Facebook stock is down almost 45% from last year’s highs and most people are blaming Apple’s 2021 privacy moves on iPhone. This week Google announced massive and similar changes on Android, prompting another 6% drop this week and ousting Facebook (ok, Meta) from the world’s top 10 biggest companies by market cap.
“Google is an advertising company, and any push towards real privacy will hurt their revenue, which they wouldn’t do,” says Dmitry Gerasimenko, CEO and founder of the alternative search engine Ahrefs.
Privacy advocates tend to agree.
“It will not be as restrictive as Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature,” privacy spokesperson Chris Hauk at Pixel Privacy says. “Google’s new policy will surely impact Facebook, but it will be helpful for both users and Facebook. Unlike Apple, it will not impact Facebook negatively.”
There are definite privacy advantages to Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox for Android. The key change: Google is killing the Google Ad ID. That’s simply a string of numbers that can serve to track your devices around mobile ecosystem as you use apps, see ads, click on links, and install new apps. The Apple version is IDFA, and where Apple changed the world by requiring consumer consent to companies using your IDFA and sharing data with other companies, Google intends to completely eliminate the GAID.
But are Google’s privacy moves as dangerous to Facebook revenue as Apple’s?
In a word: no.
At a glance, it seems possible that they’d be much worse. After all, Android is the default mobile operating system for 85% of the planet. But the devil’s in the details. And … in the differences between Google and Apple.
That sounds worse for advertisers and better for consumer privacy, right?
Not so fast…
