Twitter and LinkedIn are showing Facebook that privacy isn't the end of the world

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Facebook (Image credit: iMore)

LinkedIn today announced that it will stop collecting Identifier for Advertising (IDFA) data. Twitter even welcomed Apple's privacy stance. Facebook, not so much.

Apple will bring new privacy features online later this year to iOS 14 that will see developers forced to ask users for their permission before they can be tracked from app to app. Facebook has been making plenty of noise, saying it will harm small businesses and, of course, its ad business. LinkedIn, however, isn't worried.

We have decided to stop our iOS apps' collection of IDFA data for now. Although this change affects the LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN), Conversion Tracking and Matched Audiences, we expect limited impact to your campaign performance, and don't foresee major changes required for your campaign set-up.

Twitter CFO Ned Segal says that his company knows that it will only get one chance to make a first impression and it wants to make sure it knows the lay of the land before doing so.

"We don't want to be in a rush around IDFA," he said. "You only have one chance to ask somebody if you can have access to their device ID to show them more relevant ads. You want to ask in a really thoughtful way, and you want to take time to learn from the industry and the broader ecosystem before you ask a question like that."

And then there's Facebook, throwing its toys out of the pram. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even tried to tell us that Apple will hamper the recovery from COVID-19, no less.

It's obviously very difficult to feel any sympathy for Facebook, nor Zuck. The fact that other social networks are seemingly fine with Apple's privacy stance should probably further drive home the point that whatever Facebook is doing with our data, and however it's selling it, is probably bad for us.

I'm all for Apple and other companies doing what they need to do to make life hard for Facebook.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.