Apple's controversial privacy policy changes have cost almost US$10 billion to social media companies

Last year, Apple announced its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature to restrict apps and websites from collecting user data without explicit user consent. ATT went into full effect in April of this year. Now, an investigation from The Financial Times has shed some light on the impact of ATT on social media sites.

According to the report, Apple’s ATT caused social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube to lose US$9.85 billion. While Facebook lost the most amount of money, Snapchat was affected the worst when loss is looked at as a percentage of business revenue. The reason why Snapchat suffered more loss than other platforms is that it is only available on smartphones. Ever since Apple announced ATT, social media companies have been opposing Apple's decision. Facebook even published a full-page newspaper ad claiming that Apple’s move would be “devastating to small businesses”. In the wake of The Financial Times’s report, we can see why Facebook was so opposed to Apple’s privacy policy changes.

As things currently stand, social media platforms have to come up with new ad strategies to make sure their revenues don’t dip any further. Eric Seufert, an ad-tech consultant, explained the situation to The Financial Times,” Some of the platforms that were most impacted — but especially Facebook — have to rebuild their machinery from scratch as a result of ATT. My belief is that it takes at least one year to build new infrastructure. New tools and frameworks need to be developed from scratch and tested extensively before being deployed to a high number of users.”

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