Facebook launched its most direct attack against Apple to date, taking out full-page advertisements in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and rolling out a website highlighting complaints from small-business owners.
The fusillade on Wednesday is aimed at a new privacy policy that was part of Apple’s iOS 14 mobile update, AppTracking Transparency, a framework for any app that “collects data about end users and shares it with other companies for purposes of tracking across apps and web sites,” according to Apple’s developer page. The transparency framework creates tracking authorization requests within apps that users must agree to before the apps can collect data.
“They’re creating a policy — enforced via iOS 14’s AppTrackingTransparency — that’s about profit, not privacy,” Facebook’s Dan Levy, vice president of ads and business products, wrote in a blog post. “It will force businesses to turn to subscriptions and other in-app payments for revenue, meaning Apple will profit and many free services will have to start charging or exit the market.”
I’m pretty certain #Facebook is fighting #Apple to retain access to personal data. #PID #privacy. #fullpagead #wsj pic.twitter.com/029WwaGSs0
— Dave Stangis (@DaveStangis) December 16, 2020
The policy is not yet in effect. Apple planned to roll out the framework with the initial update release in September but has delayed it until early next year, according to the Verge.
Underscoring Facebook’s preemptive attack ads, Levy called the data-tracking request “a discouraging prompt which will hurt [small businesses’] ability to build their businesses” and complained that the decision will hurt businesses “who are already struggling in a pandemic,” forcing them to revamp their advertising budgets and find new revenue streams such as “subscriptions and other in-app payments for revenue” — a portion of which can be taken by Apple.
Facebook also said that Apple’s apps aren’t beholden to the same restrictions that it’s placing on other apps.
“They’re not playing by their own rules,” Levy wrote. “Apple’s own personalized ad platform isn’t subject to the new iOS 14 policy.”
Apple did not immediately respond to comment but has defended itself against similar critiques from Facebook in the past. In November, Apple sent a letter to human rights and privacy organizations explaining its decision to delay the transparency framework and ripping other tech companies who were opposed to the move.
“Facebook and others have a very different approach to targeting. Not only do they allow the grouping of users into smaller segments, they use detailed data about online browsing activity to target ads,” Apple wrote in the letter obtained by Bloomberg. “Facebook executives have made clear their intent is to collect as much data as possible across both first and third party products to develop and monetize detailed profiles of their users, and this disregard for user privacy continues to expand to include more of their products.”
Facebook also noted that “there will be an impact to Facebook’s diversified ads business.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Facebook for further comment.
