And in his recent interview on The Information, Zuckerberg laid bare his intention to get Facebook hardware into the hands of as many consumers as possible with an aggressive pricing policy that foregoes hardware and app store margins. Facebook is accelerating its efforts in VR/AR with mass-market headsets, smartwatches, and AR glasses in order to own the interaction layer with the consumer and establish defensibility through a bonafide hardware-based content platform. While these changes affect the whole mobile-app ecosystem, they’re also impacting how advertisers run ads, target people, and measure their results on Facebook. For consumers, not much changes except that you’ve got more privacy, and probably somewhat less relevant ads. And, of course, a lot more GDPR-like clicking to accept or deny tracking permission to apps every time you install one.
A pregnancy app can take most of the mystery out of childbirth, monitor a mother’s health, and track a baby’s growth. Here are our top picks — and a word of mark clubhouse apple idfa facebook caution before using any of them. It’s not going to make a lot of difference to anyone who has already been paying attention to their privacy settings.
The new feature from Apple will block apps and websites from collecting and sharing an identifier called IDFA . This will prevent Facebook from using something called “view-through conversions” to get a complete picture of an ad’s effectiveness. Founded in 1993 by brothers Tom and David Gardner, The Motley Fool helps millions of people attain financial freedom through our website, podcasts, books, newspaper column, radio show, and premium investing services. 🤝 Saving and investing app Acorns acquired AI-powered startup Pillar, which helps people manage their student loan debt. Pillar launched in 2019 with $5.5 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins and grew its business to manage over $500 million worth of student loan debt across 15,000 borrowers. Acorns will add Pillar to one of its monthly subscription plans in time.
Google maintains an 18-month location history on most Android users. But even if users opt-out of location history, Google is still tracking their location through apps. Most users have granted Maps and Weather location permissions, and every time they are used, even in the background, Google gets that location. Apple will force apps to ask permission before they track users via the IDFA, which serves as a unique identifier specific to Apple and Apple devices. Ad companies need this IDFA, and Facebook defends its position by saying that asking users’ permission will result in a loss of ads. This mental model from 2015 is clearly still driving Facebook’s strategy with VR/AR.
VR is often referred to as the “next big computing platform,” but next isn’t a helpful timeframe. Is next soon enough to arrest the potentially severe damage inflicted on Facebook’s advertising revenues by ATT? And more importantly, in this VR-enabled future, is it Facebook that dominates the consumer market for hardware and content, or is it some other company?