Ali Hasan
2 Big, Giant, MNCs fighting against each other. What a Historic Battle this could be and it could also turn into a War. The world is going to witness a once in a lifetime match between 2 heavyweights one more time.
Your contenders are as follows:-
- On one side is Apple which was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. It’s The Most Valuable Company in the world in terms of Market Capitalization which is around $2.24 trillion.
- On the other side is Facebook which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. It’s The Biggest Network of Social Media in the world and has a Market Capitalization of $761.63 billion.
Now we will get straight to the main issue because of which these 2 Goliaths are fighting each other. The feud is regarding User Privacy and Restrictions that are imposed by iOS 14. The shocking aspect of this battle is that Facebook’s own employees have apparently sided with Apple.
The social media giant has been criticizing Apple for the past few months over its recent iOS 14, which would bar Facebook from tracking user data without their explicit permission, and this back-and-forth has made things ugly between the two tech giants, even as Apple has for long been a vocal critic of Facebook’s data collection methods.
As per reports, the employees of Facebook said that it was hiding its bad privacy practices behind small businesses. Apple earlier this year launched iOS 14, which starting next year, would bar Facebook and its products from tracking non-app movements of iPhone users. This is set to hit Facebook’s targeted ads feature, a major source of revenue for the social media giant.
Facebook recently published a full-page ad in prestigious newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and New York Times to criticize Apple for its iOS 14 provisions, and stated that the policies would hurt small businesses which rely on Facebook’s targeted ads feature to gain visibility.
Facebook has been claiming to benefit small businesses with this feature for a long time, as this has been their most visible and sympathetic pitch behind targeted advertising. To this, Apple said that it was protecting the interests of its own users and was reinstating within their hands the power to decide who could track their movements and use their data.
In this fight, Facebook claimed to stand up for the interests of small businesses, even as Apple made it highly clear that iOS 14 would not stop Facebook from tracking user movement if the user so desires.
Instead, it would just allow users to decide who would be able to access that data, a right which Apple believes is users and theirs alone. Once implemented next year, iOS 14 would not allow iPhone apps to track and sell user data secretly without the customer’s explicit permission.
Facebook built an empire by collecting up the data of its users to inform its targeted ad system. Its revenue topped $20 billion last quarter, and nearly 99% of it comes from advertising. This battle is more than a decade old and the roots of this battle can be stretched back when smartphones just started making waves and it was unclear about how people are going to use the internet.
They could use the internet on a desktop PC, where people mostly used a mobile web browser to visit websites. Or would users switch between a collection of internet-connected software “apps,” giving more control to the companies that owned the mobile platforms?
Facebook, which was born on the open internet, favored the former option and pushed for rich web apps written to emerging standards. But it lost the fight in large part because of Apple, which pushed the app model as the default way of accomplishing tasks on the iPhone, then insisted that its own App Store would be the only legal and easy way to find and install those apps.
As the future became clear, Facebook made attempts to build its own smartphone so it wouldn’t have to concede so much control to Apple or Google. The device never saw the light of day, and Facebook instead developed a software “skin” for Android devices that featured its own services. That too was also a flop.
Today, Facebook is laying the groundwork to own the next major computing platform so it doesn’t have to play by another company’s rules again. That’s why it’s currently developing products like digital glasses, which the company is expected to launch in 2021.
In the meantime, Facebook has to deal with Apple.
Who’s going to win this battle is still unclear. But it looks like both of these companies will fight for what they believe is true.
Privacy is important as we know what happened with Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and at the same time we also need targeted ads in order for small businesses to reach their target audience which also helps users as they get to know about the latest products and services which might be useful for them.
We think that Facebook makes sense but Apple makes more sense as the right to privacy should always be given in the hands of the users.
