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Facebook recently launched a campaign promoting itself as the protector of small businesses. This is a ridiculous attempt by Facebook to distract you from its poor history of anticompetitive behavior and privacy issues while trying to derail Apple’s privacy-friendly changes that are detrimental to Facebook’s business.
The Facebook campaign aims at a new AppTrackingTransparency function on iPhones that will require apps to ask users for permission before tracking them on other apps and websites or sharing their information with and from third parties. Requiring trackers to ask for your consent before stalking you over the internet should be an obvious baseline, and we applaud Apple for this change. But Facebook, having built a massive empire around the concept of tracking everything it does by allowing apps to sell and share its data among a shady group of outside companies, would like users and lawmakers to believe otherwise.
Make no mistake: this latest Facebook campaign is yet another direct attack on our privacy, and despite its elegant packaging, it is also an attack on other companies, both large and small.
Apple change
Apple has implemented AppTrackingTransparency to iOS 14, iPadOS 14 and tvOS 14. This type of consent interface is not new and is similar for other permissions on iOS: for example, when an app requests access to your microphone, camera, or location. It’s normal for apps to be required to request user permission to access specific device features or data, and third-party tracking should be no different. (However, in an important limitation of AppTrackingTransparency, please note that this change does not affect source tracking or data collection by the app.)
Allowing users to choose which third-party tracking they will or won’t tolerate, and forcing apps to request those permissions, gives users more insight into what apps are doing, helps protect users from abuse, and enables them to make the best decisions for themselves. . You can set your AppTrackingTransparency preferences app by app, or set it generally for all apps.
This new feature from Apple is another step in the right direction, reducing developer abuse by giving users knowledge and control over their own personal data.
Small businesses and advertising industry
So why the Facebook protest? Facebook claims that this Apple shift will hurt small businesses that benefit from access to targeted advertising services, but Facebook doesn’t tell you the whole story. It’s really about who benefits from surveillance-based advertising normalization (hint: it’s not the users or small businesses) and what Facebook stands to lose if its users learn more about what it and other data brokers are doing behind the scenes.
For many years, the behavior advertising industry has promoted the notion that behavioral ads are better. These are the ads that track you wherever you go online sometimes eerily accurate results. This is in contrast to “contextual” or non-targeted ads, which are not based on your personal information, but simply on the content of the web page you are currently visiting. Many application developers seem to believe in targeted advertising. But are targeted ads better? AND for whom Are they really better?
In realityStudies have shown that most of the money you make from targeted advertising doesn’t go to the content creators – the app developers and the content they host. Instead, most of the extra money earned from targeted ads ends up in the pockets of these data brokers. Some names are well known, like Facebook and Google, but many more are shading companies that most users have not even heard of.
Bottom line: “The Association of National Advertisers estimates that when the” ad tech tax “is taken into account, publishers only take home 30 to 40 cents of every dollar [spent on ads]. “ The rest goes to third-party data brokers who keep the lights on by exploiting your information, and not to small businesses trying to work within a broken system to reach their customers.
The reality is that only a handful of companies control the online advertising market and everyone else is at their mercy. Small businesses cannot compete on their own with large ad distribution networks. Because the advertising industry has promoted this fantasy that targeted advertising is superior to other methods of reaching customers, anything else will inherently have less value in advertising markets. That not only means that ads have a lower ad value if they are not targeted at users, but it also drives away the money flow of innovation that could otherwise bring us different advertising methods that do not involve profiling and targeting. invasive.
Facebook is touted in this case as protecting small businesses, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Facebook touts itself in this case as protecting small businesses, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook has locked them in a situation where they are forced to be cunning and adverse to their own customers. The answer cannot be to defend that broken system at the cost of privacy and control of its own users.
To begin with, we should not allow companies to violate our fundamental human rights, even if it is better for your results. Stripped of its brilliant public relations language, that’s what Facebook is complaining about. If companies want our attention and money, they must do so while respecting our rights, including our right to privacy and control of our data.
Second, we acknowledge that companies are in a bind due to Facebook’s dominance and overpromises from the ad industry. Therefore, if we want small businesses to be able to compete, we must create a level playing field. If an app needs to ask for permission, everyone should, including Facebook itself. This points the way, again, to the need for a basic privacy law that protects and empowers users. We hope app developers will join us in pushing for a privacy law so everyone can compete on the same grounds, rather than the worst privacy violators having (or being perceived to have) an advantage.
If we want small businesses to compete, we must create a level playing field.
Overall, AppTrackingTransparency is a big step forward for Apple. When a company does the right thing for its users, EFF will support it, just as we will be tough on companies that do the wrong thing. Here, Apple is right and Facebook is wrong. Next step: Android should continue with the same protections. Your move, Google.
