Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Facebook Privacy Apple

Apple's App Tracking Transparency Crackdown Estimated To Cost Facebook Another $13 Billion In 2022 42

Apple's controversial App Tracking Transparency feature available in iOS 14.5 is expected to have a significant impact on Facebook, Twitter, Snap, and YouTube in 2022. According to a report by Lotame, big tech platforms' revenue could drop by almost $16 billion. 9to5Mac reports: For those who don't remember, ATT requires that applications ask permission from users before tracking them across other apps and websites. For example, when you open the Facebook app, you'll see a prompt that says the app would like to track you across other apps and services. There will be two options from which to choose: "Ask App not to Track" or "Allow."

Talking about Facebook, Lotame's report shows that Zuckerberg's company will take the biggest hit as the privacy changes will cost it $12.8 billion in revenue: "The effects of these changes on these companies are hard to isolate because all four players are still growing extremely strongly, still taking share from the last bastions of traditional media and gaining share in digital media as privacy regulations make it harder and harder for independent publishers and technologies to execute,' said Mike Woosley, Chief Operating Officer at Lotame. 'To add to the complexity, the pandemic has introduced volatile and unpredictable gyrations in the pacing of media spend.'"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Apple's App Tracking Transparency Crackdown Estimated To Cost Facebook Another $13 Billion In 2022

Comments Filter:
  • We laugh, but an all-American advertising baron is really gonna feel this.
    • Re:sucks to be Zucks (Score:5, Interesting)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @09:42PM (#62451188)
      To say it is going to cost him is a stupid way of looking at it. If Apple allowed the Facebook app to listen and transcribe all conversations it hit, that would make him yet more money. However, that money shouldn't be considered "lost" to begin with. A hole in privacy protections he was exploiting granted him temporary extra money. This move corrects it.
      • A decade and a half is a LOT of temporary extra money. Like a trillion dollars worth. FB/Meta needs to be broken up and a portion of its ill-gotten assets ceded and used to contribute a public body focused on end user privacy and protection.
        • I am against the government regulating our privacy even more than I am against companies pilfering it. They should be civilly liable for invading our privacies without contractual agreements with us to do so. Individually. Never make a law for something a simple court case can resolve. You don't want politicians deciding where the lines get drawn. Trust me.
      • I genuinely think it's great news. The less the privacy-rapists get from us, the better. It's almost enough to make me want to buy an iPhone... but €530 for the cheapest model? It's cheaper to buy a generic phone, root it & uninstall/block all the spyware. You also get much more privacy that way.
        • Apl? Privacy? You must be confused. If you install Facebook, you're being tracked, prompt or otherwise, regardless of platform
          • Yes, all tech companies need to be regulated & their data-raping stopped by law or it isn't going to end. GDPR was a small step in the right direction. How about giving users root access to their smart devices? Make sure that users can add black/white lists to the phones at the OS level to prevent unwanted intrusion. Want to block spyware? Go into settings & download an open, regularly updated blacklist/whitelist from a trusted source. Those blacklists also have a rather delightful effect of substan
    • by anegg ( 1390659 )

      The only "controversy" comes from the folks who were abusing their access to our data to make money off of it. Anyone who wants to have their data made available to the folks who will make money off of it can do so, easily.

      Apple just puts the control over access to the data squarely in the hands of the people to whom the data belongs. There is nothing controversial about that.

  • It is a good thing. nuff said.

    • Okay, a pretty good SP, but I was looking more for an FP joke along the similar line of "Best news of the week! Go Apple! Now how can we gig the google even harder?" (And I am not a fanbois of any stripe.)

      It's not like $13 billion is regarded as "real money" these years. More like couch cushion change for Zuck.

      Disclaimer needed? I broke down and got a Chromebook this week. Not that I wanted to contribute to the increasingly EVIL google's coffers, but I couldn't resist learning some new things. Seemed to be

      • by Tom ( 822 )

        And how does this multi-clipboard work? (And it took them long enough to implement it! (I was actually hoping Apple would get there first. Lesser evil thing?)))

        It's easy enough to get one on Apple, there are several available, some of them free to download. I've been using Clipy (https://github.com/Clipy/Clipy) for as long as I can remember and something else before that (which I don't remember).

        Unlike Mickeysoft, Apple doesn't immediately gobble up every good idea in its ecosphere.

        • by shanen ( 462549 )

          I'm not disagreeing with you, but when I focused on the idea a couple of years back (ca 2016?) I looked at a bunch of them and found problems, though I eventually picked one and used it for the project at hand.

          I think this is one of those few cases where a feature badly needs to be integrated at the OS level to work properly. But if Apple gets a bunch of patents, that could actually be a good thing. At least my impression is that Apple is much less abusive of its patent portfolio compared to several of the

  • I can't ever remember a time where Facebook has shown me a single relevant ad from a company I didn't already follow. Mostly I get ads for cars I can't afford, for medical/insurance-type businesses, and for movies I have no interest in watching. Also I get lots of Amazon ads, which is basically just wasted money on Amazon's part because I use my partner's Prime membership.

