On your phone – Donald MacKenzie in LRB:

“The mechanics of the advertising of games, apps and other products on phones tell us a lot about the rigours of the digital economy. In the goods economy, some firms advertise simply to keep consumers’ views of their brand well-burnished: a vehicle manufacturer wants to interest you in its cars, but doesn’t expect you instantly to buy one. By contrast, much, perhaps most, advertising on phones is designed to get a ‘direct response’: an immediate goal, or ‘conversion’, in the form of a purchase, a sign-up or subscription, an install of a game.
The work of a games studio, though, isn’t done once someone installs its game on their phone. Its chief concern is likely to be the player’s ‘lifetime value’ (the total revenue they will bring), and whether it will exceed the cost of the advertising that drew them to the game in the first place. There’s a series of ‘app events’, as they are called, that the studio will want to monitor closely. How many people install the game but abandon it before finishing the tutorial? How many keep playing to at least, say, level 5? Above all, how many of them make in-game purchases, and if they do, when, how often and for how much? That said, direct-response advertisers can’t afford to wait too long for lifetime value to become evident: they want to maximise the efficacy of advertising in real time. As one digital advertising specialist puts it, ‘you’ve got these bidders [for advertising opportunities] with machine learning that are saying this segment is working, bid higher here because there are conversions occurring. [All these] automated feedback loops are running.”

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“The hostility arises because Apple’s restrictions on the use of IDFAs imperil the most important method by which sense is made of the app economy’s data icebergs. Apple was able to press ahead nevertheless because, within that economy, it has ‘infrastructural power’. This term, coined by the sociologist Michael Mann in 1984, refers among other things to the leverage that you, or a system you control, can exercise by virtue of being necessary to other people or their systems in doing the things they need to do.
Apple’s engineers write iOS, the operating system that controls every iPhone. All iPhone apps run on iOS, and some of the new privacy policy’s rules are directly embedded in it, making them hard to circumvent. If an app breaks the rules, it also faces the potentially catastrophic penalty of exclusion from another crucial part of the infrastructure, Apple’s App Store. Globally, more people use Android phones than iPhones, but iPhone owners tend to be more affluent and therefore have more money to spend on in-app purchases, and currently most of them can install apps only via the App Store. (This has changed recently in the European Union because of its Digital Markets Act, but it seems likely that most of the EU’s iPhone owners will continue to install their apps through the App Store.)
Facebook’s response to Apple’s new policy was an object lesson in the effectiveness of infrastructural power. At first it protested fiercely, in December 2020 even taking out full-page ads in the Financial Times and New York Times describing the policy as ‘devastating to small businesses’ because it endangered their ‘ability to run personalised ads and reach their customers effectively’.”

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“No access to the ad data on your phone is allowed for 24 hours after it is stored, plus a further randomly varying period of as long as 24 hours, the rationale being to stop exact times being used to match ads up with subsequent actions such as purchases or game installs. Once the 24-48 hours is up, the data is sent from your phone to the relevant advertiser or ad network via an Apple server that ensures the preservation of what Apple calls ‘crowd anonymity’ (a notion that warms my sociologist’s heart). In essence, it means checking that there’s nothing about the data that stands out enough – an unusually big purchase, for example – to make your phone distinguishable from at least a moderately large crowd of other phones. As Seufert puts it, the ad network learns that ‘this campaign delivered an install’ or purchase, but Apple’s system in effect says ‘I won’t tell you who the person is.’ Apple’s preservation of crowd anonymity is a striking reversal of digital advertising’s overall trajectory, which has so far been to tailor advertising to very specific audiences, and ultimately individuals, in contrast to the inherently aggregate viewership of, say, traditional broadcast TV shows. Google is building a broadly analogous set of smartphone de-individualising mechanisms, the Android Privacy Sandbox, though it hasn’t yet committed itself to a launch date.
The second approach to measuring ads’ effectiveness tries more fully to preserve advertisers’ immediate knowledge of your actions. Since IDFAs are usually no longer available, I’m told that this can involve the use instead of Internet Protocol addresses. They’re nothing like a full substitute for IDFAs: when your phone is connected to the internet via a phone network, it may be sharing the network’s local IP address with hundreds or thousands of other phones, and that’s a form of crowd anonymity in itself. When, however, your phone’s connection is via the wifi router in your home, its IPaddress is your router’s address. The crowd is then much smaller: it’s the devices in your household using the same router. I asked one of my contacts whether whale hunting has continued since Apple’s changes. It has, he told me, even if it is now less precise. ‘They used to know that I was a match-three whale,’ he said, ‘but my wife wasn’t, and my two kids’ iPads weren’t. But with IP addresses, they still know my household has one match-three whale in it.’”

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“Tensions such as this haunt our attitudes to the digital economy. We want privacy, but we also want free information and entertainment, the economics of which often depend on targeted advertising. We are excited by the capacities of giant-scale, electricity-hungry artificial intelligence, while also knowing that we have to reduce carbon emissions. We value Big Tech’s sophisticated services and protected digital environments (the App Store, for instance, is good at blocking malware), but we also want to open them up to healthy competition.”

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“This experiment in public policy will have global consequences (Google’s changes will not be restricted to the UK), and it became more complicated in July when Google unexpectedly announced that instead of phasing out tracking cookies, it intends to give Chrome users an as yet unspecified ‘informed choice’ about them. This may also need the approval of the CMA and perhaps the Information Commissioner’s Office too. That’s how it should be. Preserving privacy is often in tension with the fostering of competition, but a productive balance between them is possible, and astute public policy can help find it.”

Read the article here.

The personalized add versus our ideals abour privacy.

Where are the whales? Good question.

A productive balance sounds like another euphemism for blatant cynicism.

What remains is an informed choice.

We know what we need to know about you, in exchange you’ll have an informed choice.