Apple Just Killed Facebook Ads, Here’s How it Affects You
Apple simply wants to give its customers the ability to choose whether or not Facebook can track outside of their very own app
Matt Quinn
Matt Quinn
Mar 22 · 5 min read

Mark Zuckerberg is out to inflict pain on Apple, on Tim Cook, and to lobby the government against them claiming antitrust and doing anything they can to paint Apple dirty. Why? Because Apple wants to give its customers and its users the ability to choose whether or not Facebook can track outside the contraints of their very own app. Apple considers this simple level of privacy and dignity, a fundamental human right. Facebook seems intent on seeing it as an existential threat.

Starting in iOS 14.5, if an app wants to track the activities in other apps and on the web, it still can, it just has to ask for permission first, that’s it. It’s called App Tracking Transparency. It means that if a user is in the Facebook app, Facebook can serve personalized ads about topics of interest because they know we’re more likely to click on that ad than something generic or random. That’s all first-party, meaning it all happening in the same app and nothing about that experience is changing at all.

The changes come in when a user leaves that Facebook app and goes to other sites like lego.*** or honda.ca, opens the journaling app, to-do list, plays a couple of games, and then goes back to Facebook. Normally Facebook would have the ability to track across all of those apps and websites, across anything that uses their software plugins and social hooks to serve ads based on what we do in those apps and sites.

Apple now wants Facebook along with every other app to ask our permission before they track us, that’s it. Any app that wants to share our data with another app or service can still absolutely do it, they simply have to ask us first. It doesn’t even apply to other apps the same company owns. Facebook can still track us across the app and on facebook.***, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Messenger, or any of their customer apps and websites. It’s only if they attempt to track us across outside apps and websites where they have to ask.

It is no different than what other apps have had to ask before they obtain our photos, contacts, camera, or physical location. What this means is that they now have to ask us before they can monitor our digital location as well, because just like we’re legitimately concerned an app might steal our private photos, spam our contacts, listen to us or spy on us with the camera. We’re also legitimately concerned that apps might start stalking us in the digital world.

It’s why we see so many conspiracy theories about apps like Facebook and Instagram using the microphones to listen in to our conversations, which they do not do, but because they are so good at serving us targeted ads. It comes down to the ability to profile us based on our behavior so they can target us with those ads, while some people will be fine with it, they may prefer those ads to be as personalized as possible but others won’t, they’ll find it creepy and demand it stops.

For the very first time, we’ll all get what we want except for Facebook, which seems to think giving us a choice in and of itself is wrong, most likely because they’re worried that if given a choice we’ll choose to block them, to say no, but rather than making a case for us to say yes, to convince us, to argue the value of what they can deliver. Facebook is publishing ads in newspapers, lobbying governments, claiming antitrust violations as if any of them, from the biggest tech companies to the smallest online merchants own our data and have a greater right to it than we do.

Now, some people are confusing how app tracking transparency applies to Apple’s pre-existing apps, intentionally or accidentally spreading disinformation about Apple having a double standard, not playing fair, and giving themselves a separate set of rules. This is false because Apple’s standard here is much higher. That separate setting doesn’t stop Apple from doing third-party tracking or serving personalized ads based on our activity elsewhere because Apple doesn’t do that, to begin with.

What that second setting does is stop Apple from serving first-party ads like suggested apps in the App Store, the equivalent of Facebook serving us those same personalized ads while we’re in the Facebook app. That’s the reason it is a second separate setting because it’s a legacy, but also because the new one applies to all apps. The old one, sadly at this point only applies to Apple and conflating third and first-party tracking in the same interface panel, that is what would be legitimately confusing.

Other people are saying the wording on the pop-up is just unfair, that allows Facebook to track your activities across other company’s apps and websites are scary, and that it should be something more friendly allowing Facebook to serve you personalized ads. Ultimately the security measures need to be scary, at this moment all users give the company access to the photo app to apply filters, contact apps to find your friends, conferencing apps to place video calls, location services for turn by turn and so much more. They all have to ask for full access, full blanket permission because that’s what they get.

Once they get it, they can steal our photos, spam our contacts, record what we’re doing, or sell our location to collection agents because that’s the access we’ve given them. So they don’t get to lie about the limitations.

Even then, Apple can’t stop all of it anyway, all they can do is block the iOS-specific added identifier, not all of Facebook or any other services, software plugins, or webhooks. All they can do is hope Facebook and others, honor and respect our choice and cut that stuff out as well, out of their own accord based on the honor system. Even that, even the honor system, even respecting our choice is too much for Facebook because it’s not ending the company at all. They’re too busy doing that themselves with Cambridge Analytica and Onavo VPN, algorithmic malfeasance, betraying Oculus login promises, and the list goes on and on.

If anything, Apple is prompting them to clean up their act, encouraging them to do the most minimally decent user-centric thing imaginable, that is respect and consent so they can start regaining our trust. Until they do we’ve just got to keep educating ourselves so that we can better understand how everything from ad tracking to algorithms works.
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