Facebook is attacking privacy with its anti-Apple campaign and has locked SMBs into a surveillance-powered advertising model that's invasive of customers
they worked their way into being the privacy co. and it's paid off — but doubling down on this particular argument seems like a really bad move for Facebook, doesn't it? https://www.eff.org/... @hypervisible : “... we shouldn't allow companies to violate our fundamental human rights, even if it's better for their bottom line. Stripped of its shiny PR language, that is what Facebook is complaining about.” https://www.eff.org/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Job requirement. Facebook's former chief privacy officer had me to lunch in June 2014 to gaslight me about their Like buttons bait and switch into surveillance tools to sell FB ads. I took them on weeks earlier in WSJ column then @DinaSrinivasan nailed it in her antitrust paper. https://twitter.com/... Jim Parsons / @jpwp : #Facebook knows: lying and disinformation WORKS (it's essential to their business) “Facebook's Laughable Campaign Against Apple Is Really Against Users and Small Businesses” | Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/... Roger McNamee / @moonalice : FB has a “Director of Privacy” whose job appears to be a PR function built around gaslighting. https://twitter.com/... @eff : This is just another attempt from Facebook to violate our privacy rights and maintain its anti-competitive digital advertising practices. https://www.eff.org/... Kontra / @counternotions : On privacy: “When a company does the right thing for its users, EFF will stand with it, just as we will come down hard on companies that do the wrong thing. Here, Apple is right and Facebook is wrong.” (Yeah, but what about those small businesses?!) https://www.eff.org/... @eff : When a company does the right thing for its users, EFF will stand with it, just as we will come down hard on companies that do the wrong thing. Here, Apple is right and Facebook is wrong. https://www.eff.org/... John Paczkowski / @johnpaczkowski : Would love to know how Facebook convinced itself this was a good idea https://twitter.com/... Kontra / @counternotions : 'Facebook's Tone-Deaf Attack on Apple' (Yes, but what about the butterfly keyboard, the missing on/off button on AirPods Max, and the 16GB RAM limit on M1 chips?! Apple is no saint.) (Extremism in bothsidesism is no vice at NYTimes.) https://daringfireball.net/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This EFF critique lands mid-escalation in the Facebook–Apple privacy fight. Apple had already demonstrated its leverage over Facebook by shutting down Facebook's internal iOS apps in 2019, and Tim Cook sharpened the framing weeks after this piece with his argument that engagement-over-privacy business models breed "polarization" and need reform (an apparent swipe at Zuckerberg).
What makes EFF's intervention notable is its target: Facebook's argument that Apple's ATT changes hurt small businesses. The corpus bears that framing out on both sides — Facebook's Q3 2021 results showed 33% ad revenue growth to $28.28B even as it warned of continued ATT headwinds, while analysts argued the secular rise of digital advertising would blunt any damage.
First-order effects
- Facebook's public positioning flips from defender to attacker of privacy defaults, drawing direct censure from a civil-liberties organization whose endorsement of Apple's position strips the pro-SMB argument of its privacy cover.
- Small businesses locked into Facebook's surveillance-powered ad model now sit on top of an iOS signal loss Facebook itself flags as a headwind, making their dependence on one targeting pipeline a live business risk.
Second-order effects
- Apple converts its privacy stance into ad inventory: its later expansion of App Store ads onto the Today homepage and app pages (beyond the Search tab) shows the platform restricting rivals' tracking while building out its own ad surface.
- As commentators like Benedict Evans note, privacy rules of this kind tend to entrench the biggest platforms — meaning the fight pushes competitors and regulators toward choosing between privacy goals and competition goals rather than pursuing both.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile advertising consolidates around whoever controls the operating system, with third-party trackers and the ad networks built on them structurally diminished — a shift regulators must adjudicate as privacy policy and antitrust pull in opposite directions.
- Privacy positioning hardens from compliance posture into competitive weapon, setting up a durable industry cleavage between hardware-platform gatekeepers selling trust and data-driven ad platforms selling reach.
The trend: Platform owners are converting privacy controls into market power, forcing data-dependent ad businesses like Facebook to fight the narrative battle publicly while their signal access erodes by default.