Facebook vs Apple: The War for Privacy, and why iOS 14.5 strikes fear in Facebook.

hey welcome back techlet here so in the ensuing battle between apple and facebook apple has just launched the ios 14.5 beta which means that they're getting ready to launch this full flash to everybody and this could be the final nail in the coffin for facebook we'll see hopefully it is now to be clear both of these companies are quite monopolistic in both of their practices i'm not huge fans of either ones so you kind of have to pick the lesser of two evils i'd probably still go with apple on this one simply because facebook fired me but i wanted to give you some perspective on what this all means so with the ios 14.5 beta apple is finally launching the app tracking transparency framework now this framework was supposed to go out much earlier but they had delayed it to give developers a little bit more time to figure things out but it seems like they're finally ready to get the show on the road here and what this does is that it breaks advertising tracking on you across different apps and websites so for example if you were to visit a website about the shoes and then you log into the facebook app the facebook app would know that you would have visited that website and start showing you more advertisements about shoes there and they will allow advertising networks to target you based on the other websites that you had visited while you are on the facebook app and this helps businesses target their advertising placements to people more likely to buy because they know that hey maybe if you were already interested in shoes you had already seen their brand and visited their website then they can simply try to show the ad a few more times to get a few more of those touch points in in order to lock in a buy and one thing i know is that sometimes advertisers can even be quite tricky with these ads because they can figure out people who are especially gullible or naive to certain types of advertising and just target those people while ensuring that their advertising dollars aren't wasted on people who are smarter or less likely to buy something and so most of this is accomplished through a technology known as the facebook pixel which website owners will install onto their website it's a very small one by one pixel image that's why it's called the pixel and there's a tracking image and once you load this code it can track you through a variety of mechanisms not just cookies necessarily some of it can be pretty devious like it can try to fingerprint your digital footprint like the network ip that you're using your system configuration your screen size or device profile you can try to hash all of this into a footprint that is unique to your device and identify you across many different types of websites and track things like app installs or app views app clicks or something like that and so long story short this facebook pixel tracking technology is absolutely integral to facebook's ad networks in order to make it really effective and cost effective for small businesses or any business to run ads and due to that facebook ads have become the dominant advertising strategy for a lot of businesses out there who are relying on this technology ios 14 breaks a lot of this stuff why well let's take a look at what tim cook ceo of apple has to say technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed advertising exists and thrive for decades without it if a business is built on misleading users on data exploitation on choices that are no choices at all then it does not deserve our praise it deserves reform in the moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories used by algorithms we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement the longer the better and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible now he's got a point in fact a lot of advertisers will run ads for fake news in order to generate publicity or press or interest for their products like maybe they'll have a headline you won't believe what tom cruise bought his girlfriend and then in the article it'll say that tom cruise bought this necklace for his girlfriend and then that necklace is actually the product being advertised by this fake news article and these ads are absolutely rampant on facebook and they're very effective as well especially for gullible people when you're able to target those ads effectively to certain small segments of people so tim cook and apple sure they've got a point and yet facebook has been launching this counter marketing agenda where they're saying that small businesses depend on the advertising tracking in order to launch really good personalized ads and facebook kind of has a point about this as well that a lot of small businesses they depend on these ads to reach the right customers and to sell really good products now either way it's probably going to depend on whoever has the most power to push their vision of the future ford apple's vision and business tends to not rely on advertising they don't give you a bunch of bloatware in their computers it's very clean and yet they will charge a really high markup for this stuff and they have a bunch of premium subscriptions for all of their services and then they give you a really clean service facebook approaches this in the opposite direction where they give you everything for free because they're going for volume of people they're trying to reach everybody in the world many of them who are in poverty and so then they use advertising to try to support that now the problem is for facebook that despite their marketing efforts they're getting very little pity online because people are just so fed up with facebook and you should probably get off the social network too and the fact is facebook is at the mercy of apple because apple just controls the platform apple built their hardware and the interesting thing is that apple also manages to track everything on their hardware like they know exactly which apps you're opening they send a little ping to their networks anytime you open up an app so they have full market data they essentially