Facebook stops using some iPhone app data for adverts ahead of privacy crackdown

Facebook will stop asking iPhone app manufacturers to provide the company with personal data of their users for advertising. New privacy edition by Apple it can reduce billions of dollars in revenue.

The social media giant told app developers in a small update last week that they can now allow users to log in via their Facebook account without being used to target them with promotions.

Facebook, which will publish the fourth-quarter results of sales and record usage growth this week, has long used the login system integrated into thousands of other apps to collect and track data from people’s smartphone habits. serving ads to users of the same users and specific apps on multiple services.

Nevertheless, these apps are A recent iPhone update that will force apps to show an aggressive confirmation popup to their users Before sharing data with advertising companies, including Facebook.

Experts believe that up to 90 users will reject pop-ups, disrupt the free app economy, and cripple Facebook’s mobile advertising machine, which made up the bulk of its revenue in 2019 when the numbers were last released. Mobile market analyst Eric Seufert predicts that the changes could be deleted from Facebook’s quarterly revenue up to 14 parts.

David Barnard, developer liaison officer for app subscription company RevenueCat, said Facebook has no choice but to change its policy to avoid breaking thousands of apps overnight when users whose accounts are connected to Facebook disable unfollowing.

“The next few months will be crazy … This is a perfect example of how deeply this policy affects the millions of lines of code already written and in production in thousands of applications,” Mr. Barnard said.

Facebook’s software development tools have been widely adopted by application developers. The login system helps them recruit new users more easily while providing access to Facebook’s powerful advertising tools.

App manufacturers can “retarget” their obsolete or infrequent users with ads on Facebook and Instagram, or use app logins to measure the success of their promotional campaigns. In return, Facebook can use the same data to sell ads to other companies.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company would still collect data but marked it not to be used in ads.