During a Facebook quarterly earning call ceo of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg attacked apple, regarding ther privacy policy on the iMessage app stating that it is less secure that than the number of messaging app owned by Facebook. He went on to claim that the Apple messenger app was misleading people with their privacy policy.
Zuckerberg went on to quote “We have a lot of competitors who make claims about privacy that are often misleading, Now Apple recently released so-called nutrition labels, which focused largely on metadata that apps collect rather than the privacy and security of people’s actual messages, but iMessage stores non-end-to-end encrypted backups of your messages by default unless you disable iCloud.”
The reason being for this feud is that Apple has introduced this privacy – nutrition labels for its apps as a part of a larger privacy update, this made Facebook angry and they went all out war by putting full page newspaper ads in December in retaliation.
Zuckerberg gave a statement where he claimed that WhatsApp’s end – to – end encryption was far superior to what Apple was doing with its messaging services. And added that “I do want to highlight that we increasingly see Apple as one of our biggest competitors. IMessage is a key linchpin of their ecosystem, we are also seeing Apple’s business depend more and more on gaining share in apps and services against us and other developers. So Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, which they regularly do to preference their own. And this impacts the growth of millions of businesses around the world.”
Apple took its time is putting out the privacy features as part of its iOS 14 update after developers, including Facebook said it would bring down their ad revenue. The feature in question was that of a asking the user permission for the apps to track them for advertising purposes.
Apple made the announcements on Wednesday for this feature which was originally set to take off in September but would be introduced in early spring. It was Dave Wehner the Chief financial officer of Facebook that said this would make the company face significant ad targeting headwinds in the first quarter of 2021.
Zuckerberg said that while Apple “may say that they’re doing this to help people,” the changes “clearly track their competitive interests. And I think that this dynamic is important for people to understand because we and others are going to be up against this for the foreseeable future.”
