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!

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