know how well each company is doing they know what the future landscape is going to look like they know what trends are coming up what trends are going down and they also are able to run their own advertising on their own platforms on their own hardware that are not subject to the rules that they impose on other ad networks like if apple wants to implement targeted ads they could do so if they wanted to and so this is one reason that personally for me i am quite bullish on apple i own a lot of apple stock despite not liking the company that much and when you think about it what really got this here well at first facebook was just the social network on the internet and then the whole mobile revolution came forward and facebook almost died at that point they probably should have died at that point but they made this hard pivot into a mobile first company and retrained all of their web engineers into mobile engineers and therefore you also see technologies like react native that helps adapt the web technologies like say javascript for mobile platforms because all of the engineers there they're not really native mobile programmers in the first place now in the process of this migration you may have noticed that the facebook app store basically died out why because apple just banned apps they said that no other app can run their own many little app stores inside and so the facebook app platform used to be this huge business we saw companies like zynga out there making on these social games like farmville mob wars and all these annoying little games and all of that pretty much died out with the mobile revolution where apple just said we don't want any of that at least not on facebook and so everything just moved on to the apple app store so apple took facebook's business that way now somewhat unfortunately facebook survived and you could say even continue to thrive in this mobile landscape and so they continued getting into say the messaging business and their main competitor became apple which had their own os specific messaging platform imessage right and so facebook has been combating that with say messenger whatsapp or instagram messaging but the thing is and the critical weakness for facebook is do you think that apple as a platform is really going to let facebook thrive and supplant them as the main messaging service on their own hardware highly doubtful i think that apple is first going to totally try to facebook's business before they let the social media company overtake them on their own platform and so we kind of saw the same thing with facebook gaming as well which is facebook's little game store that apple forbid on their platforms and the same thing kind of happened with epic games as well so epic wanted to launch their own little epic app store on the apple ios app stores and the apple forbid that as well as well as a bunch of other cloud gaming app stores out there and so that brings us to today where facebook had made the critical flaw in thinking that mobile would be just like desktop right that they were desktop first now they can be mobile first and still manage supremacy on the platform whereas now they are actually at the whims of apple and so they've hard pivoted from desktop onto mobile building their business directly on the backs of their competitors which is a really weak foundation and if you were to ask me i would say that maybe facebook needs to get off of mobile and make desktop their bread and butter business again if at all possible even though most of the world is moving into mobile it's a tough dilemma to be in but we can see that some of facebook's core businesses in apps and gaming messaging and advertising are coming head to head with apples and i think the apple will probably win out okay so what does this really mean and i know it's kind of late in the video to get into this but apple is now asking developers to put up a prompt asking for permission to track the user and so facebook this week is preemptively putting out a prompt asking users for the ability to track them on their app and website activity to kind of gather some early data to see how this change is going to affect their businesses there are some estimates that up to 80 percent of users are going to opt out and not allow facebook to track their web activity which could totally their advertising metrics and i would encourage you to also opt out when you see the prompt from facebook don't let them track you and just totally mess up their advertising because the thing is facebook as a company has probably caused more harm than good in my opinion it's kind of like unleashing a machine gun on the masses it's a tool with some benefits that is just simply too hard to control at this point especially because they have implemented algorithms into their news feed and their whole motive is to promote engagement at any cost nobody thinks about the moralities of this tim cook maybe said the best for us it is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn't come with a cost a polarization of lost trust and yes of violence a social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe and so there you have it that'll do for me and if you own any facebook stock i would maybe consider getting out of it i'm not a financial advisor but with apple now antagonistic against facebook and their whole entire business built on apple's back i'm just thinking there may be critical weakness here so that's it for me hope you enjoyed the video but let me know in the comments below what are your thoughts on this do you think facebook is going to also survive through this adpocalypse for them if you liked the video please give a like and subscribe and i'll see you in the next one thanks bye

Channel: TechLead Show

Views: 88,833

Keywords: techlead, tech lead, facebook, apple, ios14.5, ios 14.5, advertising, privacy, social dilemma, engineer, technology, amazon, google, developer, googler, tech, swe, software, computer science, cs, fb, software engineer, software engineering, software engineer life, software engineer intern

Id: Lgr4ed1UHE0

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021