tronald

ralphie said:

Zuk is full of crap. And Apples “nutrition” labels are all but worthless. How many people act in them?!  I should be able to turn off/on any of those tracking and identifiers.  WFT is “ask not to track?”, how about “disable tracking”!!  Apple likes to play the nobility card, but they could do A LOT more for the privacy of users and apps.

Apple does what they can in the app infrastructure. Apps are pretty effectively sandboxed, and phones don't provide by default a particularly usable identifier. But, applications do need to be able to share some data and it is pretty difficult to completely lock down data that could be used to link data to a user. Heck, servers can read the IP address and parts of the hardware address of a phone because that is built into internet infrastructure. That's enough for tracking and sharing between services and companies can then happen on the backend in a way that Apple could not possibly prevent through any technological infrastructure Apple could build. 

Apple also cannot control the flow of information between apps and internet servers, because that information is encrypted within the app and even if it weren't the formats of the network interactions can be proprietary so what could Apple use to block the transmission of any data that the app knows? About the best that can be done from Apple's side is to request details on information sharing from the developer and then do some manual audits on some percentage of apps to determine whether these details appear to be correct. And indeed, this is indeed exactly what they are doing. 

There is data that an app like Facebook uses that users have to grant access to, though, so some of the information in the nutrition labels has to be okayed by the user. Apple even reminds the user of some of this information sharing from time-to-time, requiring positive acknowledgement for that access to continue. Further, web-based services such as Facebook generally provide controls over how much data they actually collect and what they do with it. A nutrition label that lists what data could be shared does not necessarily tell a user how much control they have over that sharing. That is the one reasonable out that Facebook has: they can simply point out that the nutrition labels are a worst case and can point users, or reporters or regulators, at the many controls that are available to limit this sharing. Facebook going to war with Apple over this just seems idiotic and bolsters Apple's position more than it probably deserves while increasing media and regulatory scrutiny on themselves much more than would be likely from a drama free response. 

photography guy said:

Wow. Zuckerberg is astonishingly tone-deaf when it comes to discussions of privacy. You know how you can tell when a company is really serious about their customers' privacy? When the freakin' government complains—not in the courts*, but in the media—that the mean ol' company won't give them backdoor access to spy on their customers.

* Yes, the FBI has tried to compel Apple to build in backdoor tech into their devices, but so far the courts have ruled in favour of Apple, if I recall correctly.
Basically a company can't be forced to build tech for the government.

I can't wait for anti-trust rulings force Facebook to let go of WhatsApp and Instagram. I mean, I hope this happens.

Finally, I hate that Apple is always lumped in with Google and Facebook when Big Tech is brought up in discussions/debates about anti-trust and monopoly power. Apple is definitely a major player in consumer tech, but it is by no means a monopoly in any sense of the word. Apple rules its own ecosystem, but nothing more. Google, on the other hand, own the search engine space and have tremendous power over services. Facebook owns social media. Both Google and Facebook use their power to exploit consumers; in fact, in Google and Facebook's business models, the consumer is the product. Apple, on the other hand, uses its power to protect its customers.

I indeed often wonder about this as well. Apple has a vertical monopoly on the iOS ecosystem, but it is much less of a monopoly than any of the game consoles, web apps could be reasonably powerful these days, and you can easily choose not to use Apple's products either collectively or individually. And absolutely none of their products have a particularly huge market share. They deserve anti-trust scrutiny to be sure, and should perhaps be looked at for some of their App Store policies and pricing structures, and their reluctance to improve interoperation with non Apple products deserves much more attention than it currently receives. But, they are the least problematic of the current big consumer tech companies. Amazon, Google, and Facebook are far more problematic across a far greater number of their businesses. At least Netflix is no longer a monopoly concern. Media streaming is now entirely dominated by large companies, but at least there are a half dozen of them. 

Apple does make an absurd percentage of all profits directly from phone sales, but there is no law against that if they are not also the majority of sales. Apple's high prices leave plenty of financial wiggle room for a competitor to beat them with a good enough or better ecosystem at a lower price. The problem there is that Google effectively owns the only viable alternative, and that alternative is almost completely dependent on advertising. That makes Apple's task of maintaining its high margins far too easy. It isn't Apple's fault that the incompetent Steve Ballmer was running Microsoft at the time it could have owned a large piece of this market using a combination of Apple's and Google's approaches. 

Honestly, Facebook should just update the privacy information about their app rather than making getting into a big fight with Apple over it. Then, if the press comes to them about it, Facebook can point out privacy settings you can configure to reduce sharing. 

A low-drama matter-of-fact approach just seems so much more useful to Facebook, as well as all the smaller apps Zuckerberg claims to be fighting for, than this open fight in the media that Facebook can only lose. His audience consists almost entirely of people who don't care that they collect information on them (and wouldn't care about the nutrition labels) or who do care and will be more leery of using Facebook products, and more inclined to use Apple products, or at least look quite favorably at privacy nutrition labels, as a result. I can't imagine how deluded Zuckerberg must be to see his current strategy as having a chance of winning, or even being useful to his interests. He is raising the ire of both users and regulators, and dramatically increasing the visibility and the public and regulator appreciation, of Apple's approach. And for what? 

Then, I don't think I have ever seen much evidence of wisdom in most of Facebook's various strategies. They lucked into a market with a mediocre product that is still kind of mediocre, but that benefited from the actually crappy products that predated them (and News Corp's dramatic missteps). And in social media, a mediocre (but not actually crappy) product that hits the benefit of the network effect earlier beats anything that comes later. 

viclauyyc said:

I am sure this will help FB’s antitrust and privacy case. 

What were they thinking? I thought Mark is a little smarter than this. 

Mark's naïveté about politics and public opinion has always been goofily screwed up. He seems a perfect use case for the saying that you should never underestimate the willful ignorance of someone who's paycheck depends on his continued ignorance. 

That Apple is simply listing how much data the Facebook app can share, and that Facebook is objecting to Apple simply pointing that out, is yet another example of this. Other examples are well scattered through Facebook's history. 

Frankly, I have always been quite underwhelmed by pretty much every aspect of Facebook, including the design and features of its actual product. It is by far the most underwhelming of all the current well-known big tech companies. It is merely proof that in a sufficiently networked world, the network effect wins and entrenches those winners almost no matter how dumb they are. 

I would be surprised if half of Americans actually understand what 5G is or would give them. Mix that with confusing media messages about China taking over 5G and the US fighting back against them over the last three years, along with coverage of anti-5G protesters where you have to read a bit too much of the article to know that it doesn't really exist already, and AT&T literally showing a 5G logo on phones connected to their LTE network, and I would be shocked if even a third of Americans could give an informed opinion on what the state of the 5G world actually is. 

And, exactly why should it matter whether the public understands the nuances between 4G and 5G anyway? This is a matter for tech titans, government regulatory entities, and telco and local government infrastructure investment, who are all tasked with eventually figuring out how to get services to the public that the public will (hopefully) benefit from. All the general public needs to know is that technology is continuing to get better and that the tech and regulatory worlds have to work together to make sure that continues to be the case. 

It would be more interesting if the US general public could be made more aware of the many ways that US tech infrastructure is falling behind much of the world precisely because our tech-regulatory-local-government relationships are so dysfunctional in getting actual tech infrastructure out to all of us, and just how much of that is caused by entrenched tech telco businesses buying off politicians and regulators. Sure, Americans know that corporate America basically owns US governance at all levels, but it isn't clear how many Americans know how much more advanced many other countries are simply because they don't have the US's level and forms of corporate-government corruption.