Facebook's concept of informed consent is a cynical joke, and we can only laud companies and governments that rein in on their bordeline-illegal practices.<p>I've recently signed up for Facebook to use Wit.ai, and have gone through account settings to lock down the account as much as possible. It took me about an hour to set everything to private in this new account, and I'm still not sure what would happen if I start posting on their platform.<p>The settings page is not the only place that needs to be checked if you mind your privacy, there will be a myriad of configuration options and barely discoverable controls that appear in different places on your profile, and remain hidden until you submit further content.
I was recently met with a new popup in the Instagram app, asking me to allow it to track me across applications. I actually said yes, because I get great targeted ads in Instagram and Facebook. I've clicked on multiple ads and actually even made purchases of things that I didn't know about that looked interesting.<p>But the important part is that I do it willingly. I'm glad they were forced to ask -- not everyone is ok with that kind of tracking, and that's the whole point. I'm totally with Apple on this one. Give people choice.<p>I made my choice, and everyone else should get to make theirs too.
Facebook built it’s business on tracking users. It seems that’s solely their choice, only they reap the rewards and suffer the consequences of that choice. If users are fine with it the impact shouldn’t be horrible. If they aren’t, well, why does Apple or users have any obligation to care about the impact? Why is this a valid complaint?
I don’t think Facebook has really any ground to stand on when the choice is being given to the user. AdTech has been saying forever that “people want personalized ads” to justify data collection. If they’re right then obviously there’s nothing to worry about.
By the way, what would Apple lose in revenues if it blocked all ads outright, at least in apps where it has complete control of what it's allowed or denied?
So Facebook having a harder time manipulating people on Apple's devices gets government attention but users being unable to install Linux or Coreutils natively (or at least having to go through ridiculous crap to do it) doesn't?