Zuckerberg now says Facebook may benefit from iOS 14 privacy changes

Mark Zuckerberg in front of the Facebook logo Source: iMore

What you need to know

Mark Zuckerberg joined a Clubhouse chat and answered questions about the privacy changes coming in iOS 14.
The Facebook CEO said that the company might be in a better position after the changes are implemented.

After launching an attack ad campaign against Apple for the privacy improvements it was making to iOS 14, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg now says that the social media company will "be in a good position" once the changes are implemented.

As reported by CNBC, in an event hosted on the social media platform Clubhouse, which has skyrocketed in popularity recently, Zuckerberg said that Facebook "will be able to manage through" the new privacy protections coming to iOS 14, which will require apps to ask for permission to track users.

Apple's upcoming privacy changes will inform users about device ID tracking and ask them if they want to allow it. The tracking is based on a unique device identifier on every iPhone and iPad called the IDFA. Companies that sell mobile advertisements use this ID to help target ads and estimate their effectiveness.

In fact, Zuckerberg went as far as to say that the company could even be in a better position than before if more businesses decided to start using Facebook and Instagram to sell their products.

"It's possible that we may even be in a stronger position if Apple's changes encourage more businesses to conduct more commerce on our platforms by making it harder for them to use their data in order to find the customers that would want to use their products outside of our platforms," Zuckerberg said.

Facebook already has 1 million active shops and over 250 million shopping on their platform.

"Compared to the early conversations we had about how people would use this across Facebook and Instagram and our product, I think this is something that's well on track to be something that's going to be increasingly important to people," Zuckerberg said.

The statements made by Zuckerberg are very different than what Facebook has been doing since Apple announced the privacy changes at WWDC 2020. The company has been on the attack, first saying that the changes would kill small business and then pivoting to complaining about the impact on Facebook itself.