Secret talks that could have prevented the Apple vs. Facebook war

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-apple-vs-facebook-privacy-fight-11660317376

by gmays • 4 years ago

89 129 4 years ago

KerrAvon• 4 years ago

What war? This is about user privacy. Apple implemented replacement APIs allowing for tracking that doesn’t impinge user privacy. Facebook is just mad that they can’t microtarget you on iOS anymore.

tmpz22• 4 years ago

Yeah Apple’s Board of Executives put all profit motive aside and are sacrificing for our privacy.

cloudking• 4 years ago

Right.. Apple isn't playing 4D chess to challenge Facebook's Ad business. https://www.axios.com/2022/08/21/apple-advertising-privacy-t...

JKCalhoun6• 4 years ago

I don't see those as mutually exclusive. Apple seems to believe that a company that values a user's privacy can make a profit from that stance.

Tijdreiziger• 4 years ago

Meanwhile, Apple collects the same types of user data as Google [1], and wants to grow its advertising business [2].

[1] https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...

dwaite5• 4 years ago

First party data collection and use is not the same as third-party tracking.

I have relationships with Apple and Google. The line around what data usage is appropriate with those companies somewhat nebulous, and also somewhat a personal decision.

For instance - the paper you site shows that Apple and Google send location data from devices to the server. Those devices also both ship with functionality for things like mapping and local weather. So for iOS, you have to approve sharing location data (even for the built-in weather app and maps app) on an app-by-app basis. Android has gotten better about this over the years, but I don't know current state.

Facebook is (was) correlating detailed profiles of users who had no relationship with Facebook, through interactions with third parties that were not part of Facebook, and without disclosure. That is a much simpler line to draw.

Even then, Apple gave the user choice - and the users almost universally chose not to give that capability.

croes2• 4 years ago

It's about users' money. Apple's take on privacy is the same as FB's. If user data stays at Apple/FB it's private.

But that's not privacy at all. Any additional confidant besides the sender and the recipient is a breach of privacy.

You wouldn't let it count as respecting privacy either if the post office read all your letters and stored the texts.

dwaite5• 4 years ago

Different tiers.

Facebook is impacted by third-party tracking - such capturing information and generating profiles for people, even those without Facebook accounts. They would do this via Facebook javascript and Facebook native app SDKs.

Apple's solution was App Tracking Transparency - a user consent on whether to provide a handy identifier to use for correlation across apps, and App Store rules which ban tracking using other mechanisms (such as IP address correlation).

For apps outside the store (e.g. web apps), the privacy proxy stuff and third-party state isolation/blocking are used to greatly reduce such correlation.

For first-party data collection, storage and sharing, there are consents for sharing information from the device (location, contacts, health information, and so on). There is also a privacy label (which App Store rules require to be accurate) on what data collected by an app used, for what purpose, and whether that use is linked to you or anonymized.

So a post office app that read the letters and stored the text would say that 'user content' was captured, and whether or not it was 'linked to you'.

smoldesu4• 4 years ago

And how do you feel about the data that Apple collects and stores? Both companies are operated by scumbags who don't give a rat's ass about your personal privacy, it's a 'battle' in the sense that neither company can agree who should profit off of advertising.

JKCalhoun6• 4 years ago

Apple, because of their proclaimed fealty to user privacy clearly have the most to lose if they should violate that bond.

gloryjulio• 4 years ago

Apple implemented replacement APIs allowing for tracking that doesn’t impinge user privacy.

Just like android?

workingon• 4 years ago

Regarding below comments, and Apple's desire to enter the ad business and still keeping data/not respecting privacy, that's definitely a bad thing, but I still am really happy Apple did this to Facebook/Zuck. Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users. It's entirely corrupt. If you took the same ability away from Apple, they would be fine, because most of their business model is actually trying to provide something of value to the world, instead of profiting off of catalyzing it's downfall like Meta.

I wish we could do the same thing to Google.

colechristensen• 4 years ago

I wish we could do the same thing to Google.

Sell computers with chrome preinstalled with a good adblock extension.

mlyle• 4 years ago

You can't, because the Chrome license is personal and non-assignable. If you enter into a contract with them to deploy them on computers, I assume this is precluded explicitly by the terms.

