Facebook has billions of users on several different apps. And people log into these apps to use them. FB, Instagram, Whatsapp. Cross-app tracking is not a big deal, they already know who you are.
The big hits are going to be a reduction in data collected by other apps fed to Facebook, and in measurement and attribution (like app install ads). If anything, it can actually strengthen their walled-garden data moat when advertisers realize that it's still the most efficient way to reach users. Their last earnings report shows significant growth and is the opposite of a struggling business.
Google Plus may have "failed" as a product, but a lot of data joining happened in that effort.
The web saw ad blocking, tracking protection, and privacy regulation which eliminated 3rd-party cookies - but apps were overlooked for a long time. Apple and Google finally added more API permissions and removed this device ID meaning that apps are now in the same place as websites. FLoC is just a way to solve for targeting by creating interest-based cohorts within your browser that don't reveal personal details.
However none of this affects 1st-party tracking. The more you share with an app or site, the more they know, and if you login then they obviously know who you are. They can also still share that data with Facebook (subject to regulations). The major change here is to stop tracking in anonymous situations (like app installs that won't know which device clicked on an ad and then installed on app), not to stop all data collection.
It helps when governments have given out huge grants specifically earmarked for social media advertising in an effort to help struggling brick and mortar business through the COVID landscape. It will be interesting to see if those earnings continue when businesses are back to paying for their own ads. In my business, which received one of those grants, I'm not sure the payback justified the spend, to be honest.
True, but do the small business know you? No. Facebook helps match other advertisers with you, and earns a good commission out of it.
Now, with these sweeping changes, Facebook would no longer be able to effectively connect marketers with you.
>Their last earnings report show significant growth.
True. But the changes weren’t live back then. Apple released the App Tracking Transparency framework update with iOS14.5 in mid April.
I’m not a veteran in the ad tech space like you. Neither I claim to be one. What I wrote are just facts mixed with my thoughts. None of the things are misleading.
It’s easy to make such sweeping remarks in the comments section. Maybe write an article on your thoughts over this, and we’ll discuss someday
Why not? What does small business knowing you have to do with anything? Marketers can target using demographics, interests, behaviors and tons of other factors to get new customers, or they can upload an emails or other profile data to retarget existing users. Nothing has changed here.
> "But the changes weren’t live back then"
IDFA has had a global opt-out for years and 30% in the US have turned it off. The new change is to allow the opt-out on a per-app basis after install.
> "It’s easy to make such sweeping remarks in the comments section. Maybe write an article on your thoughts over this, and we’ll discuss someday"
It's "easy" because I've built multiple products and companies over a decade, and earned my knowledge and experience in the industry. I never said you were misleading though, but that's the 3rd incorrect statement you made in your reply after the two above.
No article needed, my comments already cover everything. This is a discussion forum though so go ahead and discuss right here if you want.
They gather tons of my information from third parties, often through data sharing deals.
For instance, when I bought a car, the manufacturer somehow linked it to my Facebook account (without my knowledge or consent, and I don’t have a car app installed on my phone).
However, the vast majority of their profile on me is from cross-app sharing.
This change only stops easy syncing of a profile based on a stable device-level identifier, often used in (semi-)anonymous situations (like app install ads). It doesn't mean companies can't share data ever again.
The targeting should only work in a following way:
- I sell car tyres, therefore to find my consumers I'll buy an ad on the Facebook car group.
Instead of:
- I sell car tyres, find anyone who asked their friends about where to buy car tyres, who is between 20-40, Caucasian, has a good credit score and has autism and is into rubber jokes.
"Only yesterday, Google announced its plans to make advertising ID an opt-in feature."
A few paragraphs later:
"Google’s opt-out ad-tracking popup isn’t on the forefront like in iOS. Instead, it’s buried deep in the Google Play Service settings — which could be difficult for the non-tech savvy user to find out."
And this opener:
"Facebook has a market evaluation of over 930 billion dollars today."
Versus the conclusion:
"Clearly, this chain of events is about to trigger an irreversible slump in Facebook’s advertisement business — making their ambitions of becoming the fastest trillion-dollar tech firm a far-fetched dream."
Is it really a far-fetched dream when the stock price only needs a 7.5% bump from its current level?
It feels like Substack authors got started in an ultra-competitive world where they knew clickbait journalism was the norm, so they’ve gone all-in on saying whatever they think it takes to grow their subscriber base. I’ve tried subscribing to many smaller Substacks in the past year but the majority of them feel similar to this: A lot of exaggerated sensationalism and recycled material, but little actual analysis. The exceptions have been professional journalists who were already good at writing before joining Substack.
The sensational articles with exaggerated headlines do play well on places like HN where headlines get upvotes before many read the article, so the trend will continue.
Think about all the "Sources say" articles you've read at 'respected publications' over the past few years. How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?
