalizing the notion that the constitution is/was perfect, except for that one part that somehow doesn’t count and was “inevitably doomed” anyways.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#393

There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years. I used to work at a publisher where 80% of their website traffic came from Facebook. They haven't seen audience growth in years and their audience is skewing older and older, which is bad for their advertising business Businesses like that are going to get steadily squeezed both by Facebook's d…

Yeah publishers like BuzzFeed are in deep trouble, as less ppl are discovering content on FB

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#394
post #10

> But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked. It seems most do not: a study in December by AppsFlyer, an ad-tech company, suggested that 54% of Apple users who saw the prompt opted out. Hard to believe that nearly half of all people is ok with being tracked...

Occams Razor: very few ppl actually care and just press a random choice so they can move forward and use the app.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#395
post #223

Facebook's revenue up 35% year over year: -26% (P/E ~16) Amazon's revenue up 15% year over year: +12% (P/E 60+) I don't get the stock market. Facebook can simply turn on billions in revenue whenever they want still with WhatsApp, which has north of 2 billion MAU, and has not been monetized at all yet. Facebook is a reverse meme stock.

> I don't get the stock market. There's nothing to get, it's just gambling for rich people.

This. The market is just a bunch of random ppl and robots who are have different motivations and opinions. Some are long term oriented, some just wanna make a quick buck. It’s just a chaotic casino.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#396
post #63

As a rough datapoint, I run a consumer targeted e-commerce site. We ran a campaign before Christmas were we were selling a new product that was only marketed on Facebook, we are certain that (almost) all customers found it though that Facebook campaign. Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. This then meant that Facebooks estimated CPA was effectively…

I cant upvote you enough. This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.

Ads are evil. To work, they play upon human insecurity. In many cases, they create desires or perceived needs that weren't there before, making them wasteful in addition to scammy/conniving. Because they're successfully evil - the tricks work - they often leave a residue on people: beyond just never being able to forget a jingle from a cereal ad you heard when you were 8, a lifetime of very frequent exposure to advertising trains us to suspend our criticality, or hinders us from developing it in the first place. So it leaves people dumber, too, more pliable and dependent. Hilarious in a country like the US, whose national mythos is so obsessive about personal liberty and rugged self-reliance.

We have a family friend, retired now, who had a successful career in marketing and strategy in multi-billion dollar transnational companies. I once asked (probably naively) why [maker of extremely popular product at the time] ran so little advertising. The friend told me "they have a good product. They don't need to spend money haranguing people into buying it or spreading the word about because it's actually good. Word of mouth is free".

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#397
post #63

As a rough datapoint, I run a consumer targeted e-commerce site. We ran a campaign before Christmas were we were selling a new product that was only marketed on Facebook, we are certain that (almost) all customers found it though that Facebook campaign. Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. This then meant that Facebooks estimated CPA was effectively…

I cant upvote you enough. This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.

The real world story is that marketing in one channel is a little worse now... I don't feel like that justifies the existence of data-mining to show ads.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#398
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant upvote you enough. This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.

Ads are evil. To work, they play upon human insecurity. In many cases, they create desires or perceived needs that weren't there before, making them wasteful in addition to scammy/conniving. Because they're successfully evil - the tricks work - they often leave a residue on people: beyond just never being able to forget a jingle from a cereal ad you heard when you were 8, a lifetime of very frequent exposure to adver…

I‘m sorry “they often leave a residue on people”?

At least half of your polemic needs citations.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they lacked the imagination. The Facebook app would have become a web browser where Facebook controls user auth, contacts and then payments. Big $$$

By 2009, Apple and Amazon already had more credit cards on file than any other company in the US if not the world. In Apple’s case because of iTunes, before the App Store and Amazon because Amazon. Why would you use FB for payments when you were probably either shopping on Amazon, Apple or EBay using PayPal?

In this path, people would be interacting with games/content in Facebook "apps" that are effectively mobile web pages. Facebook would have control inside their garden.

As soon as any Facebook app convinced a user to pay, all other facebook apps would have a seamless checkout.

Getting user financials isn't easy but we've seen the rise of Venmo, Robinhood, and Neobanks since then so it's doable.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this in the thread but I have to say that I disagree a bit. I'm certainly glad Apple gave users a choice, but you have to consider "the tyranny of the default" which is a great phrase I think. Most people will simply use the default option, so Apple's choice of default says something.

Right and the previous default was to allow all tracking.

Which never should have been the default.

I don't want to be included in something that I never asked to be part of, and then have to put in the effort to get out.

This is one of the things that is so upsetting: most of the industry puts it on the consumer to get out rather than come in. I often look at the list of third-parties when a website says I can opt out. There are often over 300 third parties that I would have to opt out of one at a time.

That's just plain abusive.

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