Facebook wants users to allow online tracking to keep apps ‘free’

Gadgets Now Bureau / Updated: May 4, 2021, 10:37AM IST

FacebookTwitterLinkedin

Articles

Facebook wants users to allow online tracking to keep apps free

Facebook has been quite rattled by Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature. It was in June 2020 that Apple made the announcement and Facebook hasn’t stopped voicing its opinion on how the feature isn’t great for small businesses and, of course, for the company as well. But now Facebook is trying to strike a chord with its users and how the feature could end up being ‘harmful’ for them. In its latest bid, the company has been spotted adding a new notice — which it calls educational screens — within its Facebook and Instagram iOS apps.

On these screens, the company can be seen asking their users to grant them permission to track “some data” to improve users’ ads. Additionally, it also claims that having access to this data “helps keep Facebook/Instagram free of charge and support businesses that rely on ads to reach their customers.”

The main issue with this new prompt messages is the ‘free of charge’ tag the purpose of which wasn’t clarified by the company unless it wanted to imply that Facebook could in the future perhaps be forced to charge its users.

In an updated blog post, Facebook explains, ”Apple will require apps that engage in what it calls “tracking” to ask permission when using information from apps and websites owned by other companies to personalize or measure ads. This will happen through a prompt designed by Apple that discourages people from giving their permission, and provides little detail about what this decision means.”

It’s been almost a week since Apple has released the iOS 14.5 update for iPhones and with it the support for App Tracking Transparency feature

It will be interesting to see what new direction this privacy war takes with clearly Apple in no mood to budge on its privacy-first approach or rather a transparency-first approach.

To recall, the App Tracking Transparency feature has been rolled out with iOS 14.5 and makes it mandatory for developers to request users to grant them permission in order to track them across other apps and websites.

Apple has made its stance clear in the past about the apps that fail to comply with the new privacy rules. Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi has said that apps face a risk of being removed from the App Store, which is the only way to install software on an iPhone.

FacebookTwitterLinkedin