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Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

economist.com

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

#401

Post by kazen44 »

pessimizer wrote: post #280
skizm wrote: 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.

WhatsApp has competitors that in Telegram/Signal etc. that are financially stable, offer more features and security, and with the mood of the government right now they would absolutely be prevented from purchasing. They would destroy WhatsApp in weeks if they did that. Amazon is fine and doesn't need to grow. Facebook is in danger and growth was already priced in. Now it's not.

heck, soms European politicians are calling for a split of WhatsApp from Facebook because Facebook did not honor their end of the deal when they bought WhatsApp.

fb hilariously claims that this would be impossible, which is kind of proving they didn't hold up their end of the bargain.

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

#402

Post by stjohnswarts »

Looks like I jumped on the iPhone bandwagon just in time to cost facebook some money! (got my iphone ~1.5 yrs ago). What I don't get is why iphone needs to scan your phone at all. I mean they literally have a treasure trove of information of most of their users, why do they need to sell that? Why don't they just act use the megatons of info they already have on you from scanning your page and your messages to other users? They should be rolling in ad revenue without needing to spy on data on phones.

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

#403

Post by FearlessNebula »

tiborsaas wrote: post #388
FearlessNebula wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess im talking about something else. You’re talking about being shown ads that are related to your interests which is fine with me. I’m talking about Facebook radicalizing people and manipulating their viewpoints and selling them on things they otherwise would have never wanted in a million years if they hadn’t used Facebook. I’m not talking “Facebook showed me a cool pen and I like to collect fountain pens so I…

If you can be manipulated by ads to be a terrorist I guess you have greater problems than tracking. In this case I'd say it's better for the public if these people are keep getting tracked.

Not sure where you grabbed terrorism from…

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

#405

Post by galangalalgol »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #385
ksec wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well no one's arguing that targeted ads are not effective. Oh they sure were. All ads are useless. Targeted ads are evil. And Ads should not be targeted were the HN's view, which later became there shouldn't even be any ads, it should all be subscription. That is 2018/19. By 20/21 HN were even targeting those who were working inside the online Ad industry. And this is seen across the tens of thousands of comments. (…

> All ads are useless I don't think I've ever seen someone say this. People hate that they make the internet impossible to use. I have a family friend that runs a small business and all of the revenue comes from ads on the websites they run. I hate using their website because of the ads. Pop-up that takes up the whole screen asking to subscribe, auto-play video ad, content moving as ads get loaded slowly. It's all ju…

Ublock origin and pihole make the internet a more pleasant experience for me. It has been suggested that I should feel some nagging voice causing guilt that I do not support the sites and apps I use that depend on ad revenue. Perhaps there should be, but there is not. Apple's position on this is just responding to demand. When wifi access points start offering built in enabled pihole by default those access points will sell well. Throw in a vpn to pipe your phone through it from wherever that is easy to use/automatic and "ads are useless" may become truth.

Edit: it would likely just cause a shift to self hosted ads, which is a dramatic improvement imo.

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

#406

Post by simpss »

alanlammiman wrote: post #309

The problem isn't just Apple's action on IDFA. It's that Facebook seems to be so poorly managed on some fronts that its reactions, rather than mitigating problems, has caused further harm. For example - in a rushed effort to get their privacy issues in order, they are deactivating the live facebook integrations of customers based on cursory/mistaken/possibly machine-based readings of their privacy policies. They did…

> we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales

well. if your goal isn't tracking individuals, then why are you attaching unique ID's (in cookies) to track individuals on your website?

And I'm not talking about third-party cookies disguised as first-party.

logglytrackingsession (lifetime: session)

notion_experiment_device_id (lifetime: 1 year)

Both are unique to a specific user and are used to identify a single individual. The first one is short-lived, but obviously meant for tracking and the second one can be used for tracking, identifies a single individual and is long-lived.

edit: turning off my adblocker, some more appear.

_ga, _ga_4GMCF7E1GC, intercom-id-gpfdrxfd, notion_browser_id, amp_af43d4

none of these are listed or explained in your privacy policy.[1]

[1] - https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Sticky-Privacy-Policy-...

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

#407

Post by OzCrimson »

missedthecue wrote: post #158
Nextgrid wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good riddance? People will keep finding & buying things they need. If nobody’s buying anything from these businesses without invasive advertising & tracking then maybe whatever goods they were selling aren’t actually necessary? Of course there is nuance and edge cases to this, but in general I wouldn’t be surprised if society and the planet was better off once we stop producing useless garbage.

I don't know... I've seen some interesting products thanks to Facebook that I wouldn't have otherwise. Life would be pretty boring if we all only bought what we need.

The question is more about the trade-off.

1. I see an ad for some really nice pens. COOL! 2. I go to a website that allows me to opt out of tracking but I'd have to opt out of their 300 affiliates one at a time. 3. The privacy policies that state: we do not honor do-not-track signals because we don't know if it was the user or a browser default.

For me: not worth the tradeoff.

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

#408

Post by bryan_w »

tehjoker wrote: post #370
ksec wrote: 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 synthesize desire and cause people to be unhappy when the ads work. They encourage expending money that could have been saved, or taking on debt. They also create a funding situation where media producers are beholden to corporations. The implementation of ads is also wildly invasive, creepy, and propagandistic. However, focusing on implementation allows ad salesmen to lessen the sharpness of the criticism by sup…

Ads aren't inherently trying to make people unhappy (at least the good ones). Ads in the best case, are just informing a person about the existence of a thing. There have been many ads that I've found useful, not because of some evil mind games, but rather because i didn't know of a company providing such a service.

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with expending money for things that are valuable. That kinda seems like the whole point of money.

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

#409

Post by nonameiguess »

samwillis wrote: post #9

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…

You attribute 0% of purchases to repeat loyal customers who just check in on what you're selling every now and again without needing to be reminded by a marketing campaign?
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