Journalism is probably at its lowest ever point.
Surely the majority of ads Facebook sells are displayed on Facebook's properties (Facebook, apps, IG, etc), where they'll have the logged in user's details already and don't need the user's device mobile advertising ID. That's not to say this won't impact them at all, because it will, but it's not exactly the sky falling.
> Through shrewd acquisitions, blatantly copying the exclusivity of rivals (read: Snapchat, TikTok), Facebook managed to become an integral part of our lives in less than a decade.
Maybe some of that is true? Facebook has been "an integral part of our lives" for longer than a decade. I remember returning home from college in 2008 and seeing my small town papered in facebook usernames for just about every business that had a sign. That was well before Snapchat or TikTok existed, and I don't think they'd done any acquisitions of note up to then. This guy's not completely wrong here, but the framing is myopic enough for me to look for another source of information about the advertising change.
That it might doesn't absolve the fact that Facebook has been essentially kicked about by the Big 2 that dominate the smartphone market. Remember that Apple and Google aren't exactly covered in glory as far as privacy is concerned. They want consumer data for themselves, and that's "private enough" in their eyes.
There's a reason Facebook (and Amazon) has a devices division and is betting on AR/VR.
Things will get interesting from here on.
Apple is using user behaviors for advertising within Apple's ecosystem, but that's not something I really mind. Once my data/behavior exists the company I've entrusted it too, I get very uncomfortable.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
Which undermines the whole premise of the article.
I think moving forward the term “Substack Journalist” will generally be used to refer to the authors of this low quality and factless reporting, that gets dangerously close to misinformation.
The same way that “Soundcloud Rapper” refers to the low quality and amateur rappers that upload their music to Soundcloud (although the latter seems to have some outliers).
> Instead, a lack of effort in developing their own operating system a decade ago might be Facebook’s biggest regret. And this has come back to bite them today.
Crazy that it came to this.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality...
AR... maybe. My personal opinion is the needed electronics (and especially the battery tech) aren't small enough yet, if we're talking AR glasses.
If we're talking AR on phones, where's the killer app? Pokemon go?
This is particularly evident when considering Apple's lead in silicon, which will allow Apple's AR products to be lighter, faster and longer lasting than their competitors. Apple's vertical integration means that there should be more AR "apps" and better software integration than any of their competitors. Apple's pro-privacy push means that consumers will be far more willing to strap Apple branded AR glasses to their face all day.
Facebook might be able to out-compete Apple in VR (silicon performance and efficiency is not as critical for VR), however VR likely will not have the same mainstream appeal that AR will have.
It's really a surprise Facebook was so blindsided by this, they should've known better.
When FB released its first “phone” it was still unwilling to take mobile seriously. They left the head of mobile position open for a very long time. Zuck himself has said he missed mobile.
With the IPO around that time, making some major strategic investment in tech was not an option when the company was likely under a lot of pressure to make the stock price only go one way.
You give Apple Maps as an example, but that product was a major fumble at release. To the point Apple fired the exec in charge over it.
It’s taken major investment over many years to get that app sorted out and it still needs a lot of work.
I think FB did know better they just had a competing problem of revenue growth that was at odds with laying claim to the future.
If anything, I think FB is making an ongoing strategic mistake in lack of any obvious work to establish an Alphabet structure.
FB can recover by building a social network that monetizes via payments and subscriptions. This could be hooked up to a new fortnite-seeded metaverse and run exclusively through oculus.
The opportunity for a FB-parent Corp that distinguishes a new, private network away from the damaged brand of FB is still there.
Leadership just has to be way more daring now in what it’s willing to do.
It really has to or the ruling metaverse social network will be built by someone else for Apple hardware.
Facebook can go die in the grave they dug for themselves.
Enter the iPhone/iOS and ChromeOS. (Android and Windows still have an escape hatch, and are still plagued with malware. macOS's escape hatch is basically irrelevant at this point, to the point of nonexistence.)
In those circumstances, if you aren't publishing the OS and holding the secret keys to the certs in bootloaders, you are only a sharecropper, and your access to the namespace of programs that are allowed to run on end user devices is entirely outside of your control.
Your milkshake is now someone else's. Epic and Facebook are upset about this, understandably.
I personally believe that people should be able to run Facebook spyware on the devices they bought, even if it is worse for them and the world. We aren't free if we aren't free to act against our own interests.
Apple has allowed users to reset their advertiser ID to a new random value as often as they liked since 2012, and has allowed users to go into the settings and turn off access to the advertiser ID (so that every app will see an advertiser ID of all zeroes) since 2018.
It wasn't until Apple made the Advertiser ID something that you actively had to opt into that the freakout began.
