Who Do You Trust, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Facebook?
By: Dan Hansen
Tags: iOS, Apple, Eff, Facebook, Idfa

PRIVACY

Who Do You Trust, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Facebook?

Two very different views on Apple’s privacy-related changes.

From Tim Cook’s tweet responding to Facebook

When it comes to user privacy Apple has two goals, to minimize the collection of user data and provide transparency about the data that does get collected with its products. In furtherance of these objectives, the company introduced two new initiatives this year, adding an App Privacy section to product pages in Apple’s app stores, and adding the AppTrackingTransparency framework to iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14.

App Privacy

During June’s Worldwide Developers Conference Apple announced that developers would need to provide privacy information when updating their apps in App Store Connect. This information is now available in all of Apple’s App Stores, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

The newly disclosed privacy information lets users see three classes of information: data used to track you, data linked to you, and data not linked to you.

App Privacy information for TikTok

App Tracking Transparency

The $80 billion mobile ad market depends heavily on IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers), which allows advertisers to track users on iOS devices. Apps like Facebook use this identifier to learn about users’ behavior, and target ads to them. Until now, this tracking has been enabled by default, requiring users to change their privacy settings in the Settings app in order to disable it. In 2021 Apple will add the AppTrackingTransparency framework to iOS 14, which changes the current opt-out design to an opt-in standard where users must provide consent before apps can track them.

Facebook is opposed to this upcoming change and has run the following full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post:

Apple vs. the free internet Apple plans to roll out a forced software update that will change the internet as we know it — for the worse. Take your favorite cooking sites or sports blogs. Most are free because they show advertisements. Apple’s change will limit their ability to run personalized ads. To make ends meet, many will have to start charging you subscription fees or adding more in-app purchases, making the internet much more expensive and reducing high-quality free content. Beyond hurting apps and websites, many in the small business community say this change will be devastating for them too, at a time when they face enormous challenges. They need to be able to effectively reach the people most interested in their products and services to grow. Forty-four percent of small to medium businesses started or increased their usage of personalized ads on social media during the pandemic, according to a new Deloitte study. Without personalized ads, Facebook data shows that the average small business advertiser stands to see a cut of over 60% in their sales for every dollar they spend. Small businesses deserve to be heard. We’re standing up to Apple for our small business customers and our communities.

In response to Facebook’s ad Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted:

We believe users should have the choice over the data that is being collected about them and how it’s used. Facebook can continue to track users across apps and websites as before, App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14 will just require that they ask for your permission first.

With these two tech Goliaths diametrically opposed, it’s instructive to check the reactions from other members of the community. In Kara Swisher’s op-ed in the New York Times, Facebook’s Tone-Deaf Attack on Apple, she declared that the company’s stance is “a desperate ploy that’s unlikely to work.” At Daring Fireball, John Gruber’s take is that “Facebook’s argument is along the lines of arguing that the police shouldn’t crack down on burglaries because doing so might hurt pawn shops that have been thriving during a years-long crime spree.” But the most damning rebuttal to Facebook comes from Andrés Arrieta, writing for the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation):

Facebook touts itself in this case as protecting small businesses, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook has locked them into a situation in which they are forced to be sneaky and adverse to their own customers. The answer cannot be to defend that broken system at the cost of their own users’ privacy and control. To begin with, we shouldn’t allow companies to violate our fundamental human rights, even if it’s better for their bottom line. Stripped of its shiny PR language, that is what Facebook is complaining about. If businesses want our attention and money, they need to do so by respecting our rights, including our right to privacy and control over our data. Second, we recognize that businesses are in a bind because of Facebook’s dominance and the overpromises of the ad industry. So if we want small businesses to be able to compete, we need to make it a level playing field. If one app needs to ask for permission, all of them should, including Facebook itself. This points the way, again, to the need for a baseline privacy law that protects and empowers users. We hope app developers will join us in pushing for a privacy law so that they can all compete on the same grounds, instead of the worst privacy violators having (or, being perceived as having) a leg up. Overall, AppTrackingTransparency is a great step forward for Apple. When a company does the right thing for its users, EFF will stand with it, just as we will come down hard on companies that do the wrong thing. Here, Apple is right and Facebook is wrong. Next step: Android should follow with the same protections. Your move, Google.

The EFF is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Just last month it successfully fought back against the RIAA’s abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove “youtube-dl” from GitHub. When the choice over who to believe is between the EFF and Facebook, the EFF wins every time.