Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the 56th Munich Security Conference in Munich, Southern Germany, on February 15, 2020.
Christof Stache | AFP | Getty Images
Facebook will start Monday with some iPhone and iPad users to allow the company to track their activities so that the social media giant can show them more personalized ads.
The move comes along with Apple’s planned privacy update to iOS 14, which notifies users about this type of tracking and asks them if they want to allow it.
The two companies have been at odds with each other for a decade and have recently been engaged in a heated battle of words surrounding these privacy changes. Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg named Apple one of its biggest competitors and said the privacy changes will hurt the growth of “millions of businesses around the world.” The next day, Apple CEO Tim Cook referred to Facebook in a speech at a data privacy conference in Brussels: “If a business is built on deceptive users, on data exploitation, on choices that aren’t choices at all, it doesn’t deserve that. praise. It deserves contempt. “
The fight centers on a unique device ID on every iPhone and iPad, the IDFA. Companies that sell mobile ads, including Facebook, use this ID to target ads and estimate their effectiveness.
With an upcoming update to iOS 14, any app that wants to use these IDs will ask users to sign up for tracking when the app is first launched. When users opt out, these ads become a lot less effective. Facebook has warned investors that these impending changes could hurt its advertising efforts as early as this quarter.
Facebook is now testing the effects of this update, before Apple makes it mandatory for all apps early this spring.
As part of this test, Facebook will start showing some users its own prompts starting Monday, explaining why it wants to track this activity and asking users to sign up. These prompts appear on the screens of Apple users immediately before the Apple popup appears.
A trial version of the Facebook prompt has a bold header that asks “Allow Facebook to use your app and website activity?” and claims that Facebook uses that information to “provide a better ad experience”. It then offers users the choice between “Do not allow” and “Allow”. (The exact language and appearance of the Facebook prompt may vary.)
Whatever selection users make at the Facebook prompt, if they choose not to allow tracking in the Apple popup, that choice is final and Facebook will respect it.
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