Why Facebook Is Not A Fan Of Apple's New Privacy Feature In iOS 14

How does it feel when someone interferes with your area of interest and starts speaking on your behalf without your consent? Well, that is disturbing! Facebook Inc FB is somewhat in a similar situation.

The iPhone users of Apple Inc's AAPL new operating system iOS 14, introduced in June, receive a message related to Facebook, but Facebook hasn’t sent that message, rather the message is from Apple asking the users whether they want to allow Facebook to track their data over other apps and websites.

However, this is not just for Facebook only. Apple's new privacy feature applies to every app that runs on iOS 14. But Facebook is fuming and publicly sparring with Apple, stating that it's a direct assault on its business. It even ran full-page ads in national newspapers and did a months-long campaign against Apple.

Apple Introduces iOS 14, Why Facebook Is Fuming

Facebook has an extremely profitable business model for which tracking users' data is important. It collects information about the browsing interests of its 2.8 billion monthly users, and based on that information Facebook facilitates other businesses to run targeted (personalized) ads on the social network. This is the source of its $86 billion in annual revenue. Certainly, Facebook is insecure and fuming about iOS14's new feature, as it will give users the control to stop Facebook from tracking their data.

Facebook says that data tracking is helpful for businesses, especially the small businesses that don't have heavy budgets for advertising. Facebook's targeted ads help small businesses to directly reach out to the right set of interested prospects. In August 2020, Facebook fired its first shot at Apple through a post on its corporate blog that stated iOS 14 would hurt advertisers.

Apple's CEO Tim Cook has positioned this iOS update as a necessary improvisation to protect consumer privacy. In his words "users should have a voice over the data that is being collected about them and how it's used." But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is of completely different views, saying "Apple may say that they're doing this to help people, but the moves clearly track their competitive interests" during Facebook's fourth-quarter earnings call in January.

As per Facebook allegations, changes in iOS are "about profit, not privacy." How? Dan Levy, who runs Facebook's ad business, said the new iOS update would force apps to take up in-app purchases and subscription fees to make up for lost revenue, which would in turn generate revenue for Apple as it can take a cut of up to 30% of in-app purchases.

But Tim Cook continues to argue that Apple is not using its customers as its products to make money. The new updates are to increase the transparency of user-data collection and give users more control over what data is being collected from them.

And taking a thinly veiled jab at Facebook's allegations, Cook said "If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform." What he meant is that Apple is not stopping Facebook from tracking users' data. It will still be able to collect its users' data, just that it has to ask them and get their consent.

Final Words - How This Change Affect the Users?

Who is right here? Both Facebook and Apple have a moral high ground in this situation. While Apple is defending consumer privacy, Facebook is standing for small businesses against large monopolies. Facebook has always asked its users if it can track their web activities (remember the terms and conditions page that you agree to while downloading the app). But now, post-Apple's new privacy control, it will become easy for users to opt-out of tracking.

In an attempt to overcome this new-found challenge, the social network has started testing a pop-up screen in the app asking people to stay opted in so that instead of getting bombarded with random ads, they get to see the ads of the products or services that they might be actually looking for.

So in the end for a user, opting out of data tracking will bring to you less relevant ads, and from a privacy angle, you will have a clearer idea of which apps are tracking your browsing activities. 

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