Facebook today shared its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2020, and the opening comments from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg focused on Apple’s upcoming anti-tracking privacy changes that will impact the advertising industry and companies like Facebook who rely heavily on online advertising.
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As highlighted by The Washington Post, Zuckerberg said Apple is changing its privacy policy not to help people, but to promote its own interests.
“Apple has every incentive to use its dominance on the platform to interfere with the way our apps and other apps work, which they do regularly,” said Zuckerberg. “They say they are doing this to help people, but the movements clearly track their competitive interests.”
Zuckerberg said Facebook sees Apple as one of its biggest competitors, claiming that privacy changes will help Apple services like iMessage and FaceTime, which compete with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
“IMessage is a key element of its ecosystem,” said Zuckerberg. “It comes pre-installed on every iPhone and they prefer it with APIs and private permissions, which is why iMessage is the most used messaging service in the United States”
Zuckerberg also said again that Apple’s changes will impact small businesses, which is a statement that Facebook has supported while campaigning against the changes planned by Apple. Facebook has already published ads in newspapers and shared blog posts explaining how changes in Apple’s iOS 14 ad tracking will have a “detrimental impact on many small businesses that are struggling to stay afloat.”
Facebook previously said that Apple’s move is “about profit” and that it will leave apps and websites with no choice but to charge subscription fees or add in-app purchases to pay the bills, leading to an increase in App Store revenue.
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 made, applications that track usage using a random advertising identifier will need to ask users if they want to share their information for the purpose of tracking ads.
Advertisers use the random advertising identifier to serve personalized ads and track advertising 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 being collected and shared on other applications and websites and should have the option to accept or cancel. “We believe it is a matter of defending our users,” said Apple in response to Facebook’s claims.