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Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

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511–520 of 579 posts

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

#511

FB is one of the most developer hostile platforms that I've worked with. For example, their API tokens expire in 60 days, so users of automated reporting tools are constantly having to re-grant. Why? No good reason. And the documentation is garbage. FB can't blame Apple or anyone else for those failings. They should fix the things that are under their own control.

FB has been making their API increasingly useless for a decade now. They don't want you building integrations, they want you in their walled garden using their tools.

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

#512
post #48

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…

Really what you're saying is that there's a whole ecosystem of businesses that depend on unavoidable surveillance. All Apple have done is allow users to say no. They haven't even stopped anyone opting into surveillance if they want to. It just turns out that, when given the choice, people don't like being snooped on.

Stalking!

Snooping is a one off or occassional thing whereas continual obsessive profile building is actually stalking.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I don't earn money to watch it sit in the bank. If there's something fun out there that I might like to buy, show it to me!

This mindset is so weird to me. I can't imagine just wanting to buy things for the sake of buying things. I generally only buy things because I have problems I recognize and want to solve. And the more heavily advertised a solution to one of my problems is, the more I inherently distrust it to actually be a quality lasting product/service instead of something that's just desperately trying to program me that it's act…

When I die, I can’t take my money with me. Gotta do something with it.

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

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Word-of-mouth exists True. However in this case we are confident, based on our own internal tracking and metrics, that this is correct.

>True. However in this case we are confident, based on our own internal tracking and metrics, that this is correct. I'm really curious what you sell now. Can you tell us? If not, can the rest of HN create fun speculations?

Check his profile, he sells posters.

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

#515

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 believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS

Is that even legal? With AI, you can never concretely prove anything, so you then have Facebook literally making up numbers it pinky swears are legit and billing you accordingly (semi-directly because while you're not paying per click, the landing page analytics are also used to weed out robo clicks and other fraud that you shouldn't be billed for).

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

#516
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>would have become a web browser Not on iOS where that sort of thing is prohibited. Sure they could put a skin over safari, but apple would have banned the entire FB app as soon as they found a developer's app they didn't like.

Apple would have lost the mainstream user back then. Now they have power over facebook

That’s the same thing Adobe thought when Flash wouldn’t work in the iPhone.

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. I definitely think it is content (I wouldn’t draw a distinction between origin), but I can see how you have a different interpretation. When you use Instagram do you see ads or posts from people who aren’t your friends or family members? I’ve never used it so I’m not sure how the algorithms work. Personally if someone is my friend and has something worth sharing they’ll tell me about it directly or send me a p…

Ads yes, usually from random B2C companies, but I adblock so I don't see any. People who aren't your friends, no, you only see those who you follow. I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way. It's also somewhat…

> It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something.

Again just my perspective but I don’t see value in broadcasting experience to a wide audience. I would view that as “content”. I don’t think it has any positive qualities. The RSS feed is a good way of thinking about it, but I say just don’t post and who cares about your trip ya know? If you don’t care to tell someone in person or over a phone call or some other directed means I think you don’t need to share anything. Again just my perspective on that. Which is why I’ve really only ever used Twitter to complain into the void from time to time.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>would have become a web browser Not on iOS where that sort of thing is prohibited. Sure they could put a skin over safari, but apple would have banned the entire FB app as soon as they found a developer's app they didn't like.

I always wondered: why is Apple allowing WeChat to exist? Their mini apps seem in direct competition with the app store. Is this a China political thing? Are they worried about losing all access to the market there? It seems clear Apple is not applying their own rules consistently. If that's the case, wouldn't there also be anti-trust implications here?

I can bet if Apple banned WeChat, most people in China would switch to Android. Apple doesn't apply the same privacy rule in all countries as well. It's all about business, never about consistency.

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

#519
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

55% of all web traffic worldwide comes from mobile. https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-... And considering that most people spend 8 hours a day at work, how much personal usage on the web comes from the desktop? How many younger people are using computers for personal use - especially if it a shared family computer. Heck I am a software developer and my personal computer is just sitting in a…

So you do no personal development on a desktop? Do you use your work's equipment? Are you using your phone? I have three desktops on the go all day. Three keyboards in front of me and three mice. I run Windows 7, 10 and ubuntu and another ubuntu under windows 10. Trading that in for my mobile is very limiting.

I develop to trade labor for money. The last thing I want to do when I get off work is more computer work.

If I’m just doing a hobby project proof of concept to learn a new for me technology, I would do that on my work computer. We have a very liberal open source process where we can open source a project under:

https://github.com/aws-samples

That only requires going through a simple process. That also means I have unlimited admin access to multiple dev AWS accounts using our internal tool that we can’t name but almost everyone knows about.

If/when I leave, I can just fork it and continue to work on it if no one else is interested in maintaining it. Otherwise, submit a pull request.

Any outside work I would do would be considered “consulting” - the same thing I do on my $DayJob. That would clearly be a conflict of interest.

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