Report: Facebook Employees Criticize Company's War Against Apple Privacy Rules

According to a report by Buzzfeed News, employees at Facebook are criticizing the company’s efforts to shut down a feature built into the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system. The feature lets iPhone users opt-out of dating mining technology used by platforms like Facebook. The data collected by Facebook is ultimately used to serve personalized ads to its users.

“It feels like we are trying to justify doing a bad thing by hiding behind people with a sympathetic message,” one Facebook engineer wrote.

Buzzfeed included some of the top-rated questions posed by employees to management:

“Aren’t we worried that our stance protecting [small- and medium-sized businesses] will backfire as people see it as ‘FB protecting their own business’ instead?” read one top-voted question.

“People want ‘privacy,’” read another. “FB objecting here will be viewed with cynicism. Did we know this would be bad PR, & decide to publish anyway?”

“How do we pick a message that looks less self serving?” one employee asked.

In a statement, Facebook spokesperson Ashley Zandy said that the company’s fight against Apple’s privacy policies is being conducted on behalf of small business owners.

“Since launching this effort we have heard from small businesses literally around the world who are worried about how these changes could hurt their businesses,” Zandy said. “Because this is such a critical time for [small- and medium-sized businesses], we will continue to share those stories with the public and our employees.”

Breitbart News reported in November that Facebook had launched a campaign against Apple over the racking detection features in iOS 14.

In a comment, Apple Senior Director of Global Privacy Jane Horvath said that Apple will continue to protect its customers from Facebook’s data-mining practices.

“Facebook executives have made clear their intent is to collect as much data as possible across both first and third party products to develop and monetize detailed profiles of their users, and this disregard for user privacy continues to expand to include more of their products,” Horvath said.