Ads, Privacy and All That Righteousness

The company so many love to hate, Facebook, recently announced that it would ignore the Do-not-track setting on your browser. It’s easy to see why Facebook would do something that could potentially invite a lot of ire: More tracking -> more knowledge about you -> more relevant ads -> more money from advertisers.

Facebook justified the move by pointing out that “currently there is no industry consensus” on this topic (Twitter and Pinterest honor the setting; while Google and Yahoo do not). To which John Gruber retorted:
““Google does it” is not exactly a badge of honor, privacy-wise.”

It sounded strange to me when Facebook simultaneously said that it will honor the settings to limit ad tracking on iOS and Android devices. Until Gruber pointed out that Facebook is just making a virtue out of necessity:
“On iOS, they have no choice. Apple’s privacy controls are in the hands of the user, not the developer or advertiser. That’s why the whole “Do Not Track” thing for websites is a joke. It’s like putting a “Do Not Burgle” sign on your front door versus installing a lock. (And even if you do install a lock, you can’t trust Google not to pick it.)”
You might have guessed where Gruber stands in the Apple v/s Google wars. (There are even standard derogatory terms that each side’s supporters use for their “opponents”: fanboys and fandroids!)

 Then again, one shouldn’t allow a fanboy to have the last word on a topic like this, should one? And so I turned to Ben Thompson, a guy who praises and criticizes both Apple and Google in his blogs. So is Apple the “good guy” because its policy is “we choose not to retain it (information about you)”? Not so fast, says Thompson:
“You can almost hear it now:How admirable! Golly gee, Apple is such a better company than those hypocritical evil-doers at Google! Why can’t everyone treat customers so well? Apple good. Google bad. Facebook worse.”
But in reality this is why Apple doesn’t store (or use) such information:
“User information of this type isn’t important to Apple’s business model, so they “choose not to retain it.””
In other words, Apple makes money from the sale of their devices. Whereas Google and Facebook make money through ads while giving their services for free.

Maybe the people who scream murder about loss of privacy to the Google’s and Facebook’s of the world should offer to pay for using their services (Facebook, Google search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate, YouTube and that’s just for starters). Yeah, I didn’t think they want to pay either…so it should be free, ads shouldn’t be targeted but somehow the company should make money. Talk about eating your cake and having it too!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more