Apple vs. Facebook Is Kayfabe

Summary

Photo by Claudia Raya Apple vs. Facebook is, and always was, kayfabe. In reality, Apple is Facebook's chauffeur; holding Zuck's coat while Facebook wantonly surveils iPhones owners. Facebook's gross profit over time. While Facebook and Apple mugged for the cameras as "App Tracking Transparency" rolled out, Facebook's income tells a very different story. Net income dipped between late 2021 and early 2023 thanks to accelerating capital expenditures in other lines of business, not reductions in revenue. Despite strenuous efforts to sell the move, it's hard to discern any impact from ATT whatsoever. How can we be sure Apple's wise? Because Cupertino continues to allow Facebook's wide-scale abuse of In-App Browsers: Open Web Advocacy - In-App Browser Primer Apple has long facilitated and enriched mass surveillance through native apps, both directly from in-app activity, but much more insidiously through the In-App Browsers that Facebook tacks onto every link you tap. I have written about them before, and they still stink to high heavens. In-App Browsers are, for Facebook's purposes, ad-blocker blockers. Cheat codes for the enterprising panopticon proprietor. Much wringing of hands transpires every time one of these knockoff browsers is caught (or suspected) of injecting script into web pages. The fear is that this will enable a level of tracking by apps that is not otherwise possible. As scary (and real) as the threat is, it is also a misdirection. To effect total surveillance, Facebook and ByteDance and don't need to inject scripts into the runtime, they only need your browser not to block their "ad tags" that are already embedded in every high-traffic page on the internet. Combined with the ability to watch every URL you navigate to in a WebView, this is more than enough to correlate in-app activity with web browsing without leaving overt fingerprints. As long as users remain in the Native App Upside Down, data collected from tracking endpoints remains immeasurably ric...