> We believe that industry consultation is critical for changes to platform policies, as these updates have a far-reaching impact on the developer ecosystem.
Why should platform makers consult the advertising industry? It's not like the advertising industry consulted anybody before they started collecting every bit of data they could.
I mean, at one time you could build apps on Facebook that basically downloaded all of a user's data when they used it. The Obama campaign built an app that you could use to find your Facebook friends who hadn't been contacted by the campaign yet, so you could call them on the campaign's behalf. I heard of other political operations that built a "wish [famous person] happy birthday" app solely so they could grow their database.
Eventually Facebook closed all that access down and basically deprecated the concept of FB as an app platform entirely. That is a way more dramatic change than what Apple is doing to Facebook here.
This is a perfect example of the tradeoffs between openness and privacy.
If you give dangerous tools to users, you will have a few cool things and lots of tech-illiterate users screwed over.
Privacy advocates often preach solutions like the fediverse, without understanding that the fediverse is a privacy disaster for the tech illiterate. Cambridge Analytica wouldn't even be preventable on Mastodon, and it would have far worse consequences. Nevermind admins snooping on messages of their users, for i.e. romantic or financial reasons and poor people having to pay for their own services instead of seeing ads.
Yes, Facebook is horrible, but all currently known cures are worse than the disease.
I had an early fb app that let you track shows from a band you had been to and display this on your wall.
I was able to download tons of user data. I think the guide was to only take what you need and you were not supposed to store it longer than 48 hours.
But that was def an honor system thing and I’d be surprised if people were purging data back then. It was (still is?) the Wild West with consumer tracking.
This type of FB app was gone long before the CA scandal broke. There were some really cool ones available, but plainly not worth the tradeoff in retrospect.
A person associated with Cambridge Analytica used a researcher access and shared the data with the company (which he wasn't supposed to do). Researchers have (had?) more access than developers do.
Not true, they didn't have any special research access. There was an app called "This is your digital life" that was just a personality quiz that they used to scrape data. At this point facebook would let you access data about a users friends in detail when the user would authorize it (via these apps).
Also facebook killed this long before the Cambridge Analytics scandal broke. It also enabled some really cool features like their graph search where you could run queries like "people in X town that like football", but it also let you run very creepy queries to stalk people, which is why it got canned.
At one point, I wrote a script to crawl developer documentation at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and compare vs. the previous day so we could know ahead of time about breaking API changes.
So yes, it's funny to me that Facebook is calling out Apple for changing their platform when Facebook does it all the time.
Facebook's entire graph API significantly undermined what developers could do compared to the old API when it rolled out in 2011 or 2012. I was working for a social media advertising company at the time and it was certainly detrimental. They didn't consult with us, the industry using their API.
As a developer currently working for a faceless Corp that never seems to actually consult with it’s users (in a mostly unrelated industry) for any user impactful choice..I’m sorry.
I would say maybe you could take comfort in knowing that you essentially sponsored someone who wanted to help produce a world of clean, adaptable code, but the truth is I’m just another mid-rate dev producing immense value to an ironically named faceless org.
Anyway, no thanks for ads and surveillance tech but at the same time thanks for keeping me employed and thanks for keeping the viability of these pursuits going I think?
You used to be able to fetch public events (not for a user, not private events, just public events that you can easily browse to anonymously) and I had made a site that showed everything that was going on in my city. It was fantastic, you could see all concerts/gigs/plays for each day at a glance.
One day, Facebook just killed that endpoint for "privacy reasons". Anyone can still open a web browser and visit the event page, but accessing the data programmatically is now gone.
I guess they wanted to be the only event viewer, and since everyone only adds their events to Facebook and nowhere else, there is now no way to get event info.
You just need to look forward a few weeks to see a big one. The FaceBook and Instagram oEmbed changes that are going into effect at the end of October[1] are going to break all of the Facebook and Instagram embeds on WordPress sites (~1/3 of the internet) and the oEmbed functionality won't be available without a developer account[2].
It’s also a conflict of interest: when they’re interacting with that industry and advocating for things are they doing so on behalf of selling ads for Facebook or for the publishers on their platform?
