When a person who does not know how to swim goes into a pool for the first time, the way they flutter their arms and try to come out of the water is exactly how Facebook is behaving right now!
Facebook’s rivalry with Apple is not new. Back in 2018, Apple CEO Tim Cook had criticized the social platform for being a users’ privacy thief because of its intrusive user data collection and ad tracking tools. Now, Apple, the world’s ‘privacy champion’ is trying to sabotage ad targeting that Facebook and many other platforms commit to generate millions of revenues from ad sales, and Facebook is leaving no stone unturned to pressure Apple to not do this.
The Bone of Contention: Apple’s IDFA for iOS 14
Online advertisement is an important source of revenue for various sites, apps, and platforms like Facebook. For Facebook especially it has proved to be an important source of income. This year only, the social giant is expected to generate more than $80 billion of revenue through ad sales alone.
What Facebook and others do is that they use third-party trackers to collect information about people all over the world who visit different sites. These trackers present this data to Facebook, and this gives Facebook knowledge about the likes and dislikes of people. Then, based on this data, it targets those people with personalized ads based on their interests and their browsing history of most visited sites, most-searched items, their shopping sites, etc. Websites also use cookies and other tracking tools to do the same thing.
With Facebook, it’s a mutually beneficial activity. SMBs use its platform to showcase their products and services, and Facebook’s tracking tools and ad targeting measures help them connect with their potential clients.
On the other hand, Apple is against personalized ad targeting and says that customers should be given a choice to see those ads or block them. So, to bring this notion into practice, Apple announced a while ago about its new ‘Identifier for Ads’ feature in iOS 14 that basically lets the users opt-in or opt-out of ad targeting.
In the second week of December, Apple announced some changes that will be coming soon to this IDFA feature which will make ad targeting more difficult. The users will be directly shown a prompt that will allow them to choose to either accept or reject any form of data tracking from any site or app.
Now, Facebook is very angry with this. Of course, it will affect its business and revenues, but it is now creating huge mayhem about Apple’s monopoly and anti-competitive behavior.
To further raise its point, Facebook has begun a ‘Speak Up for Small Businesses’ campaign through a newly launched web page, and even went to extremes like posting large-sized ads in all the major US news publications.
In an internal meeting, many employees of Facebook have raised criticism and questions
The majority of Facebook’s employees are not happy with this campaign. They call it self-serving and hypocritical. Some of them even raised points that such negative PR efforts will tarnish Facebook’s image in the public eye as people will think that Facebook does not want any transparency for them and wants to find creepy ways to keep tracking them! Some people think that Facebook is just using the problem of SMBs to protect its own business and serve its own purpose.
Facebook is Not Entirely Wrong Though!
Apple is trying to portray that it is thinking in the consumers’ interest, but Facebook is trying to bring the reality of Apple out too.
Currently, because of ads, many sites and apps provide free service to the users because they earn through these ads. Now, when the ad-tracking will be taken away from these sites and apps, to earn money, they will start applying subscription charges and in-app fees. On the App Store, Apple takes a 30% commission from all the in-app fees and charges. So, Facebook’s point is that by forcing the sites and apps, it will all inadvertently benefit Apple a lot!
Another important point to remember is that the IDFA feature will not impact Apple’s personalized ad platform. So, it will not face the blow of this action that Facebook and all the other SMBs, advertisers, and developers will have to endure.
Hence, Facebook’s campaign may look very desperate and camouflaged with a hidden underlying ego-maniacal agenda, but it is not entirely wrong too. Apple is indeed using its power and influence in the digital world and trying to monopolize the market.
I’m Ava Paul, an experienced news website author with a special focus on the entertainment section. Over the past five years, I have worked in various positions of media and communication at World Stock Market. My experience has given me extensive knowledge in writing, editing, researching and reporting on stories related to the entertainment industry.
