Facebook’s nightmare of losing Apple users has come true, as many have opted out for tracking permissions in iOS 14.5. The App Tracking Transparency policy introduced by Apple a couple of weeks hit Facebook hard and similar businesses. This would let users decide whether they wanted to be tracked or not, wherein only 4% in the US have opted in.
iPhone Users Dump Block Facebook Tracking
Facebook has long been advocating against Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency policy, which can potentially degrade the small businesses which rely on targeted ads. Under this, Apple users updating to iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5 will be given the option to choose not to be tracked by the applications they use.
Developers in Appstore are forced to notify users with a prompt about the permissions they wanted to access, like location, microphone, cookies, etc. While some applications do need a handful of permissions to function, not all will limit themselves with what they need. Facebook, in general, tracks more details about the users than necessary to understand them better.
This could sometimes be intriguing, as depicted by Signal through Instagram. Thus, many are likely to opt-out of it if known. And Apple gives them the tool to do so. The iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5 will have a toggle in Settings to disable all the permissions given apps, or the user can individually configure them.
And this turned out to be bad for Facebook, or even worse. The latest statistics from Flurry, a Verizon-owned analytics firm, says that 96% of the Apple US users have disabled app tracking from Facebook! And this happened in just two weeks from the launch of iOS 14.5.
Though Facebook is pushing users to let permissions with some intimidating practices, that didn’t work out. The number of people worldwide opting out for tracking stands at 12%, which is still bad and may continue to be worse.
