Facebook pays back the news industry it destroyed with print ads begging you to hate Apple



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Illustration of article titled Facebook Reimburses The Information Industry It Destroyed With Print Ads Begging You To Hate Apple

Photo: Olivier Douliery (Getty Images)

Facebook released its second turn of full-page ads in two days looking to make sure Apple … doesn’t roll out a privacy update or something.

The problem is an iOS update that will require users to provide explicit, opt-in consent to allow apps to track them with Apple Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), a unique “anonymous ID” on each. iOS device that allows companies like Facebook, as well as advertisers, to track user activities on applications. Currently, IDFA tracking is opt-out, which means companies get this data by default. Facebook’s concern is that, naturally, and for good reason, users won’t want to let advertisers snoop around when given the choice. through half the shit they do on their phones because they don’t really care about seeing personalized ads and all of the behavior tracking scares them.

This could seriously reduce Facebook’s ability to do things like monitor post-install actions, target ads, and model user behavior on iOS apps. Apple has also already implemented new anti-tracking features on Safari, the base browser on iOS devices, which limits the ability of advertisers to track users across the web.

Facebook has offered two lines of defense – that Apple is abusing its position as the sole arbiter of what happens on iOS devices, and that this move will be devastating for the poor mom-and-pop businesses that depend on it. Apple might just be a swagger, anti-competitive bully, but given that Facebook is too, it’s not clear why anyone would take the company seriously as an antitrust or small business advocate. Anyway, Facebook became completely aggressive by attacking Apple on the to come up requirements via dear, full page advertisements in the country’s largest newspapers. Here is the announcement published Wednesday in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post:

And here’s Thursday’s edition of the announcement, which is almost identical:

The full-page ads are clearly meant to trigger some sort of backlash against Apple from small businesses, which can be a bit of a stretch.

Facebook wrote in the ads that the “forced software update” (as if Apple is forcing users to install iOS 14 at gunpoint) will cause “your favorite cooking sites or sports blogs” to have serious constraints on “their ability to serve personalized ads” (that’s the point.) Facebook argued that this would mean that many sites or Free apps will instead have to start charging users money for subscriptions or in-app purchases.

Facebook also claimed that 44% of small businesses increased their use of personalized advertising during the novel coronavirus pandemic, citing a study by the consultancy firm Deloitte. He also highlighted, in bold, a statistic that without personalized advertising, “an average small business advertiser will see more than a 60% reduction in sales for every dollar spent.”

In one blog post, Facebook explained that the 60% number is really more of a “longer-term” thing:

Our studies show that without personalized ads based on their own data, small businesses could see more than a 60% reduction in website sales from ads. We don’t anticipate that the proposed changes for iOS 14 will result in a complete loss of customization, but rather a move in that direction in the longer term.

Facebook cited this statistic as resulting from its own internal research with few details. Facebook offered only two sentences of explanation, saying it was comparing data from advertisers who used the type of data it says Apple wants to delete versus data that didn’t:

To understand the impact on small and medium-sized businesses, we compared the aggregate results of ad campaigns from the Facebook family of apps that used advertisers ‘own data to optimize purchases on advertisers’ websites versus results of the use only of data from the advertising platform. . The research analysis includes more than 25,000 global ad campaigns in which advertisers were optimizing purchases made in 2019.

When asked for more info on the statistic, a Facebook spokesperson redirected Gizmodo to the blog post. Facebook did not immediately respond to a follow-up question about the apps involved in the testing or why they chose the specific subset of ads.

Apple hit back on Facebook by essentially accusing the company of being shit.

Earlier this year, it delayed the rollout of the anti-tracking feature until 2021 to give developers more time to adjust. When criticized by privacy groups, he sent a letter to organizations hinting that Facebook was one of the developers who needed more time to transition and accusing its executives of seeking to “collect as much data as possible on proprietary and third-party products to develop and monetize the detailed profiles of their users , and this disregard for user privacy continues to expand to include more of their products. “

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