Apple ATT (iOS 14.5, April 2021). 15-25% opt-in.
-$10B Meta revenue in 2022 (CFO David Wehner)
It's so rare that I see an ad that is targeted to me at all so what gives? Am I really so unmarketable to? It's not like i don't buy cameras, food, clothes, video games, and all sorts of things. But all i see is retargeted ads for stuff I already bought.
The question regarding ads is how well targeted campaigns are being paid for. But the ad space is relatively harmless.
It becomes relevant when not talking about ads, but surpression of citizens by state actors. If the data is being used to identified potential targets for some measures. These measures can involve drawing election districts, deciding where to build the sewage plant or library or where search for people to deport and how to influence them in political campaigns. Some margin of error has varying impact there, but it can help a lot to reduce manual selection by a lot.
IMO, nothing exposes the folly behind targeted ads as much as this.
It's infuriating.
We reviewed the ad you reported and found that it goes against
our Advertising Standards. We let the advertiser know that we
removed the ad, but not who reported it.
Thank you for letting us know. Reports like yours help us to
improve the integrity and relevance of advertising on Facebook.
Facebook provides users with virtual crack. User pays for the high with attention. This attention is sold off to the highest bidder.
The contents of the ad is irrelevant, the data harvested is used to make the crack ever more potent.
Why would they need to invest such insane amounts of money to acquire such tech (video cameras, lol, on street lamps) when they had a thriving population of curtain twitchers and snitches?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov
in Russia writing that he thought there were 30 people in the house across the street from him.
Nevertheless, the truth of whether they actually had video cameras on streetlamps is irrelevant to the point I was making. The point is that there was a time when media coverage depicted the notion of it happening as abhorrent.
If customers cared, the additional income from being someone who didn't surveil could outstrip the income stream from surveilling.
Most folks do care, they just don't understand. When you stop with the high level topics like "surveillance" and start in on the practical impacts like:
- They charge you more if they know you want something (ex - dynamic pricing).
- They try to get you addicted (gambling, vapes, social media)
- They feed you lies (curated social bubbles)
- They manipulate elections (targeted campaigns and ads, targeted social policies)
Etc... most people do actually care, they just struggle to relate the words the industry uses with the real impacts.
Folks tend to think of privacy like someone opening the bathroom door on them (and this gets immediate pushback... see all the articles about the Roomba cameras). But the surveillance we're under now is more subtle and insidious, less visceral. Harder for folks to understand without concrete impacts.
----
The reason so many tech people care is because lots of them get to watch the sausage being made, and they understand.
> exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.
Are they going to the toilet more often this week? Are they booking a flight for a funeral? Do they watch midget porn? Are they interested in science experiments that go boom? Did they just get a promotion at work? Did their car just fail the yearly inspection? Are they going on vacation and leaving the house empty for a week? Does their child have ADHD? Did their catalytic converter just get stolen? Is their phone model no longer receiving security updates? Is their child bullied at school? Did they have an abortion? Are they contemplating bankruptcy? Did they just start using a CPAP machine? Did they vote for an independent candidate? Do they listen to the local mosque's podcast? Do they smoke? Are they closet homosexual? Are they being sued? Did their dog just suffer liver failure? Did they put their teenage daughter's child up for adoption?
These are all things that your phone knows about you, which could lead to negative consequences if exposed - ranging from embarrasment to blackmail, higher prices to actual denial of services, scrutiny to arrest. Everyone has something to hide.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757509
There are many exceptions and initiatives like truly altruistic OSS projects which aim to empower users. But by and large what we have ended up with is a divide between the tech-empowered and in-the-knows (surveillance etc.) contrasted with people who just want to access their photos on their phone and their computer.
The everyman being enlightened to all the abstract BS in IT is untenable. But programmers aren’t stepping up to collectively protect all of us.
It is more pernicious. Those in the state who want to surveil will enlist those who want the obscene revenue from pervasive advertising. Working together, their lawyers will claim that "you never had any privacy or freedom anyway, so stop wriggling."
Have you bought a domain before or anything online before?
> Never had an ad on the site.
You know there are other ways of people making money without doing ads right?
There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?
This predates websites, it's called commerce.
Pick any medium, humans will always find a way to transact with one another, it's been like this for thousands of years.
I don't understand why you think websites and the internet should be exempt from this?
> > There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?
Forget websites.
How are you going to pay the rent, or put food on the table for your children if you don't want to generate money?
Unless you're retired with savings (some on HN are), have an inheritance windfall or are living on government money, then you can do things that don't need an income.
Otherwise you need to generate an income.
Should everyone be in a loss when they run a website?
Ads and surveillance are not inseparable. We don't need to accept surveillance as the price for a functional internet.
Of whom?
