"regulate" doesn't sound like the correct word in this instance. It's making the process more transparent - all Apple did was ensure users could choose what Facebook does with their data.
Apple's ad system is subject to the same rules. The link you are posting is outdated - since last year's iOS 14.5 the SKAdNetwork has been extended to provide the full API.
Money quote (which to be fair, was not too an FT journalist):
“Apple was unable to validate for us that Apple’s solutions are compliant with Apple’s policy,” he said. “Despite multiple requests and trying to get them to confirm that their products are compliant with their own solutions, we were unable to get there.”
Neither Facebook nor Google “sells user data”. Why would they? There is value in having sole access to the data. They sell access to you based on the data they collect.
In this case, I would say FB is more in the side of the angels than Google. People knowingly give FB information about them
The last thing I want to do is to start a flame war, but I know a lot about this field and it’s been my observation that it’s both important and kind of opaque.
I would be happy to answer questions (within some fairly broad guidelines of proprietary information) in as much detail as anyone would like.
Everything from the technology to the organizational imperatives to the competitive landscape is actually quite complex and nuanced.
I have no ambition of informing folks’ moral judgements (I have my own), but on average it’s probably better if moral judgements are informed by detailed understanding.
So all the ads in newspapers and on television and in sports venues and public spaces and...don't work? Or did you just mean ads are less cost effective without tracking-based targeting?
Ads are much more valuable and higher click through vs impression if they’re personalized.
Small businesses are willing to give more money per ad campaign if they know they’ll get clickthru on a specific target market. These same small businesses don’t have the money to run long ad campaigns which would result in less clicks.
sell the ads in newspapers? is this the 1950s? j/k
Seriously though, what newspaper(s) would you honestly be willing to spend ad dollars with (and for what products) thinking that this would be a good investment? Geritol? Now, if your suggestion is buying newspaper ads would then get ads in their digital versions as well, then maybe. However, seems to me that most viewers of news sites are from link aggregators more than just readers of a website. Not sure how that would affect ad placement.
TV and podcasts are moving towards surveillance based advertising too. Look at the rise of smart TV's, cable, and streaming services that require identification and location as well as the various ad supported podcast players.
Your are correct if you are using over the air TV or Kodi and if you use FOSS podcast players such as Antennapod or Podverse.
Some people claim, without much proof, that ads without tracking are less effective. We don't care and would prefer to see their business model fail than to maintain the status quo. That is the point here.
Weren't there even studies showing, that context based advertising is on par with personalized (based on tracking your every move) advertising?
I strongly suspect that might be the case. I also believe that social networks could - in theory - create effective advertising possibilities without the need to target user properties.
Take my experience with Instagram. When I am looking at mostly typography related posts, it tends to work well if they show me paid ads for interesting fonts. But when they show these to me, when I am looking at gardening content, I tend to be irritated and ignore them.
I know - I am talking anecdata here - but maybe there could be a way to not target users, but target topics and hit the users that move through these topics (so to speak).
One problem, though, I see with this approach is when you want to create a longing in somebody who never before had the idea that he/she would like to have a cool new font (to stay with my example). Or the next "hot" stuff from some global brand (or what they believe that i should want to feel cool).
But as said - I can't find the studies I seem to remember right now on the effectiveness of context based advertising compared to personalized advertising. So I am not sure if this was just my imagination.
The vast majority of people love ad supported services. They prefer free/low cost to expensive and express this preference regularly. They don't think advertising is evil, and in fact many people voluntarily wear adverts on their own clothes.
Online advertising pays for a massive amount of stuff. If it dies, then the outcome is not "everything stays the same but somehow better". The outcome is that a lot of services we take for granted go away and either don't come back at all, or come back far worse because their market is now much smaller and only rich people pay for it.
To put this in perspective, when I worked at Google they had a prototype internal service that let you "buy" your way out of seeing ads by bidding against yourself in the auction. The idea was to allow people to pay for an ad-free internet, but without making users freeloaders on the services they used (that's ad blocking and exists already). I thought, what a great idea. I'll sign up. Result: to get rid of a just a fraction of all the ads I was seeing online (my guess, ~20% of ads I saw were served by Google) would have costed $200-$300 per month.
After seeing the scale at which advertisers were subsidizing my online experience, I lost interest, as did everyone else. Paying 4x as much as my entire normal internet bill just to see fewer ads, not even get ridding of all of them, just wasn't worth it.
The reality is that the public aren't demanding restrictions on online advertising. They don't care. They like free stuff and they've got nothing against advertisers. This is a war being waged for political and commercial reasons, dressed up as consumer protection, and if/when it actually starts to bite in visible ways, a whole lot of people are going to be mighty shocked at how upset the public will get.
The public would certainly got upset with the idea above. Fortunately that idea has nothing to do with reality - we don’t need to bid ransom to Google to make it stop tracking, same way we don’t have to bid against car thieves to get our cars back.
The most efficient way to solve climate change is to provide every user in the planet the exact amount of goods/services that solves a user's need at the exact time.
This eliminates all the redundant transportation, housing, waste (food, cloths, electronics, equipment)
And the only way to provide is that through tracking (both history and intent).
No, the most efficient way to solve climate change is for people to consume less crap; this reduces far more wasted resources. There is no need to give up your privacy and no need for corrupt middlemen to track you.
