Why Is Facebook Launching An All-Out War On Apple's Upcoming iPhone Update? - NPR

Facebook is pushing back on new Apple privacy rules for its mobile devices, this time saying the social media giant is standing up for small businesses in television and radio advertisements and full page newspaper ads.

Facebook is pushing back on new Apple privacy rules for its mobile devices, this time saying the social media giant is standing up for small businesses in television and radio advertisements and full page newspaper ads.

Two titans of Silicon Valley, Facebook and Apple, are in a bitter fight that centers on the iPhone data of millions of people and whether companies should be able to track that data as easily as they do now.

CEO Tim Cook tweeted last month about the need for greater control over data privacy "from safeguarding your health & financial data to guarding against algorithms that perpetuate rampant misinformation.

Some apps, like Facebook, allow for some data tracking to be manually disabled?

Starting sometime early this spring, Apple will require apps to send a push alert where people can either choose to "ask app not to track" or "allow.".

Facebook can continue to track users across apps and websites as before, App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14 will just require that they ask for your permission first.

While Apple CEO Tim Cook has said the move is about giving people more control over data collection practices he sees as intrusive, Facebook officials argue Apple is acting out of self interest.

In an interview with NPR, Facebook's director of privacy and public policy Steve Satterfield said Apple's forthcoming alert is an attempt to undercut the business model used by Facebook and other ad-supported free apps.

A recent study from the group TapResearch found that 55% of people surveyed said they would not let Facebook track them across apps if they were prompted.

And that is the case with Facebook, which compiles its own portrait of its users through granular behavior tracking and also has a lucrative business of selling data to third-parties, like data brokers and advertisers

While Apple has apps that do a fair share of data mining, Apple claims it does not sell that data with third parties

"We have an application like Facebook that's really driven by collecting data, and harnessing the value of that data," said Jordan Fischer, a law professor at Drexel University who follows privacy issues