Since Apple had taken its customer’s privacy more seriously, the company had decided to do the unthinkable which many of its customers love by the way – the app tracking feature which was turned on by default before.
Now, the company requires all app developers to request users’ consent before tracking them across apps on their iPhones.
This feature led to some legal tussle between Facebook and Apple due to the fact that the social media needs people’s permission in order to track them.
With that in place, a new Financial Times investigation findings shows that big tech companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and even YouTube lost nearly US$10 billion in revenue due to this privacy changes.
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The new feature called App Tracking Transparency policy forced app developers to require users’ permission in order to track them across their smartphones.
A lot of people reportedly opted out of this which led to Facebook starting a campaign about the importance of tracking as it helped personalize ads experience as well as helping small businesses – even though not so many people bought the idea.
According to the Financial Time’s report, Facebook was hit the most compared to the other social networking platforms.
Meanwhile, Snap “fared the worst as a percentage of its business” because its advertising is mainly tied to smartphones, which makes sense for a product that doesn’t have a desktop version.
“Some of the platforms that were most impacted — but especially Facebook — have to rebuild their machinery from scratch as a result of ATT,” adtech consultant Eric Seufert told FT. “My belief is that it takes at least one year to build new infrastructure. New tools and frameworks need to be developed from scratch and tested extensively before being deployed to a high number of users.”
With the policy in place, several tech companies now need to up their games as far as advertisement is concerned and seek for better ways to target their users instead of a continuous tracking.
As for Android, nothing like that has been implemented even though the new Android 12 update comes with some privacy features that let you know which device is using what feature at the background.
