Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the 56th Munich Security Conference in Munich, southern Germany, on February 15, 2020.
Christof Stache | AFP | Getty Images
Facebook on Monday will begin asking some iPhone and iPad users to let the company track their activities so that the social media giant can show them more personalized ads.
The move comes along with Apple’s planned privacy update for iOS 14, which will inform users of this type of tracking and ask if they want to allow it.
The two companies have been in conflict for a decade and have recently been involved in a heated war of words over these privacy changes. Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Apple one of its biggest competitors and said changes in privacy would hamper the growth of “millions of companies worldwide”. The next day, Apple CEO Tim Cook alluded to Facebook in a speech at a data privacy conference in Brussels, saying, “If a company is based on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are not choices, it doesn’t deserve our praise. It deserves contempt.
The battle focuses on a unique device identifier on each iPhone and iPad, called IDFA. Companies that sell mobile ads, including Facebook, use this ID to help target ads and estimate their effectiveness.
With a future update to iOS 14, each app that wants to use these identifiers will ask users to choose to track when the app is launched for the first time. If users give up, these ads are much less effective. Facebook warned investors that these impending changes could hurt their advertising business as early as this quarter.
Facebook is testing the effects of this update now, before Apple makes it mandatory for all applications earlier this spring.
As part of this test, Facebook will start showing some users its own prompts starting on Monday, explaining why it wants to track this activity and asking users to accept it. These prompts will appear on Apple users’ screens just before Apple’s pop-up looks.
A trial version of the Facebook prompt has a bold header asking “Allow Facebook to use your application and website activity?” and claims that Facebook uses this information to “provide a better ad experience”. It will then offer users a choice between “Do not allow” and “Allow”. (The precise language and appearance of the Facebook prompt may vary.)
No matter what selection users make at the Facebook prompt, if they decide not to allow tracking on Apple’s pop-up, that choice will be final and Facebook will respect it.
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