Facebook’s ad campaign shows how worried it is about Apple's privacy changes
Apple and Facebook are vastly different companies with different incentives and business models. The former is about selling a very particular vision on the personal computing experience and controlling the platform that underpins that experience. The latter is about selling adverting space, business intelligence and access to large audiences.<p>To both of them, privacy is a liability or a business opportunity. They will engage with the issue of privacy to the extent that it fits within their business models.<p>As far as Apple is concerned, Facebook&#x27;s stance regarding privacy today isn&#x27;t a straightforward legal liability or even a moral quandry. It has become a deep strategic liability.<p>Over the past 15 years Facebook and others could freely leverage the affordances provided by Apple&#x27;s platform - the app store, browser, API&#x27;s, devices,... - to develop an environment that enables them to track its users. The endless string of deep issues caused by social media have rubbed off and put the entire industry - &quot;Big Tech&quot; including Apple - under public scrutiny.<p>Apple&#x27;s relationship to Facebook isn&#x27;t as straightforward as one might think: it&#x27;s implicitly symbiotic. Audiences want to be able to connect with others via social media. And Apple is perfectly positioned as a middle man to provide an integrated platform - devices, OS, app store,... - to do just that. Being able to access your social network is a major selling point for Apple. Not having to build the infrastructure itself and letting others do it, was a massive opportunity for Apple. At least in so far that those actors didn&#x27;t enter Apple&#x27;s own markets.<p>And so, Apple&#x27;s changing stance is born out of necessity. It&#x27;s about safeguarding the brand and the vision that it wants to sell to the world. But it has to do that gingerly since it&#x27;s products have become part of a digital infrastructure that underpin vast parts of economical and societal activities. Unlike Parler, Apple can&#x27;t just remove Facebook from it&#x27;s app store without hurting its own interests.<p>In all of this, I don&#x27;t think that Facebook &quot;admitted it has lost the Battle with Apple over privacy&quot;. Let alone that it actually lost that &quot;battle&quot; such as it is.<p>Even more so, if there ever is a battle over privacy, it&#x27;s between Facebook - and other media companies - and the public as represented by it&#x27;s legal and judicial institutions. Whether it&#x27;s through hearings in Congress, or through the dealings with the EU Commission.<p>Apple itself is no stranger to it&#x27;s products being front and center to privacy issues. It has a long-standing dispute with the FBI about adding backdoors that would allow public authorities to circumvent encryption. [1] However, this is less of a strategic issue threatening it&#x27;s commercial interests: it&#x27;s a legal issue in which public authorities - not a private actor - demand legal compliance from Apple. Which is a very different ballgame.<p>In the eyes of the general public, all of this may seem to revolve around the same set of issues. And Apple might be perceived as the &quot;good guy&quot; taking the private interests of its customers to heart as globally trust in big technology corporations has been damaged. But I think that&#x27;s just too simple and naive a narrative. The reality is usually far more murky.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;FBI–Apple_encryption_dispute" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;FBI–Apple_encryption_d...</a>