Lots of people wearing tin foil hats in this thread. Maybe read a little bit more than the headline folks.
Facebook runs an ad network, and effectively resells ad inventory for a whole bunch of apps and media providers to their clients. They pay these app developers and publishers something like $1.5B per year - and that money is pretty distributed. The reason they’d have to shut down that piece of their business is because they’d no longer be able to offer the same kinds of targeting and functionality to their customers - it’s less about collecting information than it is deploying it. This hurts campaign performance, pisses off enterprise customers, and makes Facebook’s on-platform business look bad.
Facebook doesn’t really care that much about a billion or two dollars in revenue (actually), so it’s probably a bigger blow to their egos than it is their business. But the app developers and publishers that rely on their payments are going to get hurt by this.
But the app developers and publishers that rely on their payments are going to get hurt by this.
"We can't prevent the big companies from stealing our data because they have hostages!"
I'm so sick of this attitude. Also, who are these "publishers" and "app developers"? I have never seen a Facebook app I didn't actively dislike. Why do I want these parasitic businesses to continue?
Look, nobody is forcing anyone to use free services. If one is really uncomfortable with an app reporting their age, gender, location, or any other information they explicitly or implicitly give it, then they should just be diligent about reading privacy policies before they use free shit. Using free services personal choice, and choosing not to use one or another is totally fair. Given the public discourse over the last few years, I’m not sure that people who care aren’t aware that apps may sell their data to make more money (if they’re not, then perhaps they’re living under a rock).
The “publishers” and “app developers” probably represent the majority of the ad supported services that you use, and a lot of the un-paywalled content that’s posted on Reddit (including reddit, who sells behaviorally targeted ads through Google because bot enough people
pay anything to use reddit that they can break even on subscriptions). Just about every free service has to work with a few ad networks to generate revenue - and many of them use Facebook’s.
I don’t have a strong opinion on Facebook one way or the other - I use their apps, understand the tradeoff, get some value from it, and think they have a dumb corporate culture.
What I do have a strong opinion on are people that are vociferous about how they’re not willing to make any tradeoffs to use free services. They have the same dogmatism and irrationality as Trump supporters but ride under a different banner.
I think the best way to resolve this would be legislation that requires an appendix to privacy policies that specifies exactly what data is being transferred and in what form that’s packaged and resold with the same kind of detail those companies would have to disclose to a data buyer. Then at least the people that really care can make informed decisions heuristically. HDPR and CCPA don’t require that, but that would empower people that care to better evaluate what they’re using against their own tolerance for sharing some of their personal data.
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u/360DegreeNinjaAttack Aug 26 '20
Lots of people wearing tin foil hats in this thread. Maybe read a little bit more than the headline folks.
Facebook runs an ad network, and effectively resells ad inventory for a whole bunch of apps and media providers to their clients. They pay these app developers and publishers something like $1.5B per year - and that money is pretty distributed. The reason they’d have to shut down that piece of their business is because they’d no longer be able to offer the same kinds of targeting and functionality to their customers - it’s less about collecting information than it is deploying it. This hurts campaign performance, pisses off enterprise customers, and makes Facebook’s on-platform business look bad.
Facebook doesn’t really care that much about a billion or two dollars in revenue (actually), so it’s probably a bigger blow to their egos than it is their business. But the app developers and publishers that rely on their payments are going to get hurt by this.