Increasingly, privacy-proponent Apple and privacy-trampling Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram are on a collision course.
Kurt Wagner and Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Competition in Silicon Valley can be brutal, but for much of the past decade, Apple and Facebook have shared a mutually beneficial relationship, if not always a friendly one. Facebook relies on Apple’s iPhones to reach millions of users, and Apple needs Facebook’s wildly popular apps on its phones to keep people from going to competing platforms. Both companies have thrived since the iPhone’s release, and for the most part they haven’t made products that compete directly.
But Facebook and Apple find themselves on a collision course. Their competition on messaging has heated up for years. Facebook is focusing on products that are also on Apple’s road map, such as virtual- and augmented-reality headsets… The feud has escalated rapidly over Apple’s forthcoming update to the software that powers its iPhones, which includes a requirement that developers get explicit permission to collect certain data and track users’ activity across apps and websites. Such a move could undermine the efficacy of Facebook’s targeted advertisements.
MacDailyNews Take: Facebook is to privacy as Chernobyl is to nuclear power.
Any “collision” on privacy between Apple and Facebook will resemble a catastrophic meetup between a steamroller and a pancake, respectively.