[dhnajsjdnd]

One can just as easily say “Apple doesn’t care about the users, they’re just trying to make money selling phones and getting a bigger cut of transactions that happen on the phone”. These sorts of statements are somewhat true, but ultimately not relevant to law or public policy. In reality you’d find that companies are composed of individuals with a diverse range of motivations.

If you find yourself unable to contemplate that the thousands of people at company X as something other than a unified blob of evil, it might be a useful exercise to seek other perspectives and practice some empathy. It’ll make the world easier to understand.

[zepto]

‘One can just as easily say “Apple doesn’t care about the users, they’re just trying to make money selling phones and getting a bigger cut of transactions that happen on the phone”.’

Yes one can, and one can make a case for that based on the aggregate of the companies behavior and statements of their executives.

If you don’t look at the actual companies, it’s easy to make a false equivalence like this.

In this case actually looking at Facebook’s behavior, incentive structure, and the statements of its executives support the position I have taken.

[dhnajsjdnd]

Looking at the company’s behavior and incentive structure is definitely more relevant than trying to read the tea leaves of motivations.

Facebook’s business is getting paid by companies to help them sell goods and services to consumers. Facebook is claiming that Apple’s changes make it harder for them to do that. Don’t Facebook’s claims match its incentives here?

[zepto]

Your description of Facebook’s business is incomplete.

Facebook’s business is getting paid by companies to help them sell goods and services to consumers by tracking user behavior without consent so that they. can sell targeted ads, and by keeping users engaged with the ad delivery platform by presenting content algorithmically selected to provoke emotional reactions.

Those are the incentives.

[dhnajsjdnd]

You’re just expressing that you have some beef with the company, not making an argument about the lawsuit. You could similarly talk about how Apple depends on sweatshops to increase margins.

[zepto]

Erm, no - nothing I just said is about expressive a beef.

It’s just a description of Facebook’s core business.

If Apple does use ‘sweatshops’, which they clearly do to some extent, that is a marginal part of their business, and not part of their business model at all.

Selling Ads is what Facebook gets paid for. Targetting ads is why they can charge a premium for those ads. Keeping users engaged to content is how they reliably deliver a large volume of ads.

This is their business.

[dhnajsjdnd]

You said:

> by tracking user behavior without consent so that they. can sell targeted ads, and by keeping users engaged with the ad delivery platform by presenting content algorithmically selected to provoke emotional reactions.

Some things in here are the core business model, others are implementation choices that don’t have to be true (like the sweatshops). I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that the lawsuit should fail because they didn’t lead it with a list of complaints people have about the company (not would I expect Apple to include the same in their response).