Apple's push to require
app developers to request permission before they're able to track you across the internet is here. On Monday,
the company released iOS 14.5, the update that includes what Apple has positioned as an effort to protect users' data.
Over the past few months, Facebook has mounted a
full-court press in an attempt to sway public opinion about the change. It has accused Apple of harming small businesses, and even threatening the open internet. At one point, Facebook's criticism got to the point that
even the company's employees thought it went too far.
AppsFlyer, an ad attribution measurement firm, says that the average opt-in rate in its testing is
around 26 percent. That means that almost three-quarters of users are likely to opt out of allowing Facebook and other apps to track their activity.
Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, told The Wall Street Journal that the company's goal is to
"give users a choice." Those four words are at the core of the problem with the position Facebook has taken since Apple announced the changes last year at its developer conference.
Apple thinks you should have a choice because that's the best thing for users. Facebook, on the other hand, is worried that if you have a choice, you'll choose not to let it track you, which would be bad for Facebook. The social media giant literally
doesn't want you to have a choicebecause it's more concerned about what's good for Facebook than what's good for users.
A piece from
The New York Times this week details how the relationship between the companies' CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook, became so sour. Cook reportedly told Zuckerberg in 2019 that the only way for Facebook to contain the fallout from a series of privacy concerns was to "delete any information that it had collected about people outside of its core apps."
Clearly, Facebook wasn't interested then in letting go of the information that is the lifeblood of its business model, and the same thing is true now. Every user that opts out of tracking is a user whose data Facebook is no longer able to collect in order to prove the value of its personalized ads.
Every business makes decisions based on what is best for the bottom line and stakeholders, but Facebook has shown that it's willing to do it even if it's problematic for users.
Facebook argues that personalized ads are better for those users. Except, if that were true, Facebook would have nothing to worry about. If people genuinely felt that exchanging their personal information for ads about the things they look at online was a good deal, they wouldn't opt out.
That, however, isn't what people think. People think targeted ads are creepy. They dream up conspiracies about how Facebook must be listening to their conversations. That should be enough to convince even the most die-hard true believer that Facebook has a problem.
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