Apple CEO, Tim Cook recently made a speech which has been interpreted by some as a swipe at Facebook, although his remarks could equally apply to Google, Fox News or Amazon.
There seem to be a few different arguments here, that are being conflated into a single issue. They are broadly.
- Consumers are ‘giving away’ large sets of personal data through the use of websites, apps and devices like wearables.
- Advertising business models require traffic to work and the data is being used to favour content that may even be inflammatory or even untrue in order to keep users coming back and perhaps click on ads.
- Some tech-companies seem to be afoul of anti-trust legislation, acting in bad-faith, whether it be the avoidance of tax, de-platforming or other monopolistic behaviour.
What is missing from the list above is the way in which anonymised behavioural data can be used by small business to compete against entrenched corporate players by being smarter at advertising to Facebook’s users.
Apple and Facebook have different approaches to privacy and the use of data to provide services, but Cook’s remarks suggested, at least in the quoted sections, that traditional, non-personalised advertising was somehow fine the way it has always been.
“Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it.
These two ideas don’t seem to fit together and may have been taken out of context in relation to the rest of the speech, but only a company with the marketing budget the size of Apple would suggest that less personalisation is better for advertising.
The USA should adopt practises like those that exist in Europe which alert consumers to which data is being collected and how it is used.
Apple intends to prevent apps from tracking users using their unique device identifier without their explicit permission. This doesn’t just apply to Facebook. Many apps take advantage of Apple phone chipsets to monitor the exact location of users via GPS and other behaviour. The rules are here…
Apple seems to admit that the privacy changes will have a much bigger impact. the update was scheduled to roll out with iOS 14 in September, but Apple delayed it after Facebook protested, saying the update would decimate its and other developers’ ad revenue. That’s the Facebook view, but what about smaller advertisers?
I’ve been catching up with missed episodes of the usually brilliant Freakonomics Podcast – specifically an episode discussing the merits of digital advertising. One of the arguments was that advertising against brand keywords is a waste of time because you end up paying for traffic that you would get from the top organic link. The company that ran this experiment? Ebay – one of the oldest domains on the internet.
In fact, if you are a small, independent hotel who is listed on all the travel aggregator sites, there can be very good reasons to advertise against your own brand-name.
The fact that Facebook, and to a lesser extent Google, have democratised advertising, providing ecommerce entrepreneurs to target micro-audiences and generate returns from small budgets gets lost in argument about privacy.
It would be interesting to know how companies like Shopify who are Apple Fan-boys see the changes impacting the thousands of SME ecommerce stores that are heavily integrated with Facebook ads.
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