Week 15 Part B: What we Learn from FaceBook Analytics

 I don't have 100 followers on my Facebook page so I will be writing this blog about the privacy settings that Apple has changed and how it affected Facebook. I had no idea that Apple had made such drastic changes. Especially had no idea that it had such an exponential effect on Facebook. I also had no idea that Apple had such influence on how Facebook is able to operate themselves or just overall influence in general.

Apples new privacy features hit Facebook as people with iPhones are opting out from the option of their devices being tracked. Which in my opinion makes complete sense as to why people would opt out of this. It hit Facebook's revenue really hard in the fact that it could cost Facebook approximately $12.8 billion in 2022. Which is obviously an extreme amount of money to no longer be bringing in. It makes me wonder why Apple decided to do this pretty much out of nowhere. What exactly are they gaining from this?

The thing that stumps me is how this affected Facebook so drastically considering that they are a social media based business and have nothing to do with tracking right? It effects the revenue on regional based advertisements which Facebook gets a pretty good portion of. This had to of affected all social media platforms just as drastically as it hit Facebook. Apparently it hit Lotame with a $16 billion decrease in revenue, $2.2 billion for YouTube, $546 million for Snapchat, and $323 million for twitter.

The privacy settings restrict apps from tracking your location by getting rid of the identifier for advertisers. This is all done through a sequence of codes that give out our location. When you say no to tracking, the advertisers only see a string of zeros rather than the number sequence that shows your exact location. Not even just for revenue loss concerns, what if this kind of tracking fell into the wrong hands? There are so many things to be skeptical about with this kind of technology especially since the average American most likely has no idea about this.

It's crazy to see how many people decided to opt out for this and how none of the users had the option to do so in the past. Considering how impactful it was on not only Facebook but on other social media platforms, it makes me question what else they were doing with our location privacy settings. Billions of dollars in revenue loss can't only come from advertisement revenue just by thinking about how much even $1 billion is.