Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the 56th Munich Security Conference in Munich, southern Germany, on February 15, 2020.
Christof Stache | AFP | Getty Images
On Monday, Facebook will start urging some iPhone and iPad users to allow the company to follow their activity, so that the social media giant can display more personalized ads.
The move comes with Apple’s planned privacy update for iOS 14, which will inform users about this type of tracking and ask if they want to allow it.
The two companies have been in conflict for a decade and have recently engaged in a heated war over these privacy changes. Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg named Apple one of its biggest competitors and said the privacy changes would affect the growth of “millions of companies around the world.” The next day, Apple CEO Tim Cook alluded to Facebook in a speech at a data privacy conference in Brussels, saying: “If a business is based on misleading users, data exploitation, options which are not choices at all, do not deserve our praise. It deserves contempt. “
The battle focuses on a unique device identifier on each iPhone and iPad called IDFA. Companies that sell mobile ads, including Facebook, use this ID to help target your ads and estimate their effectiveness.
With a future update to iOS 14, every app that wants to use these IDs will ask users to opt-in when the app is first launched. If users quit, these ads will become much less effective. Facebook has warned investors that these imminent changes could affect its advertising business immediately after this quarter.
Facebook is testing the effects of this update now, before Apple makes it mandatory for all applications in early spring.
As part of this test, Facebook will start showing certain users its own requests starting Monday, explaining why it wants to follow this activity and asking users to participate. These prompts will appear on Apple users’ screens immediately before the Apple pop-up window appears.
A test version of the Facebook prompt has a bold header asking “Do you allow Facebook to use your application and website activity?” and claims that Facebook uses this information to “provide a better advertising experience.” It will then give users a choice between “Do not allow” and “Allow”. (The exact language and appearance of the Facebook prompt may vary.)
Regardless of the selection that users make on the Facebook prompt, if they choose not to allow tracking on the Apple pop-up window, this choice will be final and Facebook will honor it.
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