You could with Chromium, but that's problematic and annoying in minor ways. (Some of the things consumers value involve Google integrations).

irrational2• 4 years ago

I thought google was changing chrome so that adblockers can’t work anymore on that browser?

ipaddr2• 4 years ago

Your chrome id still is used to link you and the sites you visit.

barbacoa• 4 years ago

I someday hope to see pihole like dns filtering built into residential routers.

account-5• 4 years ago

I still dream of a Firefox OS device in the vein of a Chromebook. I was gutted when Mozilla abandoned Firefox OS.

ipaddr2• 4 years ago

Apple kills many small businesses/apps unrelated to privacy but often wearing that shield as a defense. Why celebrate taking down another multinational when the reasons are self serving and creates bigger privacy issues?

JKCalhoun6• 4 years ago

If Apple's self-serving reasons are "because our users want it" then I am all for it.

That 2/3 of users opted out of being tracked suggests Facebook has no similar reasoning for their business model.

smoldesu4• 4 years ago

We could do the same to Google; it would require Apple working with the government, though, and adding more regulations is the last thing Apple wants. This is a shame, because we're never going to make lasting change by having private corporations do our battles for us. Furthermore, we have no way of holding Apple accountable if they're doing the same thing as Facebook. I don't care if you're the biggest company in the world, you still have to play by the rules.

If you took the same ability away from Apple, they would be fine, because most of their business model is actually trying to provide something of value to the world

Sure, they make money hand-over-fist by exploiting Uighur labor for your shiny metal laptop. Bettering the world is just their nature!

Pragmatically, though, none of these companies will ever champion true privacy. What's the point of even arguing over this stuff when every one of these corporations is compliant in PRISM? Here on HN we love to white-knight for multi-trillion dollar companies and quibble over whitepapers, but everyone has lost. Privacy is unattainable. Security is feasible, but privacy? It doesn't matter if you're on iPhone or Windows or MacOS; you're not in control of your data. Period.

mistrial9• 4 years ago

they make money hand-over-fist by exploiting Uighur labor for your shiny metal laptop.

your case would be stronger if you don't overreach .. overall component assembly business is race-to-the-bottom for worker rights, in China now.. that ethnic cleansing you mention is horrible but not exactly the same thing, and intelligent readers may know that. From my point of view, it is the Tibetans to be concerned with, not Uighur. And that is possible a more potent insight .. that Apple knowingly profited from race-to-the-bottom worker conditions, orchestrated under a government responsible for Tibetan cultural genocide. But, it is not the Tibetans that did the assembly, nor to my knowledge the Uighur.

JKCalhoun6• 4 years ago

Furthermore, we have no way of holding Apple accountable if they're doing the same thing as Facebook.

Not buy their products?

astrange3• 4 years ago

What's the point of even arguing over this stuff when every one of these corporations is compliant in PRISM?

PRISM = subpoenas. It’s not an illegal spying program. You don’t want companies to answer subpoenas?

pete_nic• 4 years ago

Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users.
I wish we could do the same thing to Google.

You’re assuming Google’s core business would not exist without spying on users and I disagree. You can run a search business and still protect privacy, this is DuckDuckGo’s whole model. This is a fundamental difference between a search product and a social product.

tpetry• 4 years ago

Google is not a search product. Their revenue come from Adwords, which is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users.

pmontra2• 4 years ago

As a long time DDG user, Google Search is better. I end up searching again on Google about half of the time I search for technical stuff (software) or for non English sites. I just feel DDG didn't understand what I want and Google usually does. I don't login on Google and use a Firefox extension to clear the cookies so Google might only rely on the search term, not my history, but who knows.

soperj3• 4 years ago

provide something of value to the world

Just for a limited time when the purposely made their phones unusable through OS updates.

Swizec• 4 years ago

Apple in my experience has a marvelous track record with this sort of thing.

I upgraded from an iPhone 4 to X because it worked fine for so long. This summer I updated my mom’s 8 year old Macbook Air to Monterey and it works great.

And I’m starting to think about upgrading my 2018 iPad only because of memory issues with 3rd party apps dumping context when multitasking.

benreesman3• 4 years ago

There are plenty of legitimate gripes with the consumer Internet megacorps. All of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more have done user-hostile and privacy hostile things. I was just taking them to task for their bullshit about AI ethics on the big language models yesterday.

But as someone working on my own Internet hyperbole problem, I’ll gently suggest that rabid-sounding hyperbole is just going to turn off the zillion employees at those companies who are also HN users and might be able to do something about it.

“Third-party cookies” === “spying”, a bit of a reach in 2022. “Grandma” knows about cookies now. It’s not an absurd argument, but it’s a bit extreme.

FAANG is “catalyzing the downfall of the world”? We’re in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” territory.

GekkePrutser4• 4 years ago

I don't agree. Third party cookies exist almost entirely for the purpose of spying.

