Duel at the top between Facebook and Apple. The social network giant strongly attacked, Wednesday, December 16, the firm at the apple, accusing it of causing harm to small businesses with its transparency measures on the collection of personal data.
“The new rules of [système d’exploitation mobile] Apple’s iOS 14 is going to have a detrimental impact on many small businesses struggling to stay afloat and on the free Internet, on which we all rely more than ever ”, writes Dan Levy, vice president of advertising and business products at Facebook in a blog post.
Mark Zuckerberg’s group has also offered a full page advertisement in major American dailies, including New York Times, the Washington post and the Wall Street Journal, and launched a site bringing together testimonials from small traders.
Facebook criticizes Apple’s iOS privacy changes with full-page newspaper ads https://t.co/KO1rUCNAC6 https://t.co/G2WsXpZ6uV
Financial profits
Earlier this week, during an update of iOS, Apple strengthened its criteria for developers who wish to offer their applications for download on the App Store, its online store. These must now provide detailed information on how information given by users is retrieved and used. The details regarding the data collected by the Facebook application are particularly numerous.
The Cupertino company has put forward a concern for transparency to defend these changes, which have been mentioned since June and are part of a vast company policy on data management.
But the social media giant believes Apple is far more interested in financial gain than privacy, greatly limiting the ability for developers to serve targeted ads.
“This will force companies to switch to in-app subscription and purchase models, which means Apple is going to benefit and many free services are going to have to become paid or leave the market.”, argues Mr. Levy.
Anti-competitive practice
The manager goes so far as to accuse the Apple brand of anti-competitive practice “Using their control of the App Store to inflate their bottom line at the expense of app developers and small businesses.” “
The iPhone manufacturer also takes up to 30% commission on consumer transactions made via the App Store. The amount of this “Tax” is notably contested by Epic Games, the publisher of the popular video game Fortnite, which is banned from downloading from Apple devices until summer 2021.
In his post, Mr. Levy reports that Facebook will provide justice with evidence that this ban hits the advertising revenue of the social network.
At a summit in Brussels last week, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, anticipated negative reactions to the new transparency measures. He then qualified these attacks as “Shameless attempts to maintain the status quo on invasion of privacy.”