Facebook And Apple’s War Over Your Data: Here’s What You Need To Know

Conservative News DailyMay 27, 2021

Two Big Tech giants, Facebook and Apple, are currently at war over your privacy and access to your data.

The core of this ongoing tug-of-war over privacy and access relates to Apple’s newest operating system, iOS 14.5, which launched in late April. The primary element of the latest Apple software update is to actively challenge the data tracking used by companies like Facebook and Google to develop deeply-accurate customer profiles to enable profitable features such as targeted advert placement.

As explained by CNET, once users update their Apple products to use iOS 14.5, they’ll be asked “whether they consent to having their activity tracked across apps and websites they use.”

“Facebook will begin including a message in its app to explain what it uses this tracking for, but it has also started a campaign pushing back against Apple’s approach,” noted CNET. In late 2020, Facebook criticized Apple’s proposals, running an advertisement claiming that Apple’s changes would hurt consumers and small businesses by making “the internet much more expensive.”

“Take your favorite cooking sites or sports blogs,” the advert said. “Most are free because they show advertisements. Apple’s change will limit their ability to run personalized ads. To make ends meet, many will have to start charging you subscription fees or adding more in-app purchases, making the internet much more expensive and reducing high-quality free content.”

“Every business starts with an idea, and being able to share that idea through personalized ads is a game changer for small businesses,” Facebook also said in a blog post in February. “Limiting the use of personalized ads would take away a vital growth engine for businesses.”

Speaking with The New York Times, Apple CEO Tim Cook described Facebook’s complaints as “flimsy arguments.”

“I think that you can do digital advertising and make money from digital advertising without tracking people when they don’t know they’re being tracked,” Cook said.

The feud between the two tech giants continued in late April. “Facebook shared a copy of the alert it’ll tell users Apple ‘requires’ as part of its new privacy push, while Apple released a video on YouTube saying it’s fighting against ‘apps that have trackers embedded in them that take more data than they need,’” CNET noted.

In recent years, Tim Cook has presented user privacy as a central element of the company’s business strategy. Writing for Time Magazine in 2019, Cook stated, “it’s time to stand up for the right to privacy — yours, mine, all of ours. Consumers shouldn’t have to tolerate another year of companies irresponsibly amassing huge user profiles, data breaches that seem out of control and the vanishing ability to control our own digital lives.”

With Facebook and Apple two of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations, however, it remains to be seen whether Cook’s push for “privacy” is motivated entirely by a concern for user data safety. Given that Facebook and Apple are fierce rivals in the arena of Big Tech, and that it is widely acknowledged that both Cook and Zuckerberg have had heated interactions in the past, it seems unlikely that Cook’s primary concern is the safety of user data. Instead, it’s far more likely that the move toward “privacy” is one weapon of attack against one of Apple’s largest competitors, Facebook.

After all, this is the same Apple who “ceded legal ownership of its customers’ data” to the communist regime in China. Privacy only counts, it seems, when it can be used to Apple’s advantage.

Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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