Facebook today shared its revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s opening remarks focused on Apple’s upcoming anti-detection privacy changes that will affect the advertising industry and companies like Facebook that rely heavily on online advertising .
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As highlighted by The Washington Post, Zuckerberg claims that Apple is changing its privacy policy not to help people, but to promote its own interests.
“Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, which they do on a regular basis,” Zuckerberg said. “They say they do it to help people, but the movements are clearly keeping an eye on their competing interests.”
Zuckerberg said that Facebook considers Apple one of its biggest competitors and claims that the privacy change will help Apple services like iMessage and FaceTime that compete with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
“iMessage plays a key role in their ecosystem,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s pre-installed on every iPhone and they prefer it with private APIs and permissions, which is why iMessage is the most widely used messaging service in the United States.”
Zuckerberg also said once again that Apple’s changes will affect small businesses, which is an allegation that Facebook has relied on while fighting Apple’s planned changes. Facebook has previously published newspaper ads and shared blog posts explaining how Apple’s iOS 14 ad tracking changes will have a “detrimental impact on many small businesses struggling to stay afloat.”
Facebook had previously claimed that Apple’s move was ‘about profit’, and that it would leave apps and websites with no choice but to charge subscription fees or add in-app purchases to make ends meet, leading to increased revenue from the App Store.
Apple is not backing down despite Facebook’s complaints and plans to implement the new tracking rules in the near future. When a requirement is set, programs that track usage through a random ad identifier will require users to ask if they want to share their ad tracking information.
Advertisers use the random ad identifier to present personalized ads and to track ad campaigns, but the advertising industry expects many people to choose not to share this information.
Apple says users should be aware of when their data is collected and shared across other apps and websites, and that they should have the choice to join or withdraw. “We believe it’s an issue to stand up for our users,” Apple said in response to Facebook’s allegations.