Google and Meta are gigantic surveillance companies. It's their imperative that you keep allowing it. On top of that, most state actors love the idea of more surveillance.
Then you have huge portions of the population that simply don't care or don't know better and aren't going to start directly paying for anything.
> but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web
This isn't a forum of marketers, this is a forum of engineers and makers. So... how do we make the next version of the internet fully private and prevent it from becoming overly centralized. How do we prevent companies like Google dictating the design with their browser dominance (chromium, not just Chrome)?
We definitely have some solutions to some of these problems but also need to work on others. We can probably build something that is fully encrypted and peer to peer (example projects exist!) but maintaining decentralization is still an unsolved problem. There's also issues like how we get people to buy in. Most of the population doesn't understand the nuance but does recognize there is a problem. Hell, even more informed places like HN will bicker on about the problems in certain software yet not acknowledge that there exists no perfect solution[0]. We just end up arguing and nothing gets solved, things just stay the same. That's the absolute worst part! People that want the same things end up becoming divided simply because we're really bad at listening to one another[1].
I'm sure it'll continue to be a cat and mouse game, but it also feels like many have given up. I'm exhausted too. But I'm still angry and annoyed. I'm tired and exhausted of being so tired and exhausted. To constantly be dealing with dark patterns. To constantly have things that should take 30 seconds take 30 minutes because of absolutely unnecessary (and often intentional) roadblocks. I'm tired of everyone trying to move so fast that it makes everything move so slow. I don't know how we got to a place where we're just thickening the jell-o we're trying to run through. How every little shortcut we take just makes the jell-o thicker and we pat ourselves on the back.
As we advance as a society the problems we have to solve only become more nuanced and complex, yet for some reason we've come to believe the they are simpler and easier to solve. We may have more powerful tools at hand, but a better tool doesn't make the problem you're trying to solve any less complex, it only can enable solving it or make some parts easier. The complexity is still in the problem and if we abstract it away too much then we only make things worse. IDK but somehow we've come to believe there are no such things as experts, and that we're all experts in everything. This wasn't possible in the past and our world is only more complicated, not less.
[0] I mentioned chromium so I'll use Firefox vs Chromium as an example. Every time the comparison is brought up people say how Chromium is "more complete" while ignoring how "complete" is predominantly defined by Google. The reason they have this power is browser dominance. Can you use de-googled Chromium? I'm personally unconvinced. You might be able to use something which takes out all (known) trackers, but not a Chromium that is void of Google's influence nor a Chromium that doesn't perpetuate Google dominance. But does that mean Firefox is "better"? It all depends on how you define that, and that's where the conversation gets lost. There's no truthful answer to this question and it is all extremely complicated and nuanced. There's never going to be a browser that checks all the boxes. We must give some things up in the pursuit of other things. Arguing the way we currently do is absolutely nonsensical.
[1] And by that, of course, I mean I'm a perfect listener and "you're" the problem. There's no other way to interpret me, my words are absolutely and unambiguously clear. Of course.
It's evident proof that information is power.
- C.S. Lewis
What a contrast to modern websites which require all sorts of weird clicking gymnastics to disable similar tracking.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/11/14/apples-4b-ad-busi...
WhatsApp pulls a similar trick on Android. It's E2E encrypted, but by default backups (done to Google Drive) are not. I think most users never enable encrypted backups.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a deal with law enforcement, where Apple and Meta can do and advertise E2E chats, but the defaults (which most users do not change) are such that law enforcement can still access them. But yeah, Apple and Google were part of PRISM too, so no big surprise I guess?
If you truly care about privacy, either completely disable iCloud backups or get a GrapheneOS phone. Also use Signal, because they exclude themselves from phone backups by default. So either chats are not backed up or they are backed up through Signal's own E2E backup service.
I frankly don’t care if the App Store has advertisements. I would care if my data is (1) available to Apple to read by virtue of not being e2e encrypted, and (2) used to train models and target those advertisements.
Here we go:
Apple fined $8.5M for illegally collecting iPhone owners' data for ads (gizmodo.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected (aalto.fi)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657
Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them (lapcatsoftware.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588
Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952
Apple memory holed its broken promise for an OCSP opt-out (lapcatsoftware.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41184153
Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS (therecord.media) [but Apple still collects a lot!]
There seems to be a common misconception that this blocks trackers, which is not the case. Use a DNS-based ad/tracker blocker and watch the logs and you'll see that many apps happily track you. As far as I understand, ATT blocks is cross-app/website tracking. If you deny, the app does not get access to the Identifier for Advertisers, meaning that tracking services cannot use a single identifier that is used across apps. While this initially had a large financial impact (see the article), trackers have probably developed other ways to correlate data from apps/websites now.
