iPhone 13: the END of Facebook By The Apple Circle

Your next iPhone might shut down Instagram Facebook, google and many many more apples is done. Messing around they're, taking a firm stance on privacy, and they're about to start publicly calling out some bad actors who aren't doing things with your best interest at heart, on your phone, which is great and all, but what? If that means no more Instagram Facebook or google on your iPhone. Let's talk about how some of these changes impact things like the iPhone 13, what big changes could be coming along with iOS 15 and some new apple products that apple could potentially launch that change the way you use your iPhone forever we're going to start with some breaking news: Facebook versus apple, so chances are if you've read some blogs. You've been on social media or even just watched cable TV over the past couple of months, you've probably seen apple and Facebook sparring back and forth in different stories and headlines, and you might be confused as to why. Why is Tim Cook kind of calling out Facebook's shady practices? Why is Mark Zuckerberg kind of going after apple and Tim Cook? There is a lot to unpack here, so, let's just kind of start from the beginning, so it should come as no surprise is over the past couple of years. Apple has really taken a sort of double down approach.

When it comes to privacy, they want to keep all their devices all their services. Basically, everything in the Apple ecosystem, safe secure and keep your privacy kind of at the forefront and be very sensitive to the information you have on your device and make sure your information stays with you, which has been a great thing. I mean we've seen safari, really double down on blocking trackers. When you browse online, you have Siri doing most of its work on the device itself and not relying on external servers. You've got all your map, information being anonymized.

You've got your Apple Pay for secure transactions. Furthermore, you've got secure, enclaves built in Apple devices, I could go on and on, but Apple is really taking a privacy, centric and privacy first approach when it comes to their entire ecosystem. In fact, there's a whole page on Apple's website that goes through all their different devices and services and shows you all the way, they're really putting your privacy first. Above all else, and all of this is great for you and I who actually use these devices every day I mean- I don't think any of us want to be inherently unsecure, but who is losing in this battle? Are companies like Facebook and google and major advertisers and data brokers, basically the companies that benefit from us sharing our information with them? The more that Facebook can see about me where I am my hobbies, my likes my dislikes metadata from my photos, stuff, like that uh they're able to really build a very lucrative, very detailed profile about me that they can then use to target a specific ad to know the things I'm going to like, or they can take that information and sell it off to another company. We've seen this from many giant companies.

This is nothing new, and it's mostly kind of been accepted for lack of a better word online for the past couple of decades. You just kind of know when you're online you're, probably being tracked with cookies, as you browse from one website to another, and it's also been the case on mobile as well apple says. The average app has six built-in trackers that are going to track you between app to app track you within the app itself and what you do, and basically you should just know that everyone is trying to get your personal information and your privacy couldn't be any more important than it is today in 2021. But over the past couple of years, specifically with the last couple of years of iOS, software updates apple is really cracking down on some of these, not so above board practices. You might have noticed, for example, in iOS 14.

You now have the toggle to allow an app to have your location, all the time or just while you're in the app you can give apps permission to all of your photos or just select photos. Furthermore, you even have a little indicator at the top of your iPhone. That shows when your microphone and camera are active, even if the app is not in the forefront. Maybe if you're on a phone call and your microphone's still active, and you're browsing your phone, you can still see that your microphone is on and being activated by some apps, even if they're, in the background, all great things, all things done by apple to really promote privacy, and it's just apple trying to make sure you are in control of your data, and you know exactly what's going on at all times on your iOS device, and while all this is great and Apple should be commended for doing this work. They're looking to take things a step further and really crack down on this app to app tracking.

So that is why, with the introduction of iOS 14 at WWDC a few months ago, apple introduced this small kind of very simple pop-up. That asks a very basic question. Would you like to allow the app you're about to open to track you within the app and between apps and on the web? Or would you like to kindly ask the app to not track you, which is a nice way of saying we're going to kill all the tracking functionalities of this app, so you're not being tracked via the internals of this app? It's a very small kind of unassuming pop-up, but it sparks big trouble for companies like Facebook, google and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Obviously, for companies like google and Facebook, they heavily rely on this information, because this tracked info is the way they're able to target you with personalized ads the information they're able to build about you and sell to other brokers. This is a very big business, a very lucrative business that, if you were to give users a prompt to choose to allow tracking or not the assumption is most people are not going to allow tracking, which is going to really cut into their bottom line.

I saw an article floating around online earlier this week that estimated that Facebook could lose as much as 10 billion dollars just by that little prompt going up in iOS 14, because people just don't want to be tracked and because there is so much money at stake, especially for Facebook, who kind of as we know, lives or dies by the info. They can kind of get about you and sell the advertisers. Uh they've been the ones kind of leading this charge. They've been very outspoken about the issues they've taken out full-page ads in newspapers, they've talked about it on their conference, call how disappointed they are with apple's decision. There's even rumor.

