Facebook and its rebranded parent company Meta is losing a lot of money, and it blames Apple.
This week’s quarterly earnings report saw Facebook miss its revenue expectations, and to add salt to the wound its user base also shrank for the first time ever. The company’s stock responded with a sharp drop, with Meta’s CFO claiming Apple’s recent privacy changes were directly responsible – to the tune of an expected $10bn in lost revenue throughout 2022.
He’s referring to App Tracking Transparency, a feature added to iOS last year that allows users to choose whether or not an app can track them. Since its addition, the Ask App Not To Track button has been pretty popular with users.
Since a large part of Facebook’s business model is based on tracking user activity to serve targeted ads, Apple’s decision to require tracking permission really hit Facebook where it hurts.
No surprise the company is upset, but the majority of users seem to be feeling a level of schadenfreude at Facebook’s woes. It’s hard to muster sympathy for a multi-billion-dollar corporation that wants to track your every move without asking – especially one with a broad history of privacy controversies.
If you’re thinking of quitting Facebook, by the way, here are some useful apps to fill the void.