Dueling Views on Apple v. Facebook (Premium)

This week, Apple took aggressive steps to counter Facebook privacy abuses on iOS. We should collectively cheer these actions. Right?

It depends on whom you ask.

Reading The New York Times this morning, I found a rare editorial that I actually agree with, contending that only Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, has the power to fix Facebook’s privacy problems. The editorial evaluating Apple’s recent actions to ban the distribution of Facebook’s internal testing apps on iOS because the social media network violated the terms of Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program.

“We designed our Enterprise Developer Program solely for the internal distribution of apps within an organization,” an Apple statement explains. “Facebook has been using their membership to distribute a data-collecting app to consumers, which is a clear breach of their agreement with Apple.”

The New York Times editorial praises Apple’s “firm stand” against Facebook. And suggests that Cook could pull the nuclear level to punish Facebook even more.

“If Mr. Cook truly wants to protect Apple users from privacy-violating apps, he could remove all of Facebook’s products — including Instagram and WhatsApp — from the App Store until the company can prove, in a real and measurable way, that it cares about its users’ privacy,” The publication’s Kevin Roose ventures. “In the absence of government regulation, there may be no other option for bringing the company to heel on privacy.”

And there it is.

Because there are no governments—in the U.S. or elsewhere—taking material steps to curb Facebook’s voracious behavior, Roose believes that Apple could work in their place to use its own market power to harm the firm. Apple’s iPhones, after all, are a favorite of social media darlings, and they still command roughly 50 percent share in the United States and some Western European countries. Perhaps Apple could use its size to do some good.

I actually agree with this notion.

And it’s not as radical as some may believe. I’ve often made the point privately, to friends and family, that the very largest companies we often associate more with “bad” than “good” are in positions to positively change things in ways that would benefit their customers and, as important to them, their own bottom lines.

For example, a company like McDonald’s—which many outright blame for America’s obesity endemic—could require its suppliers to deliver only healthy, antibiotic- and chemical-free offerings, dramatically improving the healthiness of its own offerings. Likewise, Walmart, which already has stringent supplier requirements, could demand similar requirements around food and other goods with regards to environmental protections, recyclability, and so on. These companies are simply too big for their suppliers to ignore.

Anyway, The New York Times correctly argues that an imagined Apple attack on Facebook’s core apps—because they “have blatantly evaded the rules that Google and Apple have put in place to protect their users from being exploited by data-hungry app developers”—would be fair. And there are multiple public examples of Facebook working to circumvent those rules. One imagines there are many we don’t know about.

“If Apple is truly serious about protecting privacy, such a big crackdown is probably necessary,” the publication continues. “Time and time again, Facebook has shown that it cannot be trusted to protect users’ privacy unless it is forced to do so. And while regulators have fined Facebook for privacy violations, those punishments rarely amount to anything truly meaningful — at most, the company pays a few million dollars, promises to do better next time, and goes right back to work.”

While I think this is just common sense, we do live in a hyper-polarized world, so I should have been surprised to discover that there are those who disagree with this assessment.

Parroting comments from some of his site’s readers, Casey Newton of The Verge claims that “there’s an argument for Facebook’s kind of research.” You know, the kind of research in which it violated Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program by using it to deliver apps to teens, which were paid up to $20 a month so that Facebook could fully violate their privacy. He’s trying to appear centrist here, seeing the logic on both sides. But really, what he suggests is more radical than anything The New York Times believes should happen.

“Facebook’s program sought and obtained consent from its participants, and that to say people shouldn’t have been able to offer their consent is oddly patronizing,” he says, criticizing Apple. “By paying its volunteers, it essentially made them contractors — offering a fig-leaf defense of the move to include Facebook Research among the company’s enterprise app deployments.”

That’s not what Facebook did. Facebook worked around the app distribution rules of Apple’s platform using a tool aimed at enterprise customers and targeting its youngest and, let’s be honest here, most gullible users.

Newton also says that those “more interested in competition” than in a company protecting its users’ privacy should be “uncomfortable” with Apple’s “monopolistic power.”

Wow. That’s some purposeful word use there: Apple doesn’t really own a monopoly of any kind, but in the author’s view, it is acting “monopolistic.” Which I’ve noted many times is legal for non-monopolies. Arguably, any for-profit company acts as “monopolistic” as it can in order to maximize profits and shareholder gains.

“If Tim Cook can wreak this much havoc on Facebook’s day, however justified, just imagine what power Apple holds over the rest of us,” he concludes.

Ah boy.

Look, I’ve often cautioned users of Apple’s products to minimize their exposure to the firm’s insular, lock-in products and services, which I describe as a one-way, dead-end street. I feel that you should always optimize for portability. Meaning, you should use services that work everywhere—like OneDrive or Google Photos instead of iCloud, and so—and will always do so. But it’s also fair to point out that loyal Apple users who give in to the sweet siren call of Apple’s “better together” strategy—its “lock-in strategy,” as I’d call it—will reap the benefits of deep integration, where everything “just works.” Yes, I resist this and recommend that you do as well. But I get it.

And Apple is patronizing, for sure. But Apple also owns the platform in question here, and it sets the rules. If a developer doesn’t want to follow those rules, it doesn’t have to be on that platform. Or, it can step around them in legal ways, as Netflix did recently when it pulled in-app purchases out of its iOS app so that Apple could no longer claim its 30 percent vig.

In a similar manner, we as users are free to escape from Apple’s patronizing ecosystem in which everything works well together and the firm protects us, as much as it can, from the privacy and security violations of the outside world. Or, better still, we’re free to choose a more moderate approach in which we buy Apple hardware because it is superior—which it is, in many ways, at least subjectively—-but ignore its related products and services as I’ve long recommended. In other words, we do have a choice.

And that choice is up to us, not Apple or Facebook.

“Apple’s defense of user privacy, while certainly self-interested, is a boon to its users and a lever for change within the tech industry,” The New York Times editorial concludes. “And if Mr. Cook wants to take a strong stand against app developers that routinely violate users’ trust, he could start with the biggest privacy violator of all. Facebook won’t change on its own, but a chastening from Apple might be what the company needs to get its act together.”

I couldn’t agree more.