Facebook launches surprise attack on Apple, accusing it of chasing profit and trying to distract customers

(AFP via Getty Images)

Facebook has launched a charged attack on Apple, accusing it of attempting to distract customers, pretending it cares about privacy but actually being interested in profit, and moving away from “innovative hardware products”.

The broadside came after Apple said that it would push ahead with a controversial privacy feature that makes it harder for ad companies including Facebook to track users across their phone.

Apple’s comments came in response to a letter from civil rights and privacy campaigners who looked to ensure the feature would still be introduced. It had been intended to arrive alongside iOS 14, which was released in September, but Apple delayed it, saying that it was giving developers more time to deal with the repercussions of the change.

Apple’s new feature, which it calls App Tracking Transparency or ATT, forces developers to ask for explicit permission from users for access to the unique identifier in the phone that can be used to track a person across different apps. Apple has likened it to other controls such as its photos and locations settings, which mean developers must ask users to opt-in to give them access to that information.

The change has been opposed by some parts of the ad industry including Facebook, which has argued that it will suffer a major disruption to its business and that the fallout of the change could cause damage to smaller businesses.

In Apple’s response to the letter, it denied those claims, and insisted that advertising companies should be able to find privacy-protecting ways of showing their marketing.

Now Facebook has attacked that letter and Apple’s announcement, accusing the company of using it as a distraction from its own privacy failings, favouring its own apps, looking to launch its own advertising products and transforming its own business “away from innovative hardware products to data-driven software and media”.

In addition to the specific accusations, Facebook’s statement is a significant increase in tensions between it and Apple. While the two companies have publicly argued over privacy and data collection policies and technologies  in the past, the tone of Facebook’s statement marks a change from previous public comments.

“Apple is being accused of monitoring and tracking people’s private data from their personal computers without their customers’ knowledge through its latest update to macOS - and today’s letter is a distraction from that,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “They have a history of this."

The company claimed that Apple had previously attempted to cover up problems in FaceTime – when a bug meant that people could listen on in people without them picking up the phone – by blocking Facebook from running its internal apps. That followed the news that Facebook had been using Apple’s programmes to distribute apps that would otherwise violate its terms, but Facebook said that Apple had done so to “change the topic”.

“Sadly, we’re not perfect and it worked,” Facebook said in its statement.

Apple did not explicitly say why it had chosen to announce its response to the letter on Wednesday, despite the fact the original letter from civil society groups had arrived a month ago. But while the announcement did follow a high-profile privacy controversy in MacOS, it also came just days after it was sued over the specific feature and accused of breaching European law.

Facebook then went onto to say that Apple had “expanded its business into advertising and through its upcoming iOS14 changes is trying to move the free internet into paid apps and services where they profit”.

“As a result, they are using their dominant market position to self-preference their own data collection while making it nearly impossible for their competitors to use the same data," Facebook said. "They claim it’s about privacy, but it’s about profit.”

Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, had responded to accusations that its privacy tools were anti-competitive during an interview with The Independent as the letter of response was released. He said that the company did not dominate any markets and is instead offering customers’ a choice of which platform to use: “if we sell cars with airbags, and we decided to put airbags in our cars before someone else did, and customers want to buy those, I think it's great that we've provided that that choice,” he said.

Apple had said in its letter of response about the tracking feature that it does not favour its own apps, most of which do not collect identifying information about their users.

But Facebook appeared to suggest that could change as Apple increases its online services business – and even suggested that its products could be suffering as a result. “This is all part of a transformation of Apple’s business away from innovative hardware products to data-driven software and media,” it said.