Today, Facebook began testing the directions to iPhone and iPad users on the importance of being tracked through the social network for the benefit of small businesses using the advertising tools.
The test responds to Apple’s plan to require users to detect IDFA (Advertiser ID) in all iOS, iPadOS and tvOS applications, with new software updates expected in the spring.
According to CNBC, Facebook will precede Apple’s required pop-up with its own on affected devices. The message from Facebook is meant to persuade users not to choose from the detection.
Apple has already announced that, with the upcoming software releases, apps that IDFAs use to track users on various apps and websites should show a pop-up that says: ‘Facebook wants permission to track you in apps and websites you own through other companies. ‘
There is also a brief blurb from the app maker to fix the issue within this confirmation field (Facebook goes with “It enables Facebook to give you a better advertising experience”). This is followed by two choices: “Ask the app not to detect” and “Allow tracking.”
The Facebook app on iOS and iPadOS will serve this required dialog, but Facebook is testing another message that will appear before users see the message. In the copy obtained by CNBC, it reads:
Allow Facebook to use your app and website activity?
- Get more personalized ads
- Support businesses that rely on advertising to reach customers
To provide a better advertising experience, we need permission to use future activities that other applications and websites send to us from this device. It does not give us access to new types of information.
The sample language we have here may not be final, and Facebook may be able to test multiple versions of the message to determine which approaches are most effective at keeping users tracked.
Facebook previously bought a full-page newspaper ad with similar messages, arguing that the change would be particularly negative for local businesses as they struggle during the pandemic. “Apart from harming apps and websites, many people in the small business community say that this change will also be devastating for them, at a time when they are facing enormous challenges,” it reads. “Small businesses deserve to be heard. We stand before Apple for our small business customers and our communities.”
Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on the company’s quarterly returns that they would soon expect a diminished advertising revenue from the company due to Apple’s policy change, as many, if not most users, it would prefer to offer the choice. He also claims that Apple’s intent to require IDF tracking from users is one of the many examples of Apple using competitive and monopolistic practices.
The same week, a report was published in The Information outlining Facebook’s plan to file an antitrust lawsuit against Apple over this issue, as well as alleged preferential status that Apple gives to its iMessage platform (a rival of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp owned by Facebook). on iOS and iPadOS.
Also the same week, Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered a keynote address at a data privacy conference in Brussels in which he claimed that companies like Facebook ‘were built on misleading users, on data mining, on choices that are not choices at all. not ‘, and that business models like Facebook bear the cost of’ polarization, of lost trust and, yes, of violence ‘.
Apple plans to launch the opt-in notification in all apps using IDFAs sometime this spring, and Facebook plans to honor the choices of iOS and iPadOS users once made – at least, as long as Apple’s policies it does not get overturned in a brooding storm of antitrust complaints.