SSO is an exception but a minor one

rvz• 4 years ago

FAANG is “catalyzing the downfall of the world”? We’re in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” territory.

All the free software and privacy activists needed was Edward Snowden to leak the illegal harvesting and collection of user data done by the NSA and with Big Tech helping along quietly with the PRISM project.

Ever since they were all caught in the act, they are now screaming about privacy all of a sudden as they pretend to care about it whilst they waste resources and burn up the planet with their broken deep learning models in tens of thousands of data centers on user data only for surveillance.

Little to nothing has changed. Despite these regulations, Big Tech is still getting bigger and pushing for more surveillance and aiding the existence of another digital dystopia.

Gibbon1• 4 years ago

My thinking of late is we need to change the laws of incorporation to prevent product and service companies from making money off ads.

remarkEon2• 4 years ago

Breaking up Google and Meta would be a huge boon to all of us. Think of all the extremely intelligent and driven people who are being paid dump trucks of money to build internet surveillance or psychological manipulation technology at scale.

They could be working on so, so many more interesting and important problems.

biztos• 4 years ago

I'm sure there are some extremely intelligent and driven people working on internet surveillance or psychological manipulation, but if the only reason they're doing it is for the dump-trucks of money then I have zero confidence they will go work on interesting and important problems should MetaGoo somehow tank.

They'll just go wherever the largest dump-trucks are offered. Because they already did that, and it made them relatively wealthy, and yet there they still are.

ksec3• 4 years ago

That is exactly what is wrong. When Apple does it, it is all good. As if other business provides zero value to the world.

And to answer your last point. Apple are already doing it to Google. Apple collect $10+ Billion per year from Google just to be the default search engine. Squeezing Google left and right, partly forcing Google to increase the amount of Ads around the web.

pmontra2• 4 years ago

Is it a one sided war, right?

FB can only lose money and Apple can only make more.

The best outcome for FB would be to legally deny Apple from blocking ads and keep the status quo.

The worst outcome for Apple would be to make only as many money as before without the share they are taking from FB.

colinmhayes• 4 years ago

Apple isn’t blocking ads. They’re blocking cross app tracking which was mostly run by Facebook. The apps are still advertising, they just can’t use facebooks profile to target you.

Patrol8394• 4 years ago

True, but one should ask why was cross app tracking allowed to begin with. I think that should have never been allowed.

JimDabell• 4 years ago

Apple isn’t blocking ads. They’re blocking cross app tracking

They aren’t even doing that! All they are doing is saying that if an application wants to do that, it has to ask the user first. Cross application tracking is absolutely fine according to Apple as long as the user consents.

JKCalhoun6• 4 years ago

It seems one-sided to me.

If your business relies on convincing your users that targeted advertising is a Good Thing, then you are fighting a war from an indefensible position.

ethbr06• 4 years ago

There's only one sane outcome of the current shifts in privacy that I can see.

Something like FLoC, with

- The data stored-in and served-by a neutral, not-for-profit, regulated entity

- With user primacy and control of their own data (opt-out, wipe, request copy, etc)

You're never going to drag tracking out of Chrome, because Google is revenue addicted at this point. So at least you can keep it out of Google's control.

irrational2• 4 years ago

Or, just use Firefox. It works just as well as chrome, in my experience.

ethbr06• 4 years ago

That's not a scalable solution for people who are not me.

pessimizer3• 4 years ago

If we can't drag tracking out of Chrome because Google won't agree, why would we think they'd agree to keeping anything "out of Google's control"? If our decision-making hinges on what Google would agree to, we might as well wait for Google to announce what they're going to do anyway.

ethbr06• 4 years ago

Because one of the few things more powerful than Google is national governments, and their mutual mistrust of each other.

malshe• 4 years ago

Hopefully this one removes the paywall:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-apple-vs-facebook-pr...

GekkePrutser4• 4 years ago

It did and I thank you!

7fYZ7mJh3RNKNaG• 4 years ago

Thank you. Cueing mirror keyword for others.

bluesign• 4 years ago

People mixing 2 things: tracking over your apps vs tracking on 3rd party apps are different things.

Apples tracking protections ( allow apps to track ) applies to 3rd party apps.

Apple’s tracking for ads, applies only to Apple apps.

Facebook can track people on their apps ( facebook, instagram, whatsapp etc ) if they want. Problem is about tracking with facebook SDK on 3rd party apps.

dwaite5• 4 years ago

Facebook can track people on their apps ( facebook, instagram, whatsapp etc ) if they want. Problem is about tracking with facebook SDK on 3rd party apps.