It's the same way with software APIs... Creating new APIs is generally easy and doesn't need too much consultation compared to removing or changing APIs which would break behavior for all of your users. Apple created IDFA with the explicit intent of targeting ads and avoid using IMEI or MAC addresses. Now they are operating on it without consultation after having allowed a huge market to develop on it. Seems a pretty reasonable comment to make honestly.
Sure. As long as the flip side of that argument is equally appreciated - ad revenue pays for the apps, so less revenue will necessarily lead to fewer "free" apps and/or fewer "free" features and/or worse quality. It's a rational response of the intermediary (i.e. app makers) to the customers (i.e. advertisers) having less access to the product (i.e. us).
What's the incentive to spend money to constantly improve, fix bugs and update the features on every OS release? If you consider the entire development lifecycle, quality costs developer money every bit just as much as new features.
Is it wrong that I’ve consistently had better experiences with paid apps than advertising supported apps? Perhaps it has something to do with the alignment of incentives.
Anyway, I don’t begrudge anyone who has worked in the ad business, but I do wonder if folks might be happier optimizing for something of real lasting value in comparison to the gambling business.
Classified ads were the difference between profit and loss for a lot of local newspapers. Craigslist devastated that market in a matter of years.
Commercial ads were doing fine, and I bet there are a lot of local businesses who wish there was still a local newspaper they could advertise in. But it wasn't enough.
Some went bankrupt because one can't store a forest into a memory card. It's all about costs.
A physical newspaper costs a lot more to produce than a blog, and doesn't scale like one as well: even printing a handful of copies would cost a lot more than serving millions of people through a blog.
> The idea that privacy needs to be conceded in order for a healthy ad market to exist is false.
You can't in practice verify that clicks or impressions are real, as opposed to initiated by bots, without correlating them with real human behavior.
If you have an idea for how to verify a click or impression was real without also gathering some kind of data, go make ten billion dollars selling that technology.
That's why you don't pay per click or impression. The newspaper/magazine model has worked fine for 100 years.
I fully understand why advertising companies would be opposed to this, it's in direct opposition to their value prop. As a consumer, though, I don't want anyone who is not the entity I'm interacting with to know anything about me.
There is a reason why the news paper industry moved in the direction that they did. Or do you think they were forced to move this way? Measurement on the web can be more precise and allows to understand the impact of revenue, it's also vastly more distributed than magazines and TV channels of which there's only thousands or so for each while there are literally millions of websites. There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking. The W3C is working with Google on establishing what it would take to accomplish this stuff without sharing data, this isn't the approach apple took with its platform in plain disregard for all the apps that run on it, but than again at this point this shouldn't surprise anyone.
> There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking.
I think you give too little credit to the intelligence of ad buyers. They can figure out if a web ad is working the same way they can figure out if a billboard ad is working.
I've been working with tens of thousands of them for 15 years. To name one area: last click attribution being the primary way people measure web performance is a prime sign that they are at least confused with how performance works. Advertising measured with last click tends to focus towards people that have visited your site less than 4 hours earlier, hardly something that is incremental to the sales of a business, and basically all research and experiments that you can run point to this, but it doesn't change the fact ad buyers all believe last click is the one true way. And to show that it's not just me saying this: https://research.netflix.com/business-area/marketing-and-gro... .
I understand that they want more information, but they don't need it. Ask your clients how they evaluate the performance of offline ads. Those same analytical techniques work online as well.
I think super-precise attribution would actually kill the advertising industry. The uncertainty is what allows ad-buyers to purchase spots well below their value. The uncertainty is what leads to money being spread around and supporting the most things.
It's a little like insurance. If insurance companies could precisely target rates, you would end up paying basically exactly what your health care costs are and maybe a little more. Insurance works because of uncertainty and large pools of customers.
> You can't in practice verify that clicks or impressions are real, as opposed to initiated by bots, without correlating them with real human behavior.
In this case how does real-world advertising in magazines, public transport, TV, etc manages to have such a high price despite the targeting capabilities being orders of magnitude lower than online?
Maybe the problem with online ads isn't the targeting or lack thereof but that the well has been poisoned by allowing even the worst possible scum and the users reached their breaking point and learned to ignore them, while the higher quality in real-world advertising is enough to even keep people paying for advertising (in the form of buying magazines)?