I have always been a bit skeptical of off-site data producing serious lift in VCG auction clearing prices for in-feed units, but I’m also pretty out of date.
Oh, you just wait! I am sure that Apple will eventually build its own ad empire. It is too sweet peece of pie to be left on the table. Also, Apple badly needs to justify it's market cap with some revenue.
Why this isn’t about Apple, if they literally use their market power to destroy competition? They could have done tons of features to benefit users, but they implement those which damage competitors.
Which is false as Apple tracks you across apps without showing you this new prompt.
> That isn’t about Apple destroying anyone.
Could you elaborate on what are you implying here?
Are you saying Apple doesn’t damage anyone with this policy? It is obviously false.
Are you saying damaging competitors and building its own ads ecosystem is not Apple’s primary motivation here? It also seems false, as they build their own ad system, which tracks users.
> They could have done tons of features to benefit users, but they implement those which damage competitors.
Why does Facebook rely on unethical and shady business practices that harm users? Facebook is harming itself. And how is Facebook, in any meaningful way, a competitor to Apple? Apple's ad's business is PEANUTS.
Fully agree. If anything the choice that Apple is offering its users should be made law so it’s not just an “Apple thing”. If you want to track users you should have to ask them first, and if they say no that’s the end of it.
I am not clear which switch Apple can flip to put Facebook out of business. I assume Apple can delete Facebook from the App Store, but that would be just as consequential to Apple as to Facebook.
Also, it would seem self evident that Apple’s ability to influence Facebook comes from having a novel product, that people like to use compared to the alternatives.
> Also, it would seem self evident that Apple’s ability to influence Facebook comes from having a novel product, that people like to use compared to the alternatives.
Apple controls 50+% of American computing. At this point it isn't just a "novel product". They own the American internet interface and it takes a nation state level of effort to compete. Facebook can't even keep up.
Android is a fragmented 40% and relies on advertising. Google locks it down so hard with their Play Store Services stranglehold (no YouTube/Maps/Gmail if you disobey), that there's no room for real competition to emerge and make any money doing something unique.
None of this is healthy for the world. Both companies need a hard slap from the DOJ.
Wait, what? If you want to say that Apple controls 50% of mobile compute, then I might be willing to go along with that. But the blanket computing alone is laughable.
You've suddenly just ignored all of the data centers in the US that have very little Apple products seeing as Apple doesn't make a server product. Sure some niche data centers have popped up with racks full of Minis, but those are primarily for people making apps for those mobile devices mentioned earlier.
Apple and Google together can tank just about any mobile platform they wish though, see Parler. If you're off both app stores, you'll have a stupidly hard time growing even if the demand's there in principle.
> I'm no fan of Facebook, but Apple is literally showing the world that their platform can sink trillion dollar businesses with simple policy changes.
Sink? I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. Furthermore, if Facebook's business model is predicated on actively harming Apple's customers (and Facebook is harming them in a multitude of ways, including this tracking), this isn't Apple's fault at all, it's Facebooks.
> When you're "America's Computer" with a 51+% entrenchment, you shouldn't be able to govern commerce. You're a common carrier at that point.
Yah, no. Apple's marketshare, even in the US, as of January is estimated to be ~33% (iOS and macOS) combined.
Nobody wants to build for iPhone or pay 30% to Apple. We build for it because that's where Americans choose to be, and if you want your software business to reach audiences, that's where you have to follow. It frankly sucks.
I don't like the fact that my code is up for review. I don't have the nanny state overseeing my web deploys.
I don't like the fact that the feedback is uneven and arbitrary.
I don't like being forced to give up my own choices for login and contact, essentially ceding my customers to Apple.
I don't like paying thirty percent for being forced to build for a platform I don't even want to be on but have to.
There should have been an open standard for native apps distributed over web. It should have been cross platform, like HTML, so we don't have to build twice or use stupid hacks to share code.
Apple builds hardware people like, but they're monsters.
Guess what? I as a consumer don’t want to enter my credit card all over the place or have to jump through hoops when I want to cancel a subscription. I want to be able to use “Hide My Email” so when you have a data breach or sell my email I can cancel it. I don’t want to use your lowest common denominator crappy web app. I want to just use an app I pay for and I don’t need to have a “relationship “ with you.
The whole “if you don’t like it don’t buy it” argument is pretty weak on a lot of the tech giants. Thank whoever failed to secure third-party cookies, it’s not great.
But Apple seems to be pretty squarely in the: “don’t buy it if you don’t like it” vertex.
I use Apple stuff because the cost/benefit is something I can live with.
But most of my friends and colleagues never touch the stuff: it’s desktop Linux connecting to server Linux. Usually Android phones but some people get Pine or old Nokias or whatever.
Is Apple running some Internet-wide cookie scam that I’m unaware of?
Apple might actually be helping Facebook. It the industry doesn't regulate itself then the governments will at some point and that's going to be much worse.
The GDPR is governments (the EU) regulating an industry that has failed to regulate itself the last 20 years and most would argue that the GDPR is much stricter than it needs to be.
Apple's ad system is subject to the same rules. The link you are posting is outdated - since last year's iOS 14.5 the SKAdNetwork has been extended to provide the full API.