Facebook Vs Apple Privacy Row And What It Means If You Advertise On Facebook

Good morning from a dreary and rainy South Wales morning. Now, speaking of dreary this morning, we are talking about Mr. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, and Mr. Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, of course, and their recent spat regarding privacy and how it is going to affect your advertising on Facebook.

Yes, this is the ongoing playground bickering between Mr. Cook and Mr. Zuckerberg about privacy that has escalated into a full-blown fight.

We need to go back to September 14, when Mr. Cook gave an in-depth interview with Charlie Rose and he touched upon a range of topics including privacy. Now, during this interview, Mr. Cook confirmed Apple’s commitments to your privacy whilst having a little pop at companies such as Google and Facebook, quite ironic, really given that this interview took place just weeks after the infamous leaks of multiple female celebrities, nude photographs, which were stored inside the iClouds accounts. While there you go, Mr. Cook.

So first punch thrown, then Mr. Zuckerberg in an interview with time later that year was reported to be visibly irritated by Mr. Cook’s assertions. Zuckerberg said frustratingly I have seen that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model which somehow being out of alignment with your customers. It goes on, I think it’s the most ridiculous concept.

If you were in alignment with your customers Apple, then you wouldn’t be making your products so expensive, they’d be a lot cheaper. Well, you just have a point Apple’s products are rather expensive, aren’t they?

Now, of course, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which engulfed Facebook in 2018, when a whistleblower revealed that they had harvested user data without consent from over 50 million users.

Now, Mr. Cook, during an interview was asked what he would do if he’d found himself in Mark Zuckerberg’s shoes and Cook said, or cook responded, what would I do? I wouldn’t be in this situation at all, a low blow and Zuckerberg jabbed back again, criticizing the premium Apple price it places on all its products. So from a school ground squabble, it became two of the big bullies of the tech industries in a full-blown playground war slugging it out whilst the rest of us were waiting for the fallout.

Well, the fallout continued, of course, then Apple showed off a feature to help iPhone users cut down on the time spent inside apps and an Apple executive said, if you see an app where you might want to be spending a little less time, you can set your own limit. Whilst there was a big picture of the Instagram app behind him which appeared on the screen behind him, which of course is owned by Facebook.

Now, this is a strange spat given that Facebook actually does rely on Apple’s iPhones to reach millions of its users and Apple also needs Facebook’s widely popular apps on its phones to stop people going over to Android.

Of course, can you imagine if Facebook wasn’t on Apple’s platforms? So the feud has escalated rapidly over Apple Apple’s iOS 14 app data, which includes a requirement that developers get explicit permission to collect certain data and track user’s activity across apps and websites.

Apple says the software update will give users more clarity about who’s collecting their data and for what purpose it describes user’s privacy as a fundamental human right, but I’m sure you don’t care.

I’m sure you really don’t care about this silly episode and what you want to know is what this spat means for you if you advertise on Facebook as a small business.

So what actions do you need to take right now? Well, first of all, the thing you must do is verify your domain with Facebook. Now there are a few ways of verifying your domain. You could add a DNS text entry to your DNS records to confirm that you are the legal owner of a particular domain, you could also upload a Facebook provided HTML file, which you can get from business manager to your web directory and you can also add a meta tag in the head section of your website again, which is provided inside Facebook, Facebook business manager.

Now, the next thing you need to do is decide which eight events for conversions you will want to track. Before we had standard events, such as conversions adds to cart leads, etc, but now you’ll be restricted to eight events.

Now, this is in response to how data is handled when people opt out of that prompt about tracking in-app activities.

This will have a wide-ranging impact on all web advertising via FB.

Now advertisers will be required to select and rank eight web events, so standard events, and custom conversions for example, can be used to optimize per domain if an iOS user opts out of tracking.

Now the highest-ranking event from a visit will be reported if they have opted out. But this limit doesn’t just apply only to iOS targetting moving forward.

Advertisers will only be able to optimize for one of eight events per domain. So anything beyond those eight won’t be available for optimization.

Many of us will be holding our heads in our hands. So this is quite a complex subject and we will be producing a more in-depth video, in the next few days. So if you want to see that straight away, please subscribe to our YouTube channel or pop along to our Facebook group, the nicest guys in marketing.

See you there