Facebook vs. Apple: inside the battle for your information
By Wesley Diphoko
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NO single company, organisation, government, or regulator has managed to stop Facebook and other social media and internet giants from selling user information for profit.
This practice, which is considered a violation of user privacy, has been a major headache for privacy advocates who argue that users should have the ability to choose how their information is used by internet giants.
Apple is about to change this with a simple software update, iOS 14.
The upcoming changes with Apple software will add a few requirements that will enable users to have more control over their information.
No longer so social, no longer at ease
Social media concept [Photo: Shutterstock]
Social media has had a tremendous impact on the digital age, shrinking the world into a wee space, with no corner too far from anyone’s reach. And with a whole assortment of social media sites to choose from, even governments sometimes choose to disseminate pronouncements on their official handles, while a lot of business talk is propagated through social media platforms such as WhatsApp.
That was why WhatsApp dominated talk in the first week of January 2021 after a notification was released to the platform’s users. “WhatsApp is updating its terms and privacy policy. The new update makes it mandatory for the users to accept the terms and conditions in order to retain their WhatsApp account information,” read the message.
As advertisers look for hyper-targeted, contextualised advertising, the changes could hurt Facebook’s ad biz, with advertisers likely to move to competitor platforms
OPINION: We re all familiar with the saying: A week is a long time in politics.” British Prime Minister Harold Wilson first said it in the mid-1960s, and he s not wrong. I wonder, though, what he would have said about the week we ve just had in technology. It started on International Data Privacy Day, when Tim Cook sat in his office and gave a sombre 12-minute monologue-to-camera, urging us all to take more care with our data privacy. It was box office stuff. We should not look away from the bigger picture. At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement - the longer, the better. And all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible.
31 January 2021, 5:54 am EST By ( Pexels/Pixabay )
On July 2020, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the heads of Amazon, Google and Apple were all fired with heated questions from members of the House Antitrust Subcommittee.
This incident has sparked questions about online privacy. Now Mark Zuckerberg s greatest enemy in this sector is not from the government, but from another tech mogul Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Apple vs. Facebook
On January 28, Cook gave a speech explaining Apple s upcoming privacy changes, which will ban apps from sharing the online behavior of iPhone users with third party companies unless the users themselves give consent, according to Vox.