Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the opening remarks about the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call to blow Apple over the upcoming privacy changes, and said that Facebook is increasingly seeing Apple as one of its competitors his biggest.
Apple is gearing up for a software change that will explicitly ask iPhone and iPad users if they want to share their information for advertising purposes. The online advertising industry expects to be hit with the fact that a percentage of consumers choose not to share that information.
Facebook, which receives almost all of its revenue from online advertising, has been very excited about the changes, running newspaper ads, publishing a site- website and running a blog post outlining its arguments against Apple over the change it says “threaten the personal ads that millions of small businesses rely on -see and reach out. ”
Zuckerberg suggested, in his comments, that Apple use its position to help its own services, in particular its iMessage service, which competes with Messenger and WhatsApp services on Facebook.
“IMessage is a key baseline of their ecosystem,” he said. “It comes pre-installed on all iPhones and prefers it with private APIs and permissions, which is why iMessage is the most used messaging service in the US”
He said Apple’s business is now increasingly reliant on getting a share in apps and services.
“Apple has every incentive to use their largest platform setting to disrupt the way our apps and other apps work, which they consistently do it for the better on their own, “he said.” This is impacting the growth of millions of businesses around the world, including with the iOS 14 changes that are being made. to come. “
Zuckerberg also reinforced Facebook’s argument that Apple’s privacy changes will make it harder for small businesses to reach their customers with targeted ads.
“Apple may be saying that they are doing this to help people but the trends are clearly in keeping with their competing interests,” he said. “We and others are going to be against this in the future.”
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