This is clearly not Facebook’s year. On March, the company grappled with the privacy scandal that was the Cambridge Analytica story which led to an ‘inappropriate’ collection of data of upto 87 million people.
Since then, we have seen a decisive move by institutions like the EU, which passed the General Data Protection Regulation which imposes stiff penalties on companies that violate its stipulations against personal data use.
Privacy has become the new selling point for companies and Apple did that with last night’s WWDC keynote conference. Facebook was targeted subtly by the company to a great effect.
Breaking tracking tactics
Starting with iOS 12, Apple previewed some of its upcoming features and a major feature was the privacy aspect to it.
“Apple believes privacy is a fundamental human right,” they say on their page and on iOS 12, Safari will stop web pages from tracking you without your permission. It will also stop advertisers from collecting your device unique characteristics (fingerprinting) so that they can’t identify your device.
This feature is also on the new MacOS release, Mojave which means a person in the Apple ecosystem would be shielded from these cookies that track your activity all over the Internet.
This move right here fundamentally breaks how companies track you all over the web and to show it, Apple decided to shade Facebook by showing example of one of their links.
Ooh. Apple “shutting down” Facebook’s attempts to follow you around the web with ‘likes’ and other things. Wants to make it “dramatically more difficult for these companies to track you”. #wwdc18 pic.twitter.com/2Q5tfK3oUY
— Adrian Weckler (@adrianweckler) June 4, 2018
Screen time
Our phones are the most used gadgets that we have around and we have a tendency to use apps for an extended amount of time. On iOS 12, Apple introduced Screen Time which allows you to understand how much time you use on certain apps.
While introducing this feature to the world, Apple decided to show Facebook apps as an example, which is funny because they could have chosen any other app.
Oh you Apple!
