Apple’s simple iPhone alert is costing Facebook $10 billion a year

MacWorld ^ | 02/03/2022 | Michael Simon

[Drew68]

Facebook/Meta announced its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday and it was quite a different mood than Apple’s last week. Facebook missed expectations with lower revenue and a dismal outlook that sent the stock plummeting some 25 percent. And it’s all Apple’s fault.

It all stems from the App Tracking Transparency feature that Apple implemented in iOS 14.5 last April. It’s a simple dialogue box that pops up when you launch an app for the first time. Before you start using the app, you’ll get an alert that asks if you want to allow it to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites.

Tap Allow and things will continue as they have since you’ve owned your phone. But select Ask App Not to Track and the app will be barred from tracking your activity once you leave it.

It might seem like a small thing, but tracking is big business for a company like Facebook that relies on ads. According to Meta CFO Dave Wehner, “the impact of iOS overall is a headwind on our business in 2022 … on the order of $10 billion.” The stock hit when the markets opened Thursday initially wiped out $200 billion of Facebook’s value.

Facebook complained that Apple’s app tracking transparency favors companies like Google because ATT “carves out browsers from the tracking prompts Apple requires for apps.” Wehner even went so far as to accuse Apple of ignoring the “policy discrepancy” because “Apple continues to take billions of dollars a year from Google Search ads.”

Apple built strong anti-tracking protections into Safari long before ATT was implemented, and Google has insisted that it doesn’t sell personal information with several ways to turn off tracking within Chrome and search. Additionally, Google has created its own version of ATT as part of its Android operating system as well as a new cookie-free advertising system in Chrome called Topics that involves short-term, hand-curated data analysis that “represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history.”

But it’s hard not to see how ATT affects Facebook above all others. Despite an ad campaign fighting it and a page that explains how allowing ad tracking will “support businesses that rely on ads to reach their customers,” a disproportionate number of iPhone users have opted to turn off tracking. And now it’s starting to seriously affect the bottom line.

[Zathras]

The difference is Apple produces a product which benefits the buyer.
Facebook produces a service which only benefits Facebook.

[Swordmaker]

Apple iPhone users? Really want to hurt Facebook and Google? Here’s a simple way to do that. Turn off the app tracking option universally and only allow those apps you want to track you. This stops Facebook’s and Google’s tracking for advertising purposes which is how they make their revenue. PING!

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF APPLE PRIVACY PING!

If you want on or off the Apple/Mac/iOS Ping List, Freepmail me.

[Swordmaker]

Thanks for the ping for the ping group… done did ping them.

[Swordmaker]

Only Apple people would take credit for facebook loses.

Uh Facebook said that $10 billion in loss was attributed to Apple mobile devices no longer being trackable due to users turning off tracking with Apple’s new feature to disallow tracking. That’s not Apple people taking credit, that’s Facebook assigning the credit in their latest financial report. QUIT BLAMING APPLE USERS FOR FACTUAL DATA STATED BY OTHERS!

[Spktyr]

Not as much as turning off app tracking. Awful lot of other companies embedded FaceBook tech into their apps and sites - as part of the deal, FB gets tracking information and can use that to sell ads through their ad network that you will see even if you aren’t a FB user!

[dennisw]

Good for Apple! ESAD facebook. Android should add an anti-tracking feature. But since android=Google, I doubt it will.

There are anti-tracking extensions such as track-me-not. I am using it on Chrome right now. I use Brave too which has built in anti-tracking

[jdsteel]

Re: Facebook

If you aren’t paying for tech and you’re not sure what the product is….

YOU ARE THE PRODUCT.

[minnesota_bound]

I went to the Daily Mail website on my android phone: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ushome/index.html

I started to get notifications several times that day from them. It would buzz the phone and turn on the display. Lucky that I could easily block this but it shows you are being tracked.

[minnesota_bound]

#7 The “Frivacy” settings are kinda tricky : )

[BlueStateRightist]

Using DuckDuckGo as your search engine further insulates you.

[itsahoot]

I don't know how long that deal was for, but it wasn't permanent.

Safari lets you set your search engine they currently offer 5 choices, not sure if you can add others like you.com. DuckDuckGo, Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ecosi are currently listed in my choices.

[AustinBill]

It’s simply showing how fragile the Facebook “business model” is. Their entire business is built on the assumption that people can’t figure out how to turn off tracking. Now that Apple is doing it for them, their revenue is drying up.