During the earnings meeting for the first calendar quarter of 2021, social media giant Facebook confirmed that the upcoming changes to iOS 14.5 namely “App Tracking Transparency” will have a manageable impact on the business in the second quarter of 2021.
According to the report, Dave Wehner – Facebook CFO, said that Facebook will soon begin to attract headwinds in ad targeting in 2021 due to the iOS 14.5 update. Apparently, Apple released iOS 14.5 with an App Tracking Transparency which basically gives users control over whether they want their activities to be tracked or not. Here, the app developers will have to take permissions from users to access IDFA to track user’s activity across apps and websites on their iOS devices. If the user denies it, app developers have no option to track the user’s activity.
App Tracking Transparency – Facebook says the ongoing iOS 14.5 impact is ‘manageable’
In the recent meeting, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said that Facebook is going to do a lot of work in order to prepare for the changes imposed by the iOS 14.5 App Tracking Transparency. She further added that Facebook is working towards rebuilding elements crucial to their ad tech to support the changes to Apple APIs. Here, Facebook mentioned that they are working with W3C and other bodies to provide a personalized user experience with just a little amount of data.
This is a crucial move to prevent advertisers from switching from Facebook to Google. According to Wehner, Facebook said that the impact on the business is manageable as they will have to make up systems to improve ad performance. Apparently, this does impact Apple in some ways as well since it has a number of hardware and software APIs where Apple gives preferences to their products when pit against other products. This could affect Apple in the long run.
Facebook even took it to a full-page newspaper ad marking Apple as an enemy of small businesses who will be the most that will suffer from the upgraded iOS 14.5 policies. Facebook will continue to provide small businesses with a better understanding of personalized advertising. It could be a disguise which is something people have stated in reports tagging Facebook with the phrase that it is pushing “a sympathetic message to justify doing a bad thing”.
