Win McNamee / Getty Images
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees near him: “We need to hurt Apple” for comment by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who described Zuckerberg as “extremely slippery”.
These and other insights into a continuing rift between the two companies appeared in a report in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend. The article indicates that based on first-hand reports, Zuckerberg views the public criticism of Cook and Apple on Facebook’s privacy policies, either directly or indirectly, as personal.
Cook, for example, publicly reacted to Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 by saying that such a scandal would never happen to Apple because Apple does not treat its customers like products. When asked what he would do in Zuckerberg’s position, he said: ‘I would not be in this situation, calling Facebook’s approach’ an invasion of privacy. ‘That was one of the remarks that led Zuckerberg to view Apple as an opponent.
Before that, in 2017, Zuckerberg and Cook met to try to forge an already sour relationship, the article reads, but the meeting “led to a strained deviation.” Since then, the relationship has continued to sour.
The controversy became a new trend last year when Apple announced that it had to ask permission from iOS applications to detect it with IDFA (Advertiser ID) tags in various applications and websites. The change in policy is already reflected in Apple’s terms of service for app developers, but will not be implemented until early spring, after the release of iOS 14.5.
Facebook, whose business model and competitive advantage rely on this kind of tracking, responded by telling investors to expect declining revenue – and by having full-page newspaper ads state that the change would hurt small businesses.
Furthermore, Facebook has investigated the filing of a lawsuit against Apple, claiming that the smartphone maker’s policy is not competitive.
The Wall Street Journal story also notes that Facebook helped Epic Games’ fight against Apple directly over a separate but loosely related fight over Apple’s grip on its App Store and that Facebook campaigned against Apple with government officials and antitrust regulators. .
Apple has tried to position itself as the Big Tech company on the side of privacy because its business model is not built on the track like Facebook’s or Google’s.
But other dimensions also play a role. Both Cook and Zuckerberg said they see augmented and mixed reality as ‘the next computing platform’, and Facebook and Apple are on track to compete more directly with their products in the future.
Facebook has agreed to follow Apple’s rules that require users to act for the detection in its iOS applications, but they have tested ways to advance the Apple-required instruction to set the case to users to log in.
Meanwhile, both companies are subject to wide-ranging lawsuits and investigations into competitive conduct, though mostly for many different reasons.