Facebook is preparing to sue Apple for "anti-competitive practices." With the help of an outside legal advisor, Facebook has been preparing for months an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, which the iPhone maker allegedly abused its power in the smartphone market by forcing app developers to obey App Store rules that enforce Apple's own apps.
The tone is rising between Facebook and Apple and after years of tension, the war between the two giants could reach its peak in court.
Facebook and Google derive a large portion of their revenue from advertising , a market worth billions of dollars annually. Therefore, ensuring the health of this activity is crucial for these major brands. While Google owns Android and its privacy rules are not as hostile to advertising, Apple and iOS are not. The company aims to make its platform the most secure operating system on the market for its users, and this poses a problem for some.
For your information, with iOS 13, advertisers can use a unique identifier called IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) to better target ads and estimate their effectiveness . This is a unique, encrypted endpoint identifier assigned by the operating system; IDFA on iOS and AAID on Android.
But iOS 14 predicts that every app that wants to make use of these credentials will ask users to opt in to tracking when the app is first launched.
Clearly, iOS 14's privacy settings will reduce targeted advertising for businesses . Facebook was right to say this in August, stating that the update would significantly impact parts of its business, including user tracking.
The company said these settings in Apple's iOS 14 could lead to a dramatic drop of more than 50% in ad activity on its Audience Network tool.
The latter allows advertisers to extend their Facebook and Instagram campaigns across the internet through thousands of high-quality apps. Audience Network helps mobile app developers deliver targeted in-app advertising to users based on Facebook data, and it claims this feature would no longer be useful if these iOS 14 settings were implemented.
In response to civil, human, and digital rights groups, Apple stands by its rollout plan for the new App Monitoring Transparency (ATT) feature, and Jane Horvath, Apple's senior director of global privacy, promises the eight organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to move forward with the reform.
"Tracking can be invasive, even scary, and most of the time is done without the user's knowledge or consent," wrote Jane Horvath, Apple's senior director of global privacy. "What some companies call 'personalized experiences' are often veiled attempts to collect as much data as possible about people, create comprehensive profiles about them, and then monetize those profiles."
In the end, Apple had postponed the full implementation of iOS 14 functionality until early 2021. These measures appear to prioritize user data privacy and confidentiality over the interests of advertisers and developers.
However, some have given a projection of what this may mean for the future. Based on these reviews, these updates reveal that advertising as a model for app monetization is being decimated.
In this case, as a user, they estimate that we must prepare to pay now for these applications that were once free and above all we must bear in mind that Apple charges a commission of 30% of all payments within the application.
Ultimately, Facebook could decide not to press charges, as its executives face internal resistance from some employees due to their public campaign against Apple.