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Facebook today warned advertisers that Apple's upcoming anti-tracking tools could cause a more than 50 percent drop in Audience Network publisher revenue due to the removal of personalization from ads within apps.
MacRumors quotes Facebook:
despite our best efforts, [privacy changes] may render Audience Network so ineffective on โiOS 14โ that it may not make sense to offer it on โiOS 14โ in the future.
I still think in 100 years weโll feel weird if people donโt know where we are all the time, maybe even with video, but my reaction today remains QQ.
I couldn't figure out what about Giphy was worth $400 million, especially since its search seems so bad recently, and too many results are themselves the results of marketing campaigns or similar.
UPDATE: There are exceptions to the $99 developer fee, for nonprofit organizations in five countries:
You can request to have the 99 USD annual membership fee waived if youโre a nonprofit organization, accredited educational institution, or government entity that will distribute only free apps on the App Store and is based in an eligible country. Apple will review your request and contact you to let you know whether your request is approved.
Eligible countries: Brazil, China, Japan, United Kingdom, United States.
Itโd be interesting to know how many of these waivers have been granted.
I've done some app work for a non-profit, and it's the only reason I have a dev account. Looks like I need to start the ball rolling on this, though I'm guessing it'll take long enough I'll still shell out $99 later this month for the upcoming year.
Facebook's executive team, including Mark Zuckerberg, used the data of Facebook users as leverage over partner companies, according to leaked emails, webchats, presentations, spreadsheets, and more obtained by NBC News.
More than 4,000 pages of leaked documents from 2011 to 2015 provide insight into how Facebook was taking advantage of user data while publicly promising to protect user privacy before and after its 2015 move to end broad access to user data.
On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.
And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP addressโโโonce every five minutes.
This is all going on via Background App Refresh. You can see which apps have this permission on your iOS device in Settings: General: Background App Refresh (itโs the 8th item in General in iOS 12).
Note to self: Turn off Yelp background refresh. Actually, turn it off for everything that doesn't have a clear reason to have it.
Sign-in with Apple sounds wonderful. It’s interesting to compare it to the original goals of Microsoft Passport.
When Apple has to make a difficult decision regarding an app in the App Store, its fate is determined in a meeting of a group called the Executive Review Board or ERB, led by Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller.
...
The Executive Review Board meets once per week and discusses controversial apps or iPhone apps that might be infringing on App Store guidelines, and it has the final word on whether an app can stay on the store or if it's going to be removed.
Nothing really to say here. It’s a bizarre process that you can’t ever get right.
Apple has filed a response to Spotify's anticompetitive complaint about the App Store in Europe, noting that Spotify pays Apple a 15 percent commission for only about 0.5 percent of its paying subscribers, according to CNET.
That figure equates to around 680,000 users who subscribed to Spotify through its iOS app, via Apple's in-app purchase system, between 2014 and 2016. This is because Apple only collects a 30 percent commission for the first year of a subscription, at which point the fee drops to 15 percent.
Huh? So what’s the percentage for subscribers paying 30%? What percentage of Spotify subscribers are still on recurring iOS subscriptions?
What absolutely crap numbers from Apple that have very little to do with Spotify’s current position.
Also interesting: The people who posted in that thread that without an in-iOS option, they couldn’t have access. Do parents have an option for “all you can eat in-app payments” or something this kids can access?
While the current Mac Pro has been manufactured in Texas since it was released in 2013, The Wall Street Journal reports that the new Mac Pro unveiled earlier this month will be assembled by Quanta Computer in China.
It’s a shame Apple can’t find a way to eat enough profit to manufacture at least some Mac Pros, an item starting at $7k, in the US.
UPDATE: My best guess, and a few readers have made the same guess, is that I donโt see ads on Instagram because I donโt have a Facebook account.
Strikes me as an odd missed use case, unless it's more happy-path-only QA testing we've unfortunately come to expect from Apple too often lately.
I mean, honestly, picture viewing can be used are just like any other set of data points. If he's viewed pictures by anyone else who is Facebooked in, you've got a good starting place. If he's in his own Facebookless circle of schmoes, just drop in adverts for Coke or something similarly universal-ish.
Weird. Can you really inhabit a set for which Facebook has no targeted ads? Did they really not have any concept of untargeted ads to serve up for the null set? Hard to believe.
Just caught the "Memorable Status Updates" widget on Facebook as I replied to a message, sitting there on the right side of the page. A quick Google gave this...
Facebook appears to be testing a reincarnation of memorable stories, which appeared a couple of times on the site and then disappeared.
The feature first showed up on December 16 for only about an hour, came back on January 12 and vanished at some point thereafter.
Now itโs back and this time around, the feature has the label memorable status updates, and instead of showing you some of your own content, instead you see something from one of your friends. ... And perhaps I got an odd selection, but relative to each friend shown, the status updates werenโt the ones theyโd consider most memorable. And they werenโt ones that got the most likes nor comments. (emphasis mine)
The disconcerting thing to me is that my list was of a friend who was telling of her mother going off of life support, "ready to see jesus" (I think that's, if anything, more of that incredibly personal narrative than I should be sharing). Good heavens, really? What is Facebook trying to do here? What are the metrics for a "memorable" update?
I might guess that it's based on the number of people who went to your profile page after reading the update. One thing that this certainly tells you is that Facebook is measuring everything, and constantly trying to figure out new ways of processing what it means to be human through back-end algorithms.
Wow, some of the comments to the above article are just as interesting.
I want to block my own past status updates. The past no longer matters. I hope this is an option.
Yes. Just noticed it. Was a little disconcerted because the first friend whose "memorable status updates" I saw is in very ill health and for a minute I was worried he had died and this was some sort of memorial feature.
Yep - not memorable ... and most importantly, did not include anything to do with "me". It's in the past, has nothing to do with me, and is totally random. cannot see benefit.
How do I turn it off????
Don't like it - the people they put on my page I haven't really interacted with much...
Agree with several folks - past is NOT relevant and should not be dredged up. We should have an option to block our past posts from appearing.
They need to give us a way to control whose updates we are seeing. I don't want to see the statuses of people I've hidden in my feed. That's the whole point of hiding them.
There's a group (linked to by that last comment) that's asking that Facebook "lose memorable stories or give us control". Ten likes.
Honestly, that people are wrapped up in the "me" and "now" and don't realize that everything you do on Facebook, even what you erase, is probably in a giant RDBMS farm somewhere (with couples doubles on tape and another server or 10) forever isn't quite down with the FB.
(apologies for not quite getting the "couples doubles" clip from Bedazzled. It comes a few minutes after the stables quote.)
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