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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said to employees close to him, “We need to inflict pain” on Apple for the comments of Apple CEO Tim Cook, who Zuckerberg described as “extremely superficial”.
This and other insights into an ongoing divide between the two companies appeared in a report in The Wall Street Journal this weekend. The article indicates that, based on firsthand reports, Zuckerberg considered Cook’s and Apple’s public criticisms of Facebook’s privacy policies, direct or indirect, as personal affront.
For example, Cook publicly responded to Facebook’s 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying that such a scandal would never happen to Apple because Apple does not treat its customers as 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 comments that led Zuckerberg to see Apple as an opponent.
Before that, in 2017, Zuckerberg and Cook met to try to soften an already bitter relationship, the article says, but the meeting “resulted in a tense stalemate”. Since then, the relationship has continued to go sour.
Disputes rose to prominence last year when Apple announced plans to require iOS apps to ask users for permission to track them with IDFA (ID For Advertisers) tags on apps and websites. The policy change is already reflected in Apple’s terms of service for application developers, but will not be applied until early spring, after the release of iOS 14.5.
Facebook, whose business model and competitive advantage depends on this type of tracking, responded by telling investors to expect revenue to drop – and by running full-page ads in newspapers declaring that the change would hurt small businesses.
In addition, Facebook has explored filing a lawsuit against Apple, claiming that the smartphone manufacturer’s policies are anti-competitive.
The Wall Street Journal story also notes that Facebook directly helped Epic Games’ battle with Apple in a separate, but loosely related, battle over Apple’s control over its App Store and that Facebook has “waged a campaign against Apple. Apple “with government officials and antitrust regulators.
Apple tried to position itself as the Big Tech company on the privacy side because its business model is not based on tracking like Facebook or Google.
But there are also other dimensions at play. Cook and Zuckerberg said they see augmented and mixed reality as “the next computing platform”, and Facebook and Apple are on a path to compete more directly with their products in the future.
Facebook has agreed to follow Apple’s rules that require user acceptance for tracking in its iOS apps, but has tested ways to avoid the request required by Apple in order to get users to accept.
Meanwhile, the two companies are subject to extensive lawsuits and investigations, alleging anti-competitive behavior, although the majority for very different reasons.