Here's a link speculating on the impact of Apple's IDFA deprecation on Facebook, from January: https://mobiledevmemo.com/facebook-may-take-revenue-hit-from... It carries strong parallels to what is in-process at Google.
A few ad experts I follow say that Facebook and Google will claim increasing dominance in the ad space. Their logic is that as each ad vendor loses third party information, comparative advantage will favor companies with strong first party information. This will drive more ads toward Facebook as a relative share, even if they are still losing overall. I have no information to judge to what extent this claim holds.
This is just plain stupid. Yes Facebook is a Big Evil Corp but they created a ton of value through original product development, not just “shrewd acquisitions” and ripping off other products.
Didn’t read past this point, author blew their credibility here.
Facebook must be ruing spending time on Oculus instead of developing their own mobile hardware ecosystem.
As others are pointing out, people sign in to Facebook apps. As soon as they do, that apple & google device ID are kind of redundant. The only place where these ids are useful is when users use other application to access content and the analytics for that somehow end up in Facebook's data lake. That is indeed something they've been doing as well but also something that has been getting harder due to increasing restrictions both technically and legally (e.g. GDPR).
Facebook might huff and puff a little but they'll be fine. What this will accomplish however is decimating the competition that lack their own walled gardens from which to gather tracking data and are very dependent on Google and Facebook telling them who is who. Which is also why Google is doing this.
And of course the latter two have had a strategy of strengthening the walls around their walled gardens. This will likely push more content providers inside these walls. I'm hoping the EU and the US might be able to force tearing these walls down a little. Google trying to monopolize news has been something they've been fighting for a while. And of course both Facebook and Google are creating a bit of a privileged/exclusive situation for themselves here.
Of course it will be years before most of their users get to play with Android 12. So, it's going to be slow process of this gradually getting harder for companies to work with rather than an overnight cut off. Unless of course they roll this out to older versions as well.
The issue has always been that Facebook is tracking you on non-Facebook websites and apps, even if you don't have a Facebook account. From a user's perspective, they never told Facebook what products they were looking at on Etsy, so Facebook collecting that data feels like a violation of their privacy. Things like GDPR and Apple's new IDFA policy do neuter this considerably.
It seems that Facebook might have a much stronger case against Google here, since it's using its success in the smartphone OS market to hobble its biggest competitor in the digital ads market.
I feel the same way; very little chance Google stops this unless it doesn't affect them at all (either by having determined these identifiers aren't particularly effective, or by having cooked up some new scheme.)
Google wants exclusive root on the web the way it has it on the phones they rent to you.
> And that’s how Facebook still manages to stay free of cost today.
I enjoy articles that explain to the layman how the sausage is made. I've always wondered: if enough people know they're the product and know how Facebook makes money, would they delete their account in a fit of rage or continue to use it, knowing that they're victims of surveillance capitalism?
I know for me, I cancelled my account after looking at the 'interests' page and discovered how strangely accurate it was. They really can get to know you on an intimate level. The more you engage with the app, the bigger and more accurate the profiling. More people need to visit that interests page and decide if they want to continue using Facebook.
Similar to factory farmed meat. I'm sure if you worked there, you'd be more likely to avoid eating it.
I'd love to know what FB thinks I'm interested in, but I'm nothing more than a shadow to them - no account, never used their apps - so there's no way for me to know. I think this is one of the more horrible, insidious outcomes of their way of working: If you're signed up for their abuse, you can at least find out something about what they know of you. If you've opted out of their surveillance platform, you have no way of finding out. And that's iniquitous.
People know. They just okay with it. If they aren’t, they would have stopped using it by now.
If anything, the general public seems to think that Facebook and Instagram’s tracking is more pervasive than it really is. How many times have you heard people insist that Instagram showed them ads based on a verbal conversation they had where their phone was nearby? The idea that your phone is listening to every word you speak is obviously a myth, yet many people believe it and continue to use those apps anyway.
Outside of privacy centric tech bubbles like HN, targeted advertising isn’t viewed as a violation and free products are understood to come with advertising tradeoffs. HN isn’t uniquely enlightened about the “you’re the product” trope.
Yeah and most of the time this is recency bias. You know: when you learn a new word and suddenly see it everywhere.
And Facebook already launched a phone of sorts, with HTC in 2013. Huge flop.
https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopp...
> Now that Google is pulling the plug by making GAID almost obsolete, Facebook is about to stare at a bigger loss. If their loss from iOS 14 was in the range of $80bn, Android the more dominant platform will only increase their losses and woes.
Almost obsolete? This means users have to OPT-OUT of tracking as opposed to OPTING-IN to tracking on iOS.
The two "solutions" could not be more different. I hate all of these new articles saying that "Google joins Apple" in restricting FB. Apple is restricting FB 95%, Google is restricting it maybe 5% at best.
But perhaps Facebook will eventually find a new way out anyway.
