Comment by frenchmajesty
7 days ago
Very impressive but not surprising coming from Meta. They have an history of doing this kind of things.
Back in the early 2010s, they found a way to spy on HTTPS traffic on the iOS App Store to monitor which apps were getting popular. That's what allowed them to know WhatsApp and Instagram were good acquisition targets.
At this point, I think the race for Zuckerberg is, can Meta survive long enough for the next platform shift (AR or VR) where they will own one of the major platforms and won't need to abide by any reasonable rules before their "internet tentacles" that sustain the Ad Machine are cut off.
My bet is they will make it. Though I don't wish it, they're on track.
Companies have been trying to make AR/VR the next platform shift but I'm not super convinced that people actually want or desire this outside of a few niche games. To me it feels like it has about as much staying power as 3D glasses in movies.
The window of opportunity already closed for AR/VR. AI dealt the death blow.
What do you mean? AI will enable better AR/VR experiences, or AI will obsolete them?
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idk, I would absolutely jump on AR glasses that offered reasonable hands free interaction (even via a smartwatch or something) and didn't look awful. AI might enable that, actually, but we'll see.
That's why Apple is releasing their "glass" interface. AR/VR flopped badly so they are trying to normalize the look to bridge the transition.
For gaming and media consumption, VR is here to stay. The meta raybans have also been successful.
As far as replacing your smartphone with AR glasses that remains to be seen
"Here to stay" doesn't say much. VR is as of now an extreme nieche and the reasons for that is more the space requirements and simply that having to wear a device sucks - those reasons are inherent and will not change with new tech.
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I think the world is progressing away from headsets or screens.
We will just have an AI that will do everything, we just ask. "Book a flight, order a pizza and reply to my emails" boom, done.
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> Back in the early 2010s, they found a way to spy on HTTPS traffic on the iOS App Store to monitor which apps were getting popular.
They had people install a VPN app using enterprise certificate so it was never in the App Store and they monitored all the traffic that the VPN sent.
Unlike this case, it required users to jump through a number of hoops/scary iOS warnings. Many still did, for a gift card or less.
> Back in the early 2010s, they found a way to spy on HTTPS traffic on the iOS App Store to monitor which apps were getting popular. That's what allowed them to know WhatsApp and Instagram were good acquisition targets.
Incorrect. An Israeli startup (Onavo) had pivoted into selling data acquired from their VPN got acquired by Facebook. Importantly, they used statistics to estimate population prevalence which is how FB knew that Whatsapp (specifically, this was all post IG acquisition) was super popular outside the US.
> They had people install a VPN app using enterprise certificate so it was never in the App Store and they monitored all the traffic that the VPN sent.
This was (sadly) an entirely different scandal.
Honestly, I generally defend Meta/targeted advertising in these threads, but this one is such incredible, total, absolute bullshit that I can't even begin to comprehend how one could defend this.
I do remember when I joined FB in 2013, how surprised I was that most of the company didn't care about ads/making money (apart from the sales org). That ship has clearly sailed.
Ahh, I knew about the Onavo acquisition history but I had had "context crunched" it down and skipped over the time when it was on the App Store before they rebranded it as (internally) "Project Atlas" and externally Facebook Research which was distributed through enterprise distribution. Thank you for the clarification.
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> Honestly, I generally defend Meta/targeted advertising in these threads
These kinds of things now point me in a direction where I consider advertising alone to be immoral and want it banned. I should have to request information when I want it, rather than being exposed to it at all times on every available surface.
There are only three ways this can go: 1) more frequent and more spookily relevant ads, increasing the number of people who feel that ads should be illegal because of the law breaking required to make it happen. 2) ads don’t change and everyone quickly learns to ignore them. 3) ads go away, replaced by an easy to use marketing information delivery system where only adults can request information unsupervised.
Meta do #1 because #2 and #3 mean the capitalist line doesn’t go up and the end of Meta, respectively. Meta view both of those as the same thing: the end of Meta.
“What about all the businesses which need advertising to survive?”
If they need advertising to survive they’ve been on borrowed time long enough already.
Advertisements encourage the shit Meta is doing. What kinds of similar things are they doing that we haven’t discovered, yet?
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> They have an history of doing this kind of things.
They have a history because the punishment has never dissuaded anyone from being repeat offender.
I disagree that they're on track to make it. Their platform, Quest VR, has sold around 20 million headsets. Any company would be over the moon but we're talking Facebook here. They need way more users than that, which can only be achieved with explosive growth.
So maybe they're growing fast? Nope. Their better selling product, at 14 million of those 20 million is the Quest 2 which has been discontinued for 9 months. Doesn't sound like explosive growth to me when your best selling product is not your current product.
The quest 2 was considerably cheaper, I believe it sold at a loss initially, and most of its sales lifetime was during a pandemic. It's hard to directly compare the two.