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Many of you will have all four, very few of you will have none at all. And while there is a fair argument that free-to-use services should monetize some of our data to fund their platforms, the growth, values and profitability of Facebook and Google and others suggest that the balance implicit in any such arrangement has gotten way out of kilter.įacebook has four hyperscale apps that are the front-end for its smartphone data gathering machine: Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Facebook itself. You have the right to ask why it’s being collected, how it’s being processed, where it’s being accessed. The arguments back and forth are a distraction. Seemingly innocuous and unrelated activities, a click or a search someplace else, all monitored by the world’s most lucrative algorithm.

And if you want to understand how subversive and powerful this is, think about the times someone has suggested their phone is eavesdropping on conversations, based on ads suddenly appearing in their feeds. This isn’t Apple’s problem, it isn’t your problem, it’s Facebook’s problem. Facebook has lashed out because Apple now insists that users cannot be tracked in secret, that their permission needs to be sought. Our behaviors, contact details, social graphs, locations, device details, shopping habits, browsing histories… all fair game to be harvested and sold by brokers or used by tech giants to sell targeted ads that will make us buy. Apple has, at long last, shone a bright and awkward light on the permissions abuse that has been allowed to evolve on our smartphones. This has become clear in recent weeks with WhatsApp’s mishandling of a privacy label and data-sharing backlash that has been very well documented.

We are in the realm of the frog and the scorpion. There is no balance, there are no checks or balances, its business model is so entrenched that it can’t seem to rethink the basics despite the constant backlash. On every level, however it’s judged, Facebook collects and processes too much of our data. And it’s important that we don’t allow this debate and those many complexities to cloud that in our minds. For the (literally) billions of users of Facebook apps, there is a simple, underlying truth that has become inescapable.

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Reports this week even suggest Android users may get their own (watered down) version of the anti-tracking tech.

EFF has dismissed the company’s campaign to defend its tracking as “laughable,” and just “one more direct attack against our privacy.” Google is much more silent on Apple’s changes-it sits both sides of the fence, after all.

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There is complexity underlying this debate-free-to-use services funded by access to our data, a level (or otherwise) playing field controlled by Apple, what each of those privacy labels actually means in the real world.įacebook is now testing how it might explain this to users in a convincing enough way that those users will say okay, yes, feel free to track me. Facebook rightly assumes that most people will say no, and all those “allow Facebook to track your activity” requests will be a PR nightmare as everyone thinks about the business model underpinning “free to use” apps. Apple users will be asked by each installed app whether it’s okay to follow them around online. Now, though, AppTrackingTransparency is on different level. Privacy labels have been bad enough for Facebook-just ask WhatsApp, but there’s still an onus on users to dig for the information.