Op-Ed by Albert Geokgeuzian, Staff Writer

May 16th, 2021

Have you ever had the feeling that your phone is listening to you? Maybe one day you were talking to your friend about how cold the weather has become and then you opened Facebook and saw winter coats being advertised to you. Well, I have good news and bad news for you; good news is that your phone is not listening to you, bad news is that applications are. Apps like Facebook, YouTube, and Google have built their entire companies based around personalizing advertisements for their users. On the other hand, you have Apple, a company so dedicated to protecting their users' privacy that they refused to unlock the iPhone of an individual that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, even after they were ordered to by a judge.

Starting from iOS 14.5 and onward, apps will now have to ask users to opt into being tracked, whereas before users only had the chance to opt out afterwards. The difference between opt-in and opt-out is massive because people are generally too lazy to search their phones’ settings to find the toggle to turn app tracking off. 

Once you install the update and open an app that tries to track you, this is the message that you will be shown: 

Everyday users will most probably be happy with this update; however, advertisers will hate this development.

Advertisers will hate these changes because, before iOS 14.5, when apps were given access to your data, there was a tag they used to identify you on other websites and apps. That tag is known as IDFA, and it’s used to uniquely identify you across websites, apps, and anything that is connected to the internet. 

On iOS, there is an app called Lockdown Privacy, (you can download it here). It’s an app that gives the user control over their own data. The number of trackers that each of us encounter over the course of a day is astonishing, and they can range from 3000 to 9000 trackers a day. 

This brings us to the company that has been the most vocal antagonist to the privacy update that Apple has made: it’s a company that has built an entire business model around gathering mountains and mountains of your data to sell to advertisers, big and small, to target ads tailor made for you. That’s right, Facebook. 

Facebook has gone into full panic mode after iOS 14.5 was released earlier this month - sidenote, this privacy feature was initially supposed to be released earlier than iOS 14.5, but, because of pressure from other companies, they delayed the release so that developers had enough time to meet the new requirements - and they are doing everything in their power to gear users towards opting into the tracking feature. 

In the picture above, you could see an app in the background—facebook— that app was Facebook, and in this tweet you can see what the page said, https://twitter.com/ashk4n/status/1388270878870310912?s=20

Facebook knows your data is worth billions of dollars, that’s how they make their profits, as such they are telling users to “Help keep Facebook free of charge” to try to incentivise people into opting in.

Threatening to stop letting Facebook be a free website is not the only method that Facebook has adopted to try to fight Apple on this issue. They have campaigned themselves as “Speaking Up for Small Businesses”. In their blog post, they talk about how small business will be the ones hurt the most by this update, much more than Facebook will be impacted. While it is true that small businesses will be impacted by iOS 14.5 because ads will become a lot less efficient, it doesn’t mean that it’s the wrong way to go. 

Facebook has used that idea throughout their posts around this issue, releasing a video with a small business owner as it’s focal point, talking about how it would impact businesses who just want to show their product to the potential customers. 

This update will impact small business owners, but that does not change the fact that people’s privacy has for far too long been ignored by big tech companies to increase their profits by creating juiced up, ultra-targeted advertisements. Our privacy has been breached, our data shared, used, and sold, all in the name of advertisement, without our consent. 

The phrase “data is the new oil” has been true for the past decade, with $332.8 bn being spent on online advertisement in 2020 alone, but with this change that Apple has made, and that Google may be following in Android, we could be seeing a change to online advertisements forever, and for the better.