Facebook Worried About the Privacy Settings in the Upcoming iOS 14

• iOS 14 is going to introduce a new API for advertisers, and Facebook isn’t happy about it.
• The social media giant warned its partners about the changes and told them to expect fundamental disruption.
• iOS 14 will be made available for almost the entire iPhone model range, leaving little to scrape outside Android.

The upcoming iOS 14 will be Apple’s most private version ever, as the company wants to make leaps in that area. Thus, they announced clipboard reading restrictions, an option for “approximate location” in the app permission options, more granular and transparent permission controls for the microphone and the camera, as well as changes to the advertising API that will limit user data collection.

This will obviously make targeted advertising a lot harder, and even impossible if the users don’t provide their consent. So, the companies that are getting rich by these operations are now nervous.

Facebook is one of the pillars of this business model along with Google, so naturally, they are worried that iOS 14 will adversely affect their system. As they told their ad network partners today, the new Facebook SDK for iOS 14 won’t collect the unique advertiser identifier assigned to each device.

As for the “Off-Facebook Activity” tracking, users will have an option to allow this, but it makes no sense at all to expect the vast majority to do it. After all, users were letting companies track them before either because they weren’t given any other option, or because they didn’t know about it.

The impact that this change will have on Facebook goes without saying. The company characteristically mentions the following:

This will send ripple effects to app developers too, who will get lower CPMs since the ads they will be serving their users will no longer be targeted. Considering that the iOS 14 is going to land on all devices from iPhone 6 and later, the new API is really going to have a widespread effect. Facebook doesn’t have much choice at this point, so they may try to negotiate with Apple to figure something out.