Has it a legal case coming. Facebook is working to build this case on a major anti-trust suit against apple, saying apple has too much control, and they're, putting in unfair uh rules and unfair regulations on independent publishers on their platform. It's a big deal. There's a lot to break down and Facebook is not happy about any of this. At all.

Now, Apple has kind of delayed the role out of this prompt. They kind of gave developers a little more time to get everything implemented and get it all up and running uh. But we do know that, starting with the next iOS beta, which is set to be released soon, that this prompt is going to be official and developers must comply, which leaves Facebook with limited options. They can either comply, and you know, go forward and let apple put up this prompt that allows users the choice to track or not track. They can pull their apps uh from uh the iOS App Store altogether, which is probably not even an option because hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on Facebook and Instagram and other Facebook services, or they can do what google has done recently, which is kind of change, some of their tracking uh mechanics and some tracking technology to better comply with what's going on in iOS 14.

So all of this is interesting, I'm sure apple and Facebook are going to battle it out, and I'm sure they'll figure things out in one form or another. But I think, what's more interesting than all of this is what this opens up apple to in terms of new products. How does safety and security and privacy impact the iPhone 13? What features do we have on there that are just for privacy and security, also in iOS 15? What could apple do to make that software even more secure? How could they double down on trackers, even more and probably most interesting of all, we've heard rumors. That apple is looking to replace google as the default search engine on your phone with something much more safe and secure could apple replace google yeah yeah they could. There have been rumors for a while now that apple could kind of take the next step in terms of privacy by creating their own search engine that would be ultra secure.

It would not track you. It would not sell your information, it would not serve you ads. Furthermore, it would be just a super private, secure way to browse the web without any kind of interference, and we heard that maybe, instead of creating their own from scratch, that they could just buy something new, we had heard actually rumors a couple of years ago that apple could potentially acquire Bing and kind of turn that into their own apple search engine. Obviously that didn't happen, and it probably won't happen anytime soon. But what makes much more sense is for apple to acquire the already kind of privacy focused uh super secure data, sensitive search engine duck, go on one hand.

This makes so much sense because duck go has been around for a while. It has a very privacy focused reputation. They already talk about how they don't track. You online, they don't serve you ads, you're all about safety and security when you're browsing on DuckDuckGo- and it just makes a lot of sense for apple to acquire the search engine and then put it on the iPhone as either a default option or as just another option that you could actually opt into and use. If you wanted to forgo google and just focus on safety and security and privacy, a spotless, streamline interface could be all yours if you use the apple search engine.

There's also, this idea that apple could create their own VPN or virtual private network. You've seen a bunch of options floating around the web before for this, but the idea or the rumor is, is that apple would build this into the iPhone so, whether it's free or it's paid, your uh data from your iPhone would go through this secure encrypted kind of tunnel that would filter out your data to make sure no one could log you. No one could track you basically are. You are totally anonymous unidentifiable and your browsing habits and what you do online is nobody's business, but your own and a VPN would be a really great way to do that, and hopefully it could be free and built in, and I wouldn't be surprised if iOS 15 took what apple's already doing and kind of turns it up a notch, maybe disallowing any kind of tracking within apps, maybe putting in a default secure, VPN or search engine. Maybe even doubling down on security in terms of third-party ads that we have on the web and what we have in apps.

All of this also lends itself to the iPhone 13 and future iPhones as well. Could we see some kind of physical toggle switch to kill the camera and microphone? We know that apple is very concerned about people, plugging the iPhone into these special gray boxes and trying to rip the data off of it. Maybe the reason the port's going away is for extra safety and security. I didn't really guess think about that before that could be one of the reasons. I wonder if there's any other physical hardware changes, that apple could do on the iPhone to make that device more locked down more safe and secure and make sure your personal information stays on there, and you are absolutely 100 aware when anyone is on your phone, when your microphone is active, when your camera is active, basically you're in full control of everything: hardware, software end-to-end, you have the power, and you're the one in control.

So I'm curious to hear your thoughts is apple, pushing too much power and too much control of their app store policies on developers or is Facebook just kind of sleazy company. That's doing too much advertising and too much tracking to begin with, or do you think that you should be somewhere down the middle also, how involved should apple be in terms of hardware and software security? Would you like to see like a physical camera cover on the iPhone? Would you use an apple web browser, an apple search engine or an apple VPN? I'd love to know, leave that comment down below, and we can discuss and talk. And yes, I realized that apple does make a web browser with safari, but it's too late now anyways. Thank you guys so much for watching I'm Robert Rosendo from the apple circle. Thank you so much for watching.

If you've watched to the very end, I appreciate you thank you so much, and I will see you in the next one. You.

Source : The Apple Circle