Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. they are dangerously close to a total legal war, with the social media giant firmly considering a lawsuit that could ultimately influence antitrust investigators.
The conflagration focuses on Apple’s AAPL,
new iOS 14 policy, scheduled for this spring. It includes new privacy features that, for the first time, will require apps to ask users for permission to track them on the web. This feature, Facebook FB,
claims, would severely limit online advertising and kill small businesses in the process.
Tension between companies has risen for years to the point that Facebook is considering suing Apple for giving preferential treatment to its own apps while imposing restrictive rules on Facebook and third-party apps, according to reports.
“As we have said repeatedly, we believe Apple is behaving anticompetitively by using its control of the App Store to benefit its results at the expense of app developers and small businesses,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement at MarketWatch.
Apple did not comment.
Facebook, which launched a series of print and digital ads in December to show its point, deepened its animus during a earnings call with analysts on Wednesday.
“We also see that Apple’s business is increasingly dependent on gaining participation in apps and services against us and other developers,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said during the call. “So Apple has every incentive to use its dominant position on the platform to interfere with the operation of our applications and other applications, which they usually do to prefer theirs.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook broke off hostility on Thursday without mentioning Facebook by name.
“If a company relies on misleading users, on data mining, on options that are not options at all, it doesn’t deserve our praise. It deserves reform,” Cook said at the online-only conference Computer, Privacy and Thursday data protection. “There are too many people still asking the question,‘ How much can we get out of it? “when they have to ask, ‘What are the consequences?’
“What are the consequences of prioritizing conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of their high engagement rates? What are the consequences of not only tolerating rewarding content, but undermining public confidence in the vaccines they save?” What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users join extremist groups and therefore perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more? “
The slow-fire conflict highlights contrasting business approaches: Apple enslaves the philosophy of consumer privacy in which the customer pays for their Internet experience. Facebook, on the other hand, relies on data about its members to fuel its digital advertising business.
Read more: Facebook and Apple incorporate the new technical division
Ironically, a legal showdown between tech titans could hurt them on the antitrust front, as both are being investigated for things they accuse each other of, says Elizabeth Renieris, founding director of Notre Dame-IBM’s technical ethics lab at University of Notre Dame.
“What this feud shows more than anything is that Facebook and Apple have enormous power to control doors over the market,” he told MarketWatch.
“It demonstrates how much Facebook controls access to customers or audiences through its advertising ecosystem,” Renieris said. “At the same time, the dispute reveals Apple’s ability to mediate access to our personal data through its engineering decisions and policy decisions.”