Right. Google mostly didn't mind, because they can simply push people a bit harder to log in for Youtube as well as Maps and Search, to build a first-party profile as people do searches and follow results.

This is different from building a profile as someone browses the internet, regardless of whether they have a relationship with your company.

jrm4• 4 years ago

It's weird-but-unexpected that they seem to frame this a bit as if such a war would have been a good thing to prevent. But usually it's best if these big companies ARE at war as much as possible.

sonofhans• 4 years ago

It’s to the benefit of Facebook, and other businesses harvesting and selling access to personal information, to call this a “war.” It’s similar to the modern headline news approach to politics — everything is a horse race, everything is sports. The competition becomes the story, rather than the substance behind it.

Calling this a “war” lays bare the views of many who believe this is only two tech giants duking it out over market territory, that the only substance here is the competition itself. It’s just like sports! We can root for our favorites!

It shows the fundamentally nihilistic attitude of many capitalists, that every commercial entity is _of course_ solely concerned with making as much money as possible, and that any talk of ethics or principles or honest benefit to their customers is smoke and mirrors. Of course, this is simply untrue. Many businesses do operate at least partly on ethical principle. Many businesses do try to do right by their customers, and not only because of the monetary rewards associated with success.

This scares the shit out of some capitalists, though, who want to believe that making money is the highest ethical good to which a commercial entity can aspire. Apple is an inconvenient example for these people. What if what Apple says is true? What if it really does matter to Apple that their customers have privacy? Then we have an example of a financially-successful business which is not operating in the most rapacious way possible, and this throws all sorts of wrenches into their late-stage capitalist fantasies.

I’m not demonizing capitalism — it works for me. But the WSJ is definitely the high priest at the altar here, and it seriously fucks with their narrative to even admit that commercial competition can be about anything other than money. Thus it must be a nihilistic “war.”

SnowHill9902• 4 years ago

A humbling lesson on why you must control your supply chain or have commoditized suppliers. Facebook grew on a commoditized platform i.e. browsers on PCs. But then got pinched on mobile and was too slow to react.

dredmorbius• 4 years ago

WSJ / Murdoch standing up for Facebook is ... a new look.

Animats• 4 years ago

WSJ view: if only they'd conspired together against consumers like they were supposed to.

082349872349872• 4 years ago

... and here I thought they weren't even supposed to conspire directly. Don't industry majors usually have to conspire indirectly, like by all hiring the same consultants?

GekkePrutser4• 4 years ago

I'm glad they didn't. Apple did the right thing. Still not sure whether they did it for the right reasons but it was 100% the right thing IMO

pessimizer3• 4 years ago

Thank god they didn't agree, I don't even think they should be able to talk about shit like this. We should force them to use regulators as mediators.

neonate• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/oKuGM

sandworm101• 4 years ago

Secret talks? Conspiracy. Between two market leaders. To settle their differences and thereby reduce direct competition. I understand completely why this was kept quiet. I cannot see any firm dates, but it looks like most of these reported discussions were in 2017-2018, 4+ years back, conveniently long enough enjoy SOL protection against antitrust actions. Who really wrote this piece? Who paid for it?

SOL citation: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2011-title15/html...

charcircuit• 4 years ago

To settle their differences and thereby reduce direct competition

How do you reach this conclusion? Businesses working together to increase each of their profits is what every business relationship to strives to be.

eganist• 4 years ago

How do you reach this conclusion? Businesses working together to increase each of their profits is what every business relationship to strives to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

That's generally the threshold, and without saying as much (in fact, the author of the article seems to miss this), the article suggests that the talks in question came close to cresting that boundary.

mrxd• 4 years ago

I understand completely why this was kept quiet.

Are you suggesting that Apple and Facebook normally have these kinds of discussions in public? Because that is not at all the case.

Possibly there is something nefarious going on here. But the fact these talks were secret means nothing, since all talks between companies are secret by default.

quitit2• 4 years ago

Right now there is a desperate PR push to make Apple look like they wanted Facebook's ad business and that tracked ads really aren't all that bad.

It seems part of a larger campaign to force apple to drop tracking protections by making these efforts appear not as privacy protection, but rather an anti-competitive strategy to boost their own ads sales.

HN is falling over themselves in the process. Anyone that tells you that tracked ads are just about matching your preferences is lying to you on purpose.

tehwebguy• 4 years ago

Conspiracy to do what, have less privacy violations?

Also if people were injured by this and are just finding out about it now the clock probably just started.

eric4smith• 4 years ago

Quick question...

Why would we really want to prevent a war between these two giant companies?

Secret talks that could have prevented the Apple vs. Facebook war

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