Comment by joshstrange
7 days ago
> 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.
Yeah, they were different and happened at different times. I can kinda justify Onavo (personally I think that they could've been the Neilsen of mobile if they hadn't gotten acquired) but the whole enterprise cert thing was super, super shady.
> 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?
> These kinds of things now point me in a direction where I consider advertising alone to be immoral and want it banned.
I (personally) think that's going too far. Targeted advertising has been really, really good for small businesses, and given that local newspapers are basically dead and TV/radio are expensive, these business kinda have to use Meta/Google et al.
And that's fine (IMO obviously). The actual problem here is the insatiable drive for growth from public companies/the markets, coupled with wide-scale equity ownership within the companies concerned leads to people doing mental stuff like the OP to drive those numbers up.
A bunch of this is fixable by massive, massive fines (on the part of the EU). The better solution would be for the US to introduce GDPR/DMA like regulation, as US based companies are more likely to follow their home countries laws, but that's not gonna happen any time soon.
The structural problems are harder to resolve, maybe lengthen vesting schedules and/or move back towards dividends to encourage longer-term thinking and approaches.
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