APPLE AND FACEBOOK’S PRIVACY BATTLE INTENSIFIES

Bosses Cook and Zuckerberg are at loggerheads over the IOS 14.5 update to iphones

To the students in their gowns stood before the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Great Dome, it was an inspiring graduation message from the openly gay leader of a powerful and beloved tech company.

“Measure your impact on humanity not in likes but in the lives you touch,” said Tim Cook. “Not in popularity, but in the people you serve. I know that my life got bigger when I stopped caring what other people thought about me.”

To Mark Zuckerberg, however, Cook’s remarks were a personal dig.

For years afterward, the Facebook founder would try to persuade Cook that his brainchild’s business model, using adverts to fund free information and entertainment for as many people as possible, was just as legitimate as Apple’s.

Those events, related in Stephen Levy’s book Facebook: The Inside Story, help explain why the two chief executives are now so profoundly at odds.

Zuckerberg’s quest failed, and this week their feud came to fruition with Apple’s long-awaited privacy crackdown.

Users who install the latest iphone operating system will be greeted with a pop-up which says: “Allow (this app) to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?” The wording is mandatory, and the choice is binary.

The change is a direct strike against forms of data collection that have been ubiquitous for years. It is specifically dangerous to Facebook, whose advertising system is built on tracking specific users across the internet and which makes an estimated 61 per cent of its revenue on iphones.

Given the option, the vast majority of iphone users are expected to opt out. Facebook has framed the Apple update as an anticompetitive assault on ordinary business folk. “Many small businesses will no longer be able to reach their customers with targeted ads,” said Zuckerberg in December.

The company backed up this message with full page adverts in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, which read: “We’re standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere.”

The tension between the two companies has always been present. In Facebook’s early years, Zuckerberg was lucky enough to call Apple’s previous boss Steve Jobs “a mentor and a friend.”

Despite frequent conflicts, the two founders are said to have recognized their own intelligence and ruthlessness in each other, often walking together to discuss business and life.

Even then there were conflicts about the way Facebook collected user data. In an onstage interview in 2010, Jobs was asked about privacy in a question that explicitly referenced Zuckerberg, who was also there in the audience. “Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for — in plain English, and repeatedly,” Jobs said.

But the companies had intertwined fates. Apple needed Facebook to provide the apps that kept people entertained on its devices. Facebook depended on Apple to reach its users, so many of whom lived in innocence in Jobs’s walled garden, and Zuckerberg knew it.

The divisions between Apple and Facebook escalated after Jobs died in 2011. He was replaced not by a fellow founder but by a manager.

Separated in age by 24 years, Zuckerberg and Cook came from different worlds. Unless called in front of Congress, Zuckerberg wears a Silicon Valley uniform of plain monochrome T-shirts. Cook, whose career began in 1982 within the sprawling beige empire of IBM, is more comfortable in a tie.

Whereas Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to pursue his startup dream, pragmatic Cook climbed the ladder, completing his MBA from Duke University before building his reputation at Intelligent Electronics and Compaq.

It did not take long for things to turn sour. When Apple CEO Cook said in 2014 “when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product,” Zuckerberg hit back.

“What, you think because you’re paying Apple that you’re somehow in alignment with them? If you were in alignment with them, then they’d make their products a lot cheaper.”

However it was Apple’s screen time tracker for iphones that really hit Facebook. Introduced in 2018, the feature lets users see how much time they are wasting on social media platforms and other apps, with the option to set time limits.

“Screen time” marked a new strategy for Apple in giving users more choice and oversight over how they use their phones. But it also revealed the company was ready to diverge from Facebook in a major way that had direct impacts on the social media giant’s users. The following year, after Facebook was accused of paying users as young as 13 to install an app that sent their iphone traffic directly to the company’s own servers, Apple’s revenge was unusually direct.

The company revoked permissions for all the apps which Facebook personnel rely on, causing chaos on the company’s California campus.

But Apple’s most radical change to date comes in the form of IOS 14.5, the update that British users can install on their iphones from this week.

Advertisers who rely on Facebook either to reach audiences, or to help their clients reach them, are not happy.

Morgan Wallace, director of digital marketing at advertising firm Boston Digital, says some of his clients have already started asking which other platforms they can advertise on instead of Facebook as Apple’s changes mean “smaller audiences, less impactful targeting and probably higher costs.”

Elad Levy, vice-president product and marketing at Fixel, believes Facebook has gone further than it needed to in complying with Apple’s changes. “I believe there’s going to be a huge backlash from the advertising community towards Facebook.”

For privacy advocates, there is concern this is not as much progress as Apple would like users to believe.

“It is a step forward for privacy, it doesn’t fix the privacy problem for everyone everywhere for all time,” says Nathalie Maréchal, a senior policy analyst at Ranking Digital Rights.

Apple declined to comment and Facebook did not reply to questions about the ongoing rivalry.

But claims of new efforts to compete lead some people to wonder if the feud has reached its climax or if this is only the beginning. Zuckerberg has always liked to talk about “trade-offs.” It is the same language he once used to describe his fascination with the Roman emperor Augustus.

“Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace,” said Zuckerberg. “What are the tradeoffs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a longterm goal that people talk about today. Two hundred years feels unattainable.”

Several years later, Zuckerberg will hope his old rival will understand Facebook’s own trade-offs. In two thousand years, perhaps history will agree, but Cook appears to have made his judgment.