
Facebook isn’t happy about Apple’s upcoming ad tracking restrictions - elorant
https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/27/facebook-vs-apple-ad-tracking/
======
cheeze
... And nothing of value was lost.

If it's detremental to your business to not be able to track users on such a
granular level, it's a bad business.

I'm sure Facebook will survive here.

100% biased, can't stand that company.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
> If it's detremental to your business to not be able to track users on such a
> granular level, it's a bad business.

Except that Apple still allows tracking on this granular level, it's just that
now they have to explicitly ask users to allow this.

Says a lot about Facebook's (and others) business model if it only works when
the vast majority of users are mostly unaware of the amount of tracking they
do, but the minute you make these users aware of the tracking and ask for
their permission, the business model falls apart.

~~~
ghj
To be fair if you add an opt-in step to anything, it will kill that thing. No
moral judgement, just human laziness. If it doesn't kill it, it still becomes
something everyone loathes (e.g., how you need an extra click to accept
cookies on every site you use).

~~~
tmhrtly
I think in some situations if users see value in the opt-in then it can be ok.
E.g. your phone asking you if you're happy to share your location with an app.
I sure as hell want my mapping app to know where I am, but I also feel very
comforted that I still get a say in the process. The thing about this tracking
opt-in is that no user would ever want it because it's solely there to exploit
them. So in this case I think you're 100% right.

~~~
cortesoft
Wouldn't the value in this situation be "you get to use Facebook"? If they
didn't make money off their users, Facebook wouldn't exist.

Would you be ok if they did it that way? A warning that says "by using
Facebook, you are agreeing to be tracked", at which point the user could
either continue or uninstall the app?

~~~
maps7
I think the new changes will hurt facebook competitors more. Everyone knows
Facebook and it has a brand. They want to collect some info? Most people won't
care - they just want to use the app like they always have. They might think
twice with a new app that they don't know

~~~
tmhrtly
I hope it might have the effect that those newer apps instead choose to
innovate with their business models and pursue directions that don't require
the user to sacrifice their privacy.

------
aowerijwaerj
Facebook is 21st-century cigarettes. Thousands of brilliant scientists and
engineers testing and optimizing their product to be as addictive as possible.
No concern for the effects on their users or on society. The only concern is
making money. Just like with cigarettes, at first it was cool, then it became
mainstream, then the dangers became better known, then the CEO was ordered to
appear before Congress and gave a lot of misleading and empty responses, now
it's used primarily by laggards and poorly-educated demographics. I'll be glad
to see them go. Because one day they will go.

~~~
Dahoon
Too bad you had to ruin an otherwise good post with

>now it's used primarily by laggards and poorly-educated demographics

I dislike Facebook too (and don't use it) but the above statement is a clear
lie. Normal people are who use Facebook, like it or not.

~~~
marmaduke
I agree with this: closest family, well educated, use Facebook though I ask
them not to.

------
reaperducer
I think we have to get away from calling these things "ad tracking." They're
not tracking ads, they're tracking people, and their response to the ads.

If Facebook was a guy with a notepad and a trench coat doing what it does in
meatspace, you could get a restraining order against him.

~~~
switch11
yeah, and almost everyone would

You take a normal parent and tell them - This guy from Facebook is going to
follow your teenage daughter around high school, the mall, her room,
everywhere she goes, and keep a record of every single thing she does on the
computer

and they would be running for their guns or their lawyers

Online, Facebook does all that and most people don't even have a clue

~~~
the_snooze
What Facebook (and adtech writ large) does is sniff your farts trying to
figure out what you had for breakfast. If you shoo them away, they sniff your
friends' farts to indirectly infer that.

I'm sure the folks who work on this are proud of their accomplishments.

------
clement_b
This is a tsunami for ad tech. Facebook just being the tip of the iceberg
here.

Tracking or not tracking is not really the topic here. Rather, this is yet
another proof of how abusive Apple is. They claim killing IDFA is for the sake
of users' privacy, while they do track users and their behavior and feed them
sponsored search results on the App Store (via Apple Search Ads). This ability
is just too good to share!

Apple is giving 3 months notice to an entire industry, this is just not nice.
They do it for tracking this time, 'social' login next, and you name it. This
idea of doing business unilaterally will backfire at some point...

Regardless, the next 12 months are going to be as interesting as the rise of
Facebook Ads on mobile, the rise of re-targeting or SEM. Because the entire ad
tech stack is looking for alternatives and doing anything it can to remain
effective on iOS. Get ready for some good and some ugly! Looking forward to
seeing what Google will do with their own advertising ID on Android.

