Zuckerberg takes on Cook, says