As one of the biggest online-advertising platforms, Facebook understands the hidden depths of the digital world like a lobster fisherman knows the topography of the sea floor. But Mark Zuckerberg does not set the rules in all the places where his company lurks.
Apple justifies its actions as part of a commitment to protect its users’ privacy. Facebook says it is resisting on behalf of millions of its small and medium-sized business clients that rely on its data-hunting algorithms to reach customers. On the surface it looks like a typical territorial dispute of privacy versus access. Mr Murrell’s Oculus fantasies provide a glimpse of why it goes much deeper than that.
The giants’ efforts to portray their positions as high-minded and altruistic are self-serving. But each has a point. Apple’s boss, Tim Cook, is right, in his thinly veiled attacks on Facebook, to lament the way polarisation and disinformation keep people glued to their screens to enable sites to exploit more data. Mr Zuckerberg is right to deride Mr Cook’s assertion that advertising does not need personalised data because it survived for decades without them.
More privacy will hurt but not kill the personalised-ad model. Some Apple users, preferring targeted ads to random ones, will opt to allow data-tracking. Google, which has split loyalties because of its own online-ad juggernaut, may make its Android platform privacy-lite. That would create a bifurcated web: on the one side, a privacy-focused, gentrified isystem; on the other, a freer-for-all Android one.
But it is also a demonstration of paranoia. Facebook has growing ambitions to become a direct competitor to Apple. One way would be for Facebook to combine its namesake social network with its Instagram photo-sharing app and WhatsApp messenger into a “super-app” akin to Tencent’s WeChat in China, melding social media, messaging, e-commerce, gaming and payments. That would give it more freedom to offer personalised ads, since Apple cannot control data-tracking within the Facebook family of apps.
Haha. Thats funny comiing from Fake Book
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.