It’s been almost a year since Apple released new iOS privacy settings, in something that from the first moment aimed to be a blow against apps and services that live by collecting data from their users. Meta’s response (at that time still Facebook) did not wait, although his arguments were, to say the least, questionable. And it is not that I say it, it is that even their own employees replied to the defense of the social network.
Be that as it may, it served them very little (well, nothing really), since Apple went ahead with its plans, and since then users of Apple devices are always asked if they want to allow tracking or, on the contrary, prefer that their privacy is kept as private as possible. A decision that the managers of the affected services were already waiting for, which is why they tried to fight. Even today, when you install and open those apps for the first time, they present one and a thousand arguments for you to accept the tracking.
Since Apple put its new policies in place, we have not stopped wondering about its impact on the income statements of the affected companies. According to Meta, the main impact was going to be received by small advertisers, who could no longer reach their desired audiences. However, and looking at the numbers of the investigation carried out by the Financial Times, I have the feeling that this argument was a bit tricky and that, as we already expected, it is the Meta accounts that have suffered the most the blow.
The first thing that research tells us is something we already expected: that Most Apple device users have refused to allow apps to track the data obtained by other applications, and consequently, put the losses of the second quarter of Meta, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat in nothing less than 9,850 million of dollars. Of the four, the two most affected would have been Meta (Facebook, remember) and Snapchat.
Faced with a 7.4% decline in Twitter’s revenue due to Apple’s privacy features, Meta’s losses are estimated at 13.1%. And the company itself, in the voice of its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, openly acknowledges it. Last week, Zuckerberg blamed Apple for the company’s lackluster bottom line, something in which other executives have also abounded. Had it not been for Apple’s new rules, they say their business numbers would have been better.
It’s such an obvious thing that you could almost have saved it, actually. However, Isn’t your criticism of Apple’s privacy policies supposed to be in defense of humble little businesses? Let’s see if it is going to turn out that, in reality, the privacy of users is not and has never been a concern for the company, which in reality the only thing that really cares is its income statement. This is just a theory, I clarify.
