That's OP's point. Facebook's concern is nothing to do with "protecting the poor little businesses". It's everything to do with protecting their own business. Because they know that opt-in will drastically reduce their ability to track.
But they can't say that. They can't put out an ad that says: "hey. We've been sucking up your data for years, without your informed consent. And we've made a ton of money from it. Now Apple wants to stop us doing that unless you're OK with it".
So instead they're pulling every lever they can to make Apple look like the bad guy while avoiding the truth. Hypocracy, exactly as OP says.
That they're stooping to these levels just emphasises how much they think the change is going to hurt them.
The flow of information from Facebook to iPhone app install needs some kind of per-user unique identifier. That’s unique ID is what Apple wants to remove, which breaks the advertising model in entirety. It also hurts small businesses that want to advertise on Facebook.
Does that help understand the situation?
Also, Facebook doesn't only use these identifiers for conversion tracking, it uses them to create a persistent profile of a person that often ends up containing a ton of sensitive information. Believe it or not, a lot can be inferred about you from your app downloads and website visits. As of now FB was mostly able to perform this kind of tracking without the user really knowing, the only thing Apple does here is drag this practice into the open and give users a real choice.
In my opinion a privacy-first OS should inhibit any kind of cross-app / cross-device personal tracking, I predict this will happen in the next 5-10 years, for now it seems to be too extreme still.
While in practice some user data is used to make a hash to increase the conversion accuracy, it’s by no means necessary.
That literally is what we're talking about
i don't think that's what you're describing here.
> It’s important to know if someone clicks an ad and downloads your app. That’s called a Conversion. It’s used to measure the effectiveness of the ad campaign and the value you gain from spending money on an ad.
i think you've conflated A/B testing with user-profiling. you will obviously know if a campaign has been "effective", if sales increase. you absolutely do not need to uniquely identify a user to do this (which is what happens today).
> That’s unique ID is what Apple wants to remove,
as stated, apple don't want to remove it, merely make it opt-in. and if the end user isn't opting in, they probably don't want it.
This is simplifying marketing too much. You’re likely to run concurrent campaigns on different platform, Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, Twitter, etc.
Marketers would like to understand what campaigns and what medium helps drive sales/installs. No need to waste money on Twitter ads if it turns out no one actually ends up buying.
Yet, when I open a paper or turn on the TV, there are plenty of paid advertisements. Why would the web need to be any different ?
Don't charge for clicks, just charge for showing the ad. Don't target ads based on personal data collected from users, target them based on the content of the page they're shown on. You know, just like TV and print ads have always done.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-advertisers-convi...
"The social media giant rolled out full-page ads across popular publishing houses such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and more..."
There seems to be a certain irony in this.
If you put an ad on TV, the cable company is wasting valuable time showing your ad to a ton of people who will never purchase your product (I wonder how many hours of my childhood was spent in front of things like diabetes ads, funeral home ads, depression medication ads). Same goes for newspapers.
If they could somehow target ads based on who's watching, the ads would be massively more effective and they could charge a lot more for showing ads.
By targeting ads and charging so much more for ad time, some companies can even afford to offer their services for free, which massively increases the audience, which brings in more money, which gives them the budget to build a bigger, better service, which increases their audience, which brings them more money, etc etc
And that's how you end up with Facebook and Google.
Obviously the problem is that this isn't transparent. Many people don't know why they get all of this complex technology for free. It's not explained when you sign up for a new account.
They already can, and do. They know what the audience of their shows is and schedule the ads accordingly. Don’t show ads for funeral homes during Saturday morning cartoons. Hell, this is how we got the whole concept of a soap opera: soap ads during shows targeted specifically at housewives.
You advertise cars during car shows, tools during DIY shows, toys during cartoons, etc.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
[1]: https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-chan...
[2]: https://service-design.co/95-of-the-people-stick-to-the-defa...
I think opt-out tracking (if opt-out is even offered) with personally identifiable information is probably not even permitted under the GDPR, especially the broad, unnecessary cross-app tracking.
Apple is actually doing app developers a favor by improving compliance with the GDPR.
IME for most users the default action for any popup falls into two categories - (a) Quickly close it without reading, (b) Accept it blindly without reading. The ratio changes, but I think its about even.