> In this case how does real-world advertising in magazines, public transport, TV, etc manages to have such a high price despite the targeting capabilities being orders of magnitude lower than online?
Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world", just like some brands might maintain unprofitable flagship stores.
Another reason is "because they have to charge that much". Which means that if fewer companies are willing to pay that much, more classic media outlets go out of business, as they can not lower prices further.
Lastly, you can't accurately measure how inefficient these forms of advertising are, whereas online advertising makes it easy to see whether ads are a net loss or not.
> Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world"
Doesn't that show a problem with online advertising if it's considered so bad that companies are willing to pay huge premiums to show up somewhere else instead?
On Facebook, information that users voluntarily and explicitly provide is fair game for targeting IMHO. The rest should come from the content of the page.
Facebook has a pretty good idea where I am by looking at the data associated with my connection. I know they have that, but if I don't want them to use that for advertising, they shouldn't.
Does it not depend on context? For example, you don’t need to know anything about the user of a recipe website to know they are hungry and once they pick a recipe, some basic notion of what they are looking for.
On top of that, extremely course information can be gathered without tracking users. For example, you can probably get a country level ___location and maybe even language from the request the browser sends.
I can buy ads generically on a site, but what happens after the user clicks on the ad or just views the ad and then buys the product? How do you keep track of this when you can't measure the effect? The only way is to measure some form of before/after analysis of your conversions with or without the marketing campaigns... Too much noise to be able to do that on the web.
You don't need to know anything about a person to know that, at some point, they'll be hungry. So, if you're some company that happens to sell food nationally, you can just throw your ad at anybody. That's what I mean by "big generic brand".
However, if you sell, say, artisanal hot sauce, you'd pay more to target an affluent person that likes spicy food, rather than some random person that may be just be googling how to make macaroni and cheese.
It's my phone, not the developer's. I should absolutely have the right to disable this kind of tracking on my phone. If the advertisers/ developers want to track people, maybe they should start buying people phones or do what Google did and build an OS and give it away.
There are Android phones sold in the developing world at low price points where ads appear on home screen, notification bar etc. with tracking deep within OS.
Then, there are phones like Pixel where with recent versions you have control of what is shared and you need to authorize access(single/multiple use) for things like ___location. Like iOS, not much can be collected unless you give Google/app permission to.
If the app makers were merely showing an ad , even an intrusive one without selling out my information -- I will be able to tolerate that.
However when app developers include libraries from foursquare or facebook, what they are doing is violating the users' privacy and selling their information to third party aggregators who will apply data analytics to build a full predictive model of your behavior and then they will sell it to anybody who wants to spy on you. Do you remember Cambridge Analytica ?
FB has done plenty wrong but you can make the point without upping the hyperbole as well.
There is a danger of FB manipulating things on its own but they didn't sell the data to any third party including Cambridge Analytica, it was harvested because of poor API policy(your friend auth giving access to some of your details) which was fixed in the future. The behavioral profiles were built by Cambridge Analytica on its own by the data it stole.
Why would FB in any instance even sell your data? I would argue it is in FB's interest to keep the data for itself, not letting anyone have it and be the gatekeeper.
The right thing to argue is, whether you want FB/Tiktok itself to have the treasure trove of data or not, and whether you want to allow them to use that to do precise targeting.
I suppose in a way they are monetizing/selling the use of your data because they're collecting it and selling the aggregation of that data back to advertisers.
Sure, it's not a selling of the raw data record but with advertising and targeting an advertiser can get pretty close.
Yeah, that targeting bit is fine to argue and I tried to infer that with my comment as well.
I just have an issue with hyperboles like "sold individual user's behavioral profile to Cambridge Analytica" being thrown around in articles related to tech when in HN of all places, you can argue without resorting to that.
They had a bunch of blog posts about restricting APIs like this[1]. I think someone can look at the current APIs and see what related friends information they allow. The last time I used FB APIs was in 2012 and the last time I used FB was in 2014, so not up to date with them.
It won't prevent them to show ads. It will prevent them to show targeted ads. So your point is either invalid or rather "they won't be able to be datamining their potentials users to pay the bills" ?