~~~
asadkn
Seems like they have to overcompensate for the PR to appear as the good guys
after all the PR damage they took lately. Nothing more, nothing less.
Perfunctory privacy efforts.

~~~
theklr
What damage? Outside of here and tech/gaming sites, the Apple v. Epic Games
slap fight is low on the zeitgeist, at least in the US. Outside of those
tribes, no one knew about the case, or cared enough to want to know when I
explained it to them.

------
cblconfederate
> Now Apple is going to slowly shut off the oxygen in order to take the value
> for themselves.

what happened was that developers left the facebook platform and all those
viral games consolidated into zynga .

Also , with targeted channels closed, ad money will have to flow to non-
targeted ads, which actually benefits small publishers who can sell a lot of
impressions. It's not like ad spending will stop

~~~
celestialcheese
Untargeted ads are worse for small publishers, not better. Avg cpms right now
for targeted ads are around $3-3.50. Untargeted, ~$.50 (Safari/Firefox CPMs).

What I think we'll see is ad spend will flow more to the walled gardens since
targeted ads still will be available, and perform significantly better than
untargeted.

Source: I own websites that make money with ads.

~~~
cblconfederate
if there are no targeted ads, cpms have no way to go but up

There is only so much inventory to sell in walled gardens, people don't spend
all their time on FB properties. And if apple makes it more difficult for FB
to target users, the line between targeted/untargeted gets blurry

------
pcurve
I wonder how long it will be before Apple gets into serious ad business
themselves.

~~~
rahoulb
Well, one side effect of this is developers will rely on App Store adverts to
promote their apps, whereas before Facebook ads were an effective way to
promote them. So indirectly, Apple will be gaining revenue from this move.

~~~
cblconfederate
It's probably their plan, though tbh the App Store discovery process is
atrocious. You re much more likely to find an app through google, and then you
have to type the exact full name of the app in the store to have a chance of
finding it

------
mike_n
I'm sure they have plenty of other data points to help them get a pretty good
idea of who the phone belongs to

------
nottorp
It just occured to me that we're looking at Facebook wrong.

Why do people come to FB? For the content that other people post. There would
be no eyeballs for the ads if the users didn't post content.

Shouldn't Facebook give _us_ a piece of that ad revenue then?

~~~
mk4
That sounds like youtube

~~~
nottorp
Oh, so there is a precedent :)

------
andrewstuart
I bet they're talking about how the heck they can own their own
platform/browser.

Facebook is too big to be under the thumb of the operating system and browser
vendors, who are possibly hostile towards Facebook's way of doing things.

Not an easy problem to solve.

~~~
lambdasquirrel
Apple's control over its app ecosystem is unsettling at times. The tactics
against Epic seem heavy-handed.

But then you have to remember how Facebook scraped the contacts list on
Android phones, when users installed the Android app. Ugh.

Maybe an ideal world is one where there's more than one app store for iOS, but
Apple still maintains control over the developer APIs. Apple bans plenty of
legit content that isn't Disney kiddie-ish enough for its tastes. Imagine if
the web were like that.

------
Razengan
Not a rhetoric question, I'm honestly curious:

Has there been any case where an entity who complained about Apple's
restrictions, turned out to genuinely be in the favor of users, instead of
just trying to make more money?

~~~
asd282892892
This is genuinely in favor of users and small business:
[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/14/facebook-says-apple-
refused-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/14/facebook-says-apple-refused-to-
waive-30percent-fee-on-new-feature.html) For example, some of my friends run a
dog care training business and they had to switch to using facebook streaming
to make money. This 30% fee is something they are quite unhappy about because
it runs in the thousands of dollars for their scenario.

~~~
reaperducer
I think the OP's definition of "user" is the end user, meaning the person who
sees the ad, not the company placing the ad.

 _they had to switch to using facebook streaming to make money_

This I find hard to believe. The could easily have streamed on another service
like YouTube, Zoom, or any of a dozen other solutions. Nobody "has" to switch
to Facebook streaming.

