Never afraid of a challenge, Facebook appears to have embarked on a campaign to convince the world to hate Apple, love targeted advertising, and believe the social network when it says it is doing it all out of a desire to defend small businesses.
On Wednesday, the company launched a series of full-page newspaper adverts and a press conference where the company put forward small businesses who said they relied on app-tracking to find customers. It also announced it would be siding with the Fortnite developer Epic Games in the latter’s lawsuit over control of the iOS App Store.
The point of contention is a feature coming to iPhones in the new year that will require developers to ask for permission before they can track what users do across apps. Apple says the feature, which was originally slated for launch in October before being delayed in order to allow advertisers time to cope, is necessary to protect user privacy; it comes alongside a number of similar changes in new versions of iOS, such as a requirement that app developers provide a “nutritional label” for their software to explain what they do with user data.
Apple accuses Facebook of ‘disregard for user privacy’
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Facebook objects – but seems keen to stress it is not doing so because it is defending its bottom line. According to its pitch, the real victims are “your neighbourhood coffee brewery, your friend who owns their own retail business, your cousin who started an event planning service and the game developers who build the apps you use for free”.
“Yes, there will be an impact to Facebook’s diversified ads business,” said Dan Levy, the company’s head of ads and business products, “but it will be much less than what will befall small businesses, and we’ve already been factoring this into our expectations for the business.”
On Wednesday, the company held a press conference with two such businesses: a burger company in Charleston, South Carolina, and a coffee shop in San Francisco. “Covid has wreaked havoc on not only my small business but millions of small businesses around the world,” Monique Wilsondebriano from Charleston told the event. “I would say to Apple, ‘Give us a chance. If this happens, I will not have a business. It will be very hard to survive.’”
Facebook was vague on how the specific change proposed by Apple would affect businesses like Wilsondebriano’s. The iPhone manufacturer is specifically seeking to make it harder for developers to track users across multiple apps without consent: it has no proposal, yet, to prevent Facebook from selling targeted advertising relying on demographic data harvested from its own social network.
However, Levy argued that the point was to defend all such advertising. “Folks should go study Apple policies, because this is about control of the entire internet,” he said. “This is about a long-term view that is about anti-personalised advertising, and we think is trying to take the world back 10 or 20 years.”
Beyond its bold public statement, Facebook seems to have a slim plan for action. Levy said the company would side with Epic Games in a separate lawsuit against Apple, “providing relevant information … regarding how Apple’s policies have adversely impacted Facebook and the people and businesses who use our services. It is critical for the court to understand the broader implications of the unfair policies that Apple imposes on iOS developers, among many other businesses.”
But ultimately Levy admits Facebook is planning to show Apple’s prompt that asks for tracking permission. “We have no choice if we want our app to be available in the App Store. But it doesn’t have to be this way.”
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