    Targeted advertising, my ass.

    • by gmack ( 197796 )

      Pretty targeted in my case: They give me ads days and weeks after I make a purchase for the exact item I bought.

      Sooner or later, these companies are going to realize they are wasting their money and a ton of money will just leave the market.

      • by Tom ( 822 )

        Sooner or later, these companies are going to realize they are wasting their money and a ton of money will just leave the market.

        Unlikely. Even 25 years ago, when I was in university and had a semester of marketing 101, the prof already said that everyone in marketing knows that half of all marketing money is wasted - uselessly, would be more profitable to burn it - it's just that nobody knows which half.

        • by gmack ( 197796 )

          The fun thing is that on the internet we now have the metrics to know which half.

          • by Tom ( 822 )

            Really?

            A lot of advertisement is branding. You bombard me with your brand and image not because you expect that I buy your stuff immediately in an online shop, but because when I'm in the supermarket the next time, I'll see your brand, dimly remember that there was something good about it, and pick that instead.

            How are you going to figure that out, except in the most abstract way that leaves you at best with some statistical correlations?

            Yes, a small part of advertisement is very trackable now. You show me

          • You mean the half that is used to buy Internet ads in first place?

  • by bagofbeans ( 567926 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @09:30PM (#62451164)

    Ask App not to Track?

    No. Tell App not to Track.

    • Except of course the data is still tracked for Apple's ad agency which is expected to 4x in size over the next 3 years.
      • Exactly. This is what Apple likes to not talk about.

      • It is much less invasive.from the apple site: “ Ads delivered by Apple may appear in the App Store, Apple News, and Stocks. These ads don’t access data from any other apps. In the App Store and Apple News, your search and download history may be used to serve you relevant search ads. In Apple News and Stocks, ads are served based partly on what you read or follow. This includes publishers you’ve enabled notifications for and the type of publishing subscription you have. The articles you re
    • Ask App not to Track?

      No. Tell App not to Track.

      I think that wording is used because Apple knows sooner or later somebody figures out how to do it anyway, but for the time being it works.
      If it was actually just a request obviously Facebook would ignore it and later claim it was a bug that accidentally left tracking on.

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      I was surprised to read the English says "ask". Nope. The one I get on my screen in German says "do not allow app to track".

      • Maybe it works differently in Germany; you lot are very prickly about matter of privacy (and rightly so). I've worked on internal projects at a multinational company, and the one sentence everyone always dreaded was: "This needs approval from the German works council".
        • by Tom ( 822 )

          "This needs approval from the German works council".

          That's a different thing and not privacy. The works council is a really cool concept (often not used correctly, I'll grant that) where workers and management cooperate to keep workers rights in balance with company goals. It's a bit like a union, but much more localized (to a single location, so a company with many locations can have many works councils). When done well, it's a benefit both to workers and the company (which has more happy workers as a result).

          One of the many rights of the works council is t

  • Controversial? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by splutty ( 43475 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @09:30PM (#62451166)

    How the hell is this "Controversial"?

    It's only controversial for those blood suckers at Facebook who need their daily fix of privacy destroying tracking...

    For everyone else, asking for permission is how things should be done, and in certain countries in the world (a growing number) the actual law.

    There is nothing "controversial" about this.

    • Well in the mean time Apples Ad revenue is expected to increase from $5 billion to $20 billion over the next 3 years. So really this just shifts whose pockets the money goes.
  • Keep up the good work.

  • Cmon apple! Stick them more than that! Stick them until Chapter 7!

  • The only move here is for Facebook to come out with a Zuckerphone. The Z-phone. The phone for Zuckers. Ok, if you think that name sucks, you have to admit it's better than F-phone or Face-phone.

    Apple is going to beat Facebook on VR too, with their 8K per-eye VR headset.

    Facebook needs to get their act together when it come to Meta. His bullshit of thinking 17 to 20 pixels per degree on.a VR display (2K per eye) ought to be good enough for everyone is dumb. Look at the full moon, that's a half-degree .. you a

  • by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @11:33PM (#62451320)

    It wasn't theirs to begin with.

  • by Gabest ( 852807 )

    This is an act of agression, Facebook's state news outlets already talk about WW3.

  • ... why not pay me a cut? I might be delighted to supply my geolocation and browsing history for a few bucks a month.

  • Very interesting indeed. I had no idea how much tracking was going on (although I suspected it would be a lot) since I'm hardly ever on Facebook or any other social media for that matter. But yeah, I'd use that app if I were on Facebook a lot. And wanted to buy _anything_ from Apple.

  • This sounds about the same as a ransomware gang complaining that MS finally patched a bug and it is going to cost them millions in lost revenue, and that MS is the bad guy for doing it.

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

Working...