Facebook Wants Apple To Stop Telling Users How To Block Apps From Tracking Their Personal Data; Claims It’s Standing Up For Small Businesses

Facebook wants Apple to stop letting its users know that they have the ability to disable applications from tracking their personal data. 

You know those little alerts on your iPhone that educate you on how to block apps from taking your personal information? Yeah, Facebook is fighting against that move from Apple. Facebook launched a campaign last week criticizing Apple’s decision to prompt its iPhone users about some app’s  – like Facebook’s – personal data collection actions, CNBC reports. 

In its campaign, Facebook claims it is “speaking up” for small businesses that depend on Facebook for targeted advertising with information that is supplied by personal data. The two companies have been going head-to-head for the past decade, and Facebook’s campaign is the latest move in the battle from the social media giant. According to Buzzfeed News, Facebook took out full-page ads in major newspapers and created a webpage encouraging people to “Speak Up for Small Businesses.”

While portrayed the campaign as a supportive effort of family-run businesses, some call the movement a self-serving act that straddles the line of hypocrisy, according to internal comments and audio of a presentation to workers obtained by BuzzFeed News. However, some Facebook employees think their company’s move against Apple has nothing to do with family businesses and more, if not all, to do with how Apple’s move would negatively affect Facebook as a company.

“It feels like we are trying to justify doing a bad thing by hiding behind people with a sympathetic message,” one engineer wrote in response to an internal post about the campaign from Dan Levy, Facebook’s vice president for ads.

The first issue between the two companies took place in 2018 when Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized Facebook for tracking what people did on the web and not just on the application. Facebook is also set to make a record $80 billion in ad sales alone this year, and it looks like they just aren’t trying to lose out on that money.