After a row over Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 feature which will limit ad tracking, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has suddenly changed his tune and said that his company might benefit from the new feature.
“It’s possible that we may even be in a stronger position if Apple’s changes encourage more businesses to conduct more commerce on our platforms by making it harder for them to use their data in order to find the customers that would want to use their products outside of our platforms,” Zuckerberg said.
When the feature rolls out, the ATT will require developers to gain permission from the user’s device for tracking purposes. As per official reports, “Apple’s upcoming privacy changes will inform users about device ID tracking and ask them if they want to allow it. The tracking is based on a unique device identifier on every iPhone and iPad called the IDFA. Companies that sell mobile advertisements use this ID to help target ads and estimate their effectiveness.”
This anti-tracking feature will prevent Facebook from harvesting insights into key metrics. “Compared to the early conversations we had about how people would use this across Facebook and Instagram and our product, I think this is something that’s well on track to be something that’s going to be increasingly important to people,” Zuckerberg said. Facebook already has over 1 million active shops and over 250 million shopping shops listed on its websites.
It was only in last December that Facebook began to run newspapers warning everyone of the looming threat ATT apparently posed to small business owners. In fact, in January, as per a few sources, Zuckerberg was getting ready for an antitrust suit. But that seems to be a case of the past. However, just how Facebook might use the new privacy setting of iOS 14 is still not clear yet.
