The Electronic Frontier Foundation has declared Facebook’s attack on Apple’s anti-tracking initiatives as a “laugh campaign,” which actually works against small businesses that supposedly try to protect the social network.
Facebook’s ongoing media campaign to try to pressure Apple to stop its change program to limit the amount of ad tracking done in Apple’s ecosystem has already received criticism from Apple CEO Tim Cook and of the same company. Now, nonprofit, privacy-focused EFF has gotten into the argument and has sided with Apple.
In an article posted Friday on the EFF website, the group explains that the Facebook campaign, which largely consists of a media bombardment that claims Apple’s privacy changes will be bad for small businesses, is actually the opposite. Instead of protecting privacy, the EFF says it’s a “laughable Facebook attempt” to distract users from its “bad track record of privacy issues and anti-competitive behavior” and to derail pro-privacy moves that would be bad. for the Facebook business.
Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency feature, which runs on iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, is applauded by the EFF, as “requiring trackers to ask for your consent before chasing you over the Internet should be a line of obvious basis “. By allowing users to choose which third-party crawlers can work or not, the change “provides users with more knowledge of what apps do, helps protect users from abuse, and allows them to make the best decisions for themselves.”
The feature is “one more step in the right direction,” according to the EFF, “reducing developer abuse by providing users with knowledge and control over their own personal data.”
In Facebook’s campaign against it, the EFF says it’s not about small businesses and that “it’s really about who benefits from the standardization of surveillance-based advertising and what Facebook can lose if its users learn more. about exactly what and other data the runners are behind the scenes “.
Targeted advertising, which depends on these crawlers, is believed to make more money than non-targeted ads, but FP claims that no additional revenue goes to content creators or app developers. “Instead, most of the extra money earned by targeted ads ends up in the pockets of these data brokers,” writes the EFF, which designates Facebook and Google as two beneficiaries.
Because a “handful of companies control the online advertising market,” the EFF says small businesses can’t compete effectively, in part because the advertising industry itself promotes “this fantasy that targeted advertising is superior to other methods. to reach customers “. non-targeted ads are less valuable.
“Facebook is made public in this case to protect small businesses, and that couldn’t be further from the truth,” the EFF denounces. “Facebook has locked them into a situation where they are forced to be cunning and adverse to their own customers. The answer cannot be to defend this broken system at the expense of the privacy and control of its own users.”
In conclusion, the EFF reiterates that application tracking transparency is a “big step forward” for Apple. “When a company does the right thing for its users, EFF will adhere to it, just as we will face tough companies that do harm. Here Apple is right and Facebook is wrong.”