Apple and Facebook are vastly different companies with different incentives and business models. The former is about selling a very particular vision on the personal computing experience and controlling the platform that underpins that experience. The latter is about selling adverting space, business intelligence and access to large audiences.

To both of them, privacy is a liability or a business opportunity. They will engage with the issue of privacy to the extent that it fits within their business models.

As far as Apple is concerned, Facebook's stance regarding privacy today isn't a straightforward legal liability or even a moral quandry. It has become a deep strategic liability.

Over the past 15 years Facebook and others could freely leverage the affordances provided by Apple's platform - the app store, browser, API's, devices,... - to develop an environment that enables them to track its users. The endless string of deep issues caused by social media have rubbed off and put the entire industry - "Big Tech" including Apple - under public scrutiny.

Apple's relationship to Facebook isn't as straightforward as one might think: it's implicitly symbiotic. Audiences want to be able to connect with others via social media. And Apple is perfectly positioned as a middle man to provide an integrated platform - devices, OS, app store,... - to do just that. Being able to access your social network is a major selling point for Apple. Not having to build the infrastructure itself and letting others do it, was a massive opportunity for Apple. At least in so far that those actors didn't enter Apple's own markets.

And so, Apple's changing stance is born out of necessity. It's about safeguarding the brand and the vision that it wants to sell to the world. But it has to do that gingerly since it's products have become part of a digital infrastructure that underpin vast parts of economical and societal activities. Unlike Parler, Apple can't just remove Facebook from it's app store without hurting its own interests.

In all of this, I don't think that Facebook "admitted it has lost the Battle with Apple over privacy". Let alone that it actually lost that "battle" such as it is.

Even more so, if there ever is a battle over privacy, it's between Facebook - and other media companies - and the public as represented by it's legal and judicial institutions. Whether it's through hearings in Congress, or through the dealings with the EU Commission.

Apple itself is no stranger to it's products being front and center to privacy issues. It has a long-standing dispute with the FBI about adding backdoors that would allow public authorities to circumvent encryption. [1] However, this is less of a strategic issue threatening it's commercial interests: it's a legal issue in which public authorities - not a private actor - demand legal compliance from Apple. Which is a very different ballgame.

In the eyes of the general public, all of this may seem to revolve around the same set of issues. And Apple might be perceived as the "good guy" taking the private interests of its customers to heart as globally trust in big technology corporations has been damaged. But I think that's just too simple and naive a narrative. The reality is usually far more murky.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...