The fight between Apple and Facebook continues to heat up as the former continues to push privacy updates that affect the later. Apple is set to release a slew of new privacy features to its iPhone and iPad customers in early 2021. The new update will allow users to disable tracking features in apps individually.
The social networking giant Facebook has come out hard against Apple for planning to release the set of privacy updates next year. Facebook continues to say that the majority of the businesses, especially small businesses, will be largely affected if tracking is disabled. Tracking allows apps (companies) to offer personalized ads based on the activity of the user.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said,”Facebook has recently launched a campaign touting itself as the protector of small businesses. This is a laughable attempt from Facebook to distract you from its poor track record of anticompetitive behavior and privacy issues as it tries to derail pro-privacy changes from Apple that are bad for Facebook’s business.”
Facebook makes money from ads and when Apple releases its privacy features, the company will be affected at some scale. The company took two full page ads in major newspapers in the United States criticizing Apple’s upcoming privacy features.
Requiring trackers to request your consent before stalking you across the Internet should be an obvious baseline, and we applaud Apple for this change. But Facebook, having built a massive empire around the concept of tracking everything you do by letting applications sell and share your data across a shady set of third-party companies, would like users and policymakers to believe otherwise.
Facebook touts itself in this case as protecting small businesses, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook has locked them into a situation in which they are forced to be sneaky and adverse to their own customers. The answer cannot be to defend that broken system at the cost of their own users’ privacy and control.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