------
Traster
I think it’s really kind of funny that you’ve got all these companies decrying
Apple completely destroying their business with onerous conditions. Then you
have facebook chiming in. No Facebook. Not you.

~~~
cblconfederate
If facebook pulls its app though, and goes web-only it will be a big blow to
apples products. Users spend most of their time on those apps.

------
wdr1
This change is _good_ for Facebook. When it plays out that way they just don't
want to get blamed for it.

A lot of articles seem to think Facebook won't be able to monetize you
anymore. Far from the case. Within their apps -- the Facebook app, Instagram
-- where they make most of their profit, there won't be any change. They don't
need anything like IDFA because you're signed in.

What this will hurt is the ROI on non-Facebook apps. Publishers will get less
money & advertisers will see less return.

So where will those dollars start to shift to?

Facebook.

------
SergeAx
This may actually be good. For years, all the mobile app developers had motto
"iOS first", because iOS users are bringing more revenue per install. If ads
in iOS apps will underperform because of Apple keeping all the user's data to
itself, those money could flow to Android devices.

------
spacemanmatt
As this is about a terrible company suffering another terrible company, I
don't know who to cheer for.

------
ffggvv
so if epic wins their lawsuit, will facebook just make their own app store and
track as much as they want?

~~~
mcintyre1994
I don’t think Epic are asking to be able to add their own APIs to iOS so I
doubt it, unless Apple’s implementation of these permission requests is tied
to the App Store for some reason and disappears if the app is distributed some
other way.

------
imnothere__
Good to see that they're not happy, it's our time to be happy.

------
wintorez
Good!

------
mark_l_watson
Well, Facebook can go to h*ll with their complaints. There is a little
something called freedom: corporations like Apple have the right to make their
own business decisions as long as they don’t break laws. People have the right
to buy and use products that make it more difficult for Facebook to harvest
their digital data.

Facebook also has the right to run their business as they see fit, again, as
long as they don’t break any laws.

An entirely different conversation: as much as I like free markets and
capitalism, without governments enforcing laws that put some restraints on
capitalism, that take into account externalities/costs to society, then
capitalism and free markets will die.

------
duk
a bit off topic, how much time does your spouse spend on Facebook? I just
peeked at her iPhone time tracking thingy and it's 26 hours a week. That
sounds crazy to me. The scarier thing is that she doesn't see anything wrong
with it. But I can't say anything to her; I chose being happy than being
right. But then again not very happy either. Oh well.

~~~
lukevp
Don’t know you so take this with a grain of salt, but personally if I could
not discuss how we spend that much of our time with my spouse, I would feel
that we had a fundamental problem with the way we communicate. You should also
be talking about how you are not that happy. Maybe it is related to other
things left unsaid.

That is quite a deal of time that you all are choosing as a couple to spend on
FB instead of in person.

For my spouse and I, we quit FB a few years ago (for similar reasons -
mindlessly scrolling, fomo and jealous feelings about others, watching
everyone’s highlight reel instead of real life.) We did the same with IG and
Reddit. Now I read HN and she IGs/YouTubes some for her business, and we spend
the rest of our time away from social media, playing games, making art,
reading, working, etc.

~~~
duk
Thanks for the input. It makes sense.

------
mr__y
Maybe this will encourage switching to context-based ads. If I'm reading blog
post about Rust, I might be interested in buying books or online training in
Rust. Or, if I'm watching a video on how to take care of kitten, food or
vaccination for kitten might be of interest for me. Nobody needs to track all
my activity to guess that.

~~~
reaperducer
_If I 'm reading blog post about Rust, I might be interested in buying books
or online training in Rust_

I have been repeatedly assured by ad tech experts on HN that Facebook (and
Google's) advertisements which are custom-tailored to my tabulated interests
are far superior to the ads I would get through traditional context
advertising.

You can tell by all the ads I see on Facebook for feminine hygiene products
for the lady parts I don't have, the concert ads for bands I don't like, and
the restaurant ads for cities where I don't live in places I've never been.

Life is so much better with the ad tech algorithms in charge.

~~~
mr__y
>advertisements which are custom-tailored to my tabulated interests are far
superior to the ads I would get through traditional context advertising.

actually my post is not arguing with that, however facing the reality where
interest tracking/profiling will become harder or impossible good old context-
based ads might at some point become better alternative. Not because they're
inherently more efficient but because, with changes like that, interest
tracking might become infisible or too resource consuming