The real solution would be for Apple/Google to offer an option to completely disable in-app trackers and if an app would violate it, boot them from the App Store.
Of course, they would never do that because they make a lot of money from targeted advertising with their own ad networks, so either they would have to block themselves or get in hot water with regulators.
Put differently, Apple and Google are not your friend here.
I simply meant that the unique ID can't be used to track me anymore, at least across different third party application companies. I would edit my comment but it is too late now.
Regardless, because of such things I'm guessing the only ways to disable such tracking in the foreseeable future will still be 3rd party non-affiliated DNS/extensions or browsers such as Brave and Safari (to some extent).
Disclosure: I worked on Privacy Sandbox.
The problem wasn't "Google can't remove third-party cookies", he problem is "too much power in the hands of Google" and "conflicts of interest". From the link you posted below:
--- start quote ---
The investigation concerns Google’s proposals to remove third-party cookies (TPCs) on Chrome and replace TPCs functionality with a range of ‘Privacy Sandbox’ tools, while transferring key functionality to Chrome.
The CMA is particularly interested to hear any views on whether the proposed commitments are sufficient to address the CMA’s competition concerns regarding:
- unequal access to the functionality associated with user tracking
- self-preferencing Google’s own ad tech providers and owned and operated ad inventory
- imposition of unfair terms on Chrome’s web users
--- end quote ---
Spin off your surveillance tech, and there will be no problem. Oh wait...
Instead of the default opt-in hidden in the terms and conditions nobody reads.
On top of that it literally defines opt-out as the default state
As for browsers, imagine if world's largest advertising and tracking company that incidentally builds world's dominant browser and dominates all web standards would implement this as a browser switch instead of inventing new ways of tricking you into surveillance? https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 and https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923
Most sites dont even need those popups, but its easier to just shove one on your site than try to understand the specific situations which do need it.
I think unless you run stock mullvad/Tor browser, you're leaking who you are. Sad but true. I wish canvas and webgl fingerprinting were disabled/crippled by default.
I get that this is Google's business, but perhaps a large amount of their 'business' is actually from the government system (directly or indirectly) - they merely have to pretend to be running an advertising business.
I'm saying that the whole point of advertising was surveillance from the beginning.
It's whether or not warrantless searches are admissible; and they generally arent.
Warrant processes and issuance should not be secret nor generic enough to allow for "blanket" hoovering of Personally Identifiable Information.
What is really needed is a hard fork of major browsers by a grass roots community to advance HTML standards to include partial template rendering solutions without the reliance on Javascript.
Of course this is a startup forum so the response is just going to be wittled down to observations about economic value. However if users start to change/fight then the economics will too.
It doesn't take serious money. It takes a constant stream of "sub-serious" money, stable for a long time.
A large city could pay for that project. It doesn't take a group of nations, what it takes is non-standard politics.
Surveillance implies things about bith intended usage and actual usage, etc. that -- simply put -- do not need to hold when you're tracking something. If the argument is genuinely that cookies have genuinely been used to place us under surveillance rather than mere tracking -- I have nothing inherently against it, but you need to support it with evidence. Simply pointing to the fact that they track some fact or metric that indirectly relates to you is not sufficient evidence of that.
And to be clear, I'm not saying I like tracking or we should be fine with it. I hate it too. But it's also a turnoff seeing people smearing one thing as another, and I don't think it's a great strategy to help win support for your cause.
Buddy, that's exactly how they are blowing people up with drones these days
And... your point is what? Tracking can't be used to kill people? Anything that kills people is by definition "surveillance"?
Hell, I was shopping for furniture yesterday, and I swear all the popups even with ad blockers were there to prevent me from buying things. It doesn’t seem to be helpful for the stated goal.
There are many imaginary arguments about harm in the article, with precisely zero actual examples or cases. Data brokers, buy data, stalk somebody. Can you share at least something? No, it's all just hand waving. Because none of these people can offer any. The fact that the author still thinks Cambridge Analytica meant something says a lot as well. This was a scandal out of nothing.
I, for one, am extremely grateful that, as I was growing up with not much money, I was still able to access more or less the same Internet as people in the US. I don't care about a black-box algorithm looking at my habits to figure out that I love backpacks and microbrand watches, especially if it enables free platforms for me.
Stasi didn't watch you to sell your crap online, you know. They had much worse motives.
If anything, we're now going backward because of the enormous marginal costs of inference. With AI, people aren't on the same page (even a $20 subscription is a lot of money in many countries).
Not really a hypothetical - look at China and Russia, or Saudi Arabia [1]. I'll let others make the case to add the US and European countries to that list - not because I don't believe they belong on the list, but just because I'm too lazy to meet the higher bar of evidence that goes with going against groupthink.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter#...