Advertisers are willing to pay way more for targeted ads. If an app is relying on advertising revenue, the inability to target ads will directly cause the app to generate less revenue.
The solution here is to outlaw targeted advertising, so that marketing budgets can realign to appropriately pay for normal advertising again.
As it is, the efficacy of targeted advertising is a myth. Google claimed in a blog post that their own internal study showed over a 50% benefit in targeted advertising for publishers... but an independent, academic study showed a difference of about 4%.
(Google has suggested, of course, that their wildly different outcomes are because you know, Google has data nobody else has, and obviously Google would never manipulate it's exclusive access to all that data to make studies look like what is best for their business.)
Adtech giants need advertisers to believe they need targeted advertising, because targeted advertising relies on mass data collection only they are capable of getting. If people realized the necessity of using Google and Facebook's mass user data was... a complete lie... any old ad firm could compete with their businesses.
>Adtech giants need advertisers to believe they need targeted advertising, because targeted advertising relies on mass data collection only they are capable of getting. If people realized the necessity of using Google and Facebook's mass user data was... a complete lie... any old ad firm could compete with their businesses.
Targeted advertising is as old as advertising. Why do you have cloud companies advertising on the billboards in San Francisco, but not in Beatty, Nevada? Why do you have coupons? Why Cosmopolitan has different ads than Linux Format? Why NBA games have different ads than The Bachelor?
Why do companies spend more and more money with companies that do provide better targeted advertising? Do you really believe that P&G spends billions of dollars on advertising, without understanding which forms of it are effective?
There's a valid discussion to be had about scope, allowed sophistication of targeted advertising that should be allowed, and regulations about it, but claiming it doesn't work just shows lack understanding of the topic.
Targeting by placement and ___location are just proxy for user targeted ads, due to lack of better abilities. Gives you very broad targeting criteria - like San Francisco is likely to have people interested in cloud. Cosmopolitan is likely to have middle age women readers, etc. User-targeted advertising gives you much higher granularity, which makes ads campaigns more effective for advertisers.
Is privacy invading targeted advertising a concern and something that needs more debate? Yes. Can it be creepy and cause harm in some cases? Yes. Should world be driven by advertisers ROI? No. Are user-targeted ads ineffective? Hell no.
But also, just because something is concerning and bad for some aspects of the life (like privacy), it doesn't mean it should be wiped out of the floor, as cheaper and effective advertising does help to grow any capitalist economy. Trade-offs are needed (same as we don't ban oil, even tho it's bad for environment), and it'll become more regulated (either self-regulated by industry, or by governments), but it's not going to disappear.
>The solution here is to outlaw targeted advertising
Thanks, but no. As an end user, my preference goes as:
no advertising >>>>> targeted advertising >> untargeted advertising
And I am not just speaking hypothetically. Google has a switch in your account settings where you can flip a toggle to turn off all targeted Google advertising and make it un-targeted. I couldn't last more than a day with this and flipped the toggle back on.
While with targeted advertising, most ads were useless, they at least were somewhat relevant, and a few even piqued my interest. With untargeted advertising, I was getting absolute trash that was actively annoying me.
You're thinking too small. Targeted advertising deserves to die in a grease fire, but a proper solution is to universally make an individual's personal data their property and require companies to cough up compensation every time it is used in commercial form. Any attempt to sidestep the compensation must account as fraud.
Holding on to user data needs to be a painful liability. The cost of such micro-accounting alone should incentivise companies to keep hold of as little information as possible, so as not to incur excess processing costs. The aggregated cost of payment processing on top of that will provide a secondary cost vector and further discourage using such data. Combine with GDPR and CCPA like power to demand companies to divulge their full accounting details of your data, and all of a sudden the pain becomes real. Not to mention very expensive.
> it's my phone not the developers, not the advertisers, mine.
Are you willing to extend this argument to Apple as well? Do you also think that it is not Apple's phone, and that you should be able to do what you want with it, if you choose to?
Because right now Apple does not really agree with your opinion that it is your phone, that you can do what you want with.
People who buy an Apple device often do so in part because Apple does a better job with privacy. The fact that this makes life harder for advertisers is kind of the point.
Why should platform makers consult the advertising industry? It's not like the advertising industry consulted anybody before they started collecting every bit of data they could.