Facebook Attacks Apple In The Name Of Small Business. No, Seriously.

Hartley Carlton, reporting for MacRumors:

Facebook has today attacked Apple in a series of full-page newspaper ads, asserting that iOS 14's privacy changes regarding data gathering and targeted advertising are bad for small businesses (via Bloomberg).

The ads are running in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, feature the headline "We're standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere."

Earlier this year, Apple introduced a number of privacy changes that curb the ability of companies like Facebook to gather data on users and target adverts. In ‌‌iOS 14‌‌, Apple has made the "Identifier for Advertisers," used by Facebook and its advertising partners for ad targeting, an opt-in feature, providing more transparency for users who would prefer not to be tracked in apps and on websites. The update simply asks users if they want to agree to ad tracking or prevent cross-app and cross-site tracking to provide targeted ads.

I was going to post the text of the ad and pick it apart line by line, but it would be a waste of time. Facebook has committed a logical fallacy, completely misrepresenting what Apple has chosen to do (which is give people more control over what data they share with big companies) as some sort of offensive play against small businesses. It’s a strawman argument designed to make small businesses look like the victims of Apple’s “forced software update”.

John Gruber recently wrote about this on Daring Fireball, again making the salient point that the privacy issue boils down to entitlement:

The entitlement of these fuckers is just off the charts. They have zero right, none, to the tracking they’ve been getting away with. We, as a society, have implicitly accepted it because we never really noticed it. You, the user, have no way of seeing it happen. Our brains are naturally attuned to detect and viscerally reject, with outrage and alarm, real-world intrusions into our privacy. Real-world marketers could never get away with tracking us like online marketers do.

This so clearly isn’t about small businesses not being able to advertise as effectively, it’s about facebook no longer being able to run behind you with a shop-vac, sucking up every crumb of data you leave behind. Don’t think they aren’t still trying though, Apple’s privacy tools are just limiting their ability to do so a little, taking them down from an industrial grade shop-vac to a consumer grade Dyson.

But still, let’s humor Facebook for a second and respond to their strawman argument. Here’s my take: if you built a small business that relies on Facebook (for advertising or any other aspect of your business), then you built a shitty small business. You put all your eggs in one basket, so captivated by the reach they could offer you that you didn’t consider the risks of relying on a company whose business model was inherently unethical and who could pull the rug out from under you at any moment. The problem here is not Apple giving people control over their own data, it’s that your small business was built on a foundation of stolen information that facebook gobbled up and turned into something you could use to target potential customers with. Looks like it’s time for you to find a more honest way to reach potential new customers.