The fourth-quarter earnings conference call from Facebook introduced CEO Mark Zuckerberg, citing Apple’s iOS 14 moves, saying the iPhone maker was “one of our biggest competitors” and questioning the reasons.
Yes folks, Facebook’s Zuckerberg was a bit pro wrestling (at least for tech CEOs not named Larry Ellison) with his confrontation with Apple.
Zuckerberg has a reason for being a little out of shape. Facebook said its future results could be hurt by privacy changes on Apple’s iOS 14. Zuckerberg argued that Apple’s changes are aimed at benefiting iMessage and harming small businesses.
Here are Zuckerberg’s comments in full:
WhatsApp, and the direction we’re taking with Messenger, are the best private social apps available. We now have many competitors who make privacy claims that are often misleading. Now, Apple recently launched so-called nutrition labels, which focus primarily on the metadata that apps collect, rather than the privacy and security of people’s real messages. But iMessage stores unintended encrypted backups of your messages by default, unless you disable iCloud. Therefore, Apple and governments have the ability to access messages from most people. So when it comes to what matters most, protecting people’s messages, I think WhatsApp is clearly superior. Now, as I try to use these earnings calls to discuss aspects of the business strategy that I think are important for investors to understand, I want to point out that we increasingly see Apple as one of our biggest competitors. IMessage is the key piece of your ecosystem. It comes pre-installed on all iPhone, and they prefer it with APIs and private permissions, which is why iMessage is the most used messaging service in the United States. services against us and other developers. Therefore, Apple has every incentive to use its dominant position on the platform to interfere with the way our apps and other apps work, which they regularly do to prefer their own. And this impacts the growth of millions of businesses worldwide, including with the upcoming changes to iOS 14, many small businesses will no longer be able to reach their customers with targeted ads. Now Apple can say that it is doing this to help people, but the movements clearly track its competitive interests. And I think that this dynamic is important for people to understand, because we and others will face it in the near future. Now, our messaging services continue to grow, but it’s an uphill battle, and our services just need to be much better as private social platforms to be successful.
Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, noted that Facebook will find ways to amplify stories about small businesses concerned about Apple’s iOS changes.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook did not address Facebook by name, but maintained the company’s approach to privacy. Cook said:
Tomorrow is International Privacy Day and we continue to set new standards to protect users’ right to privacy, not just for our own products, but to be the wave that drives the entire industry. More recently, we are in the process of rolling out new requirements across the App Store ecosystem that provide users with more knowledge and new tools to control the ways applications collect and share their personal data.