On July 2020, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the heads of Amazon, Google and Apple were all fired with heated questions from members of the House Antitrust Subcommittee.
This incident has sparked questions about online privacy. Now Mark Zuckerberg's greatest enemy in this sector is not from the government, but from another tech mogul Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Apple vs. Facebook
On January 28, Cook gave a speech explaining Apple's upcoming privacy changes, which will ban apps from sharing the online behavior of iPhone users with third party companies unless the users themselves give consent, according to Vox.
Cook stated that the new privacy policies were made with Facebook in mind. Cook excoriated the social media business model, which is solely based on monitoring people's behavior in order to target ads to them, as he said at the conference convened for International Data Privacy Day.
Cook posed rhetorical questions during the conference, asking what the consequences are of seeing thousands of people join extremist groups, and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more people to join in.
Although he didn't specifically mention Facebook, he didn't need to as everyone knows what he was getting at and who he was describing.
This is not the first time that two massive social media companies traded barbs, for years the two had been going back and forth regarding the privacy and structure of their respective platforms.
In 2018, Cook stated that if their customer was their product, they could make lots of money, but they've elected not to do that. But the speech that he delivered this week, was not just trash talk.
The new App Tracking Transparency framework of Apple, which was announced in 2020, takes an aim at other social media platforms that makes money by following the users' activity on the internet, according to The New York Times.
Apple's privacy App Tracking Transparency
Apple stated that the system will allow users to see which apps have requested permission to track them and they can make changes that they see fit. This requirement will roll out in mid-2021 with an upcoming release of iOS 14, iPadOS 14 and tvOS 14, and it has already goth support from privacy advocates.
Basically, the App Tracking Transparency feature moves from the old method where users had to opt-out of sharing their identifier for Advertisers to an opt-in model.
This means that every app will have to ask users whether it is okay for them to share their IDFA with third party companies, including networks or data brokers, according to TechCrunch.
Apple will enforce this prompt for all third party data sources. The company expects the developers to understand whether APIs or SDKs that they use in their apps are serving user data up to brokers or other networks and to enable the notification if ever.
Apple stated that they will abide by the rules for its own apps too, and they will present the dialog and they will also follow the toggle if its apps use tracking.
This is now surprise that Apple has launched this new app framework as the company has always made a move towards securing the privacy of its users.
Related Article: Signal vs iMessage, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger: How Much User Data They Collect Comparison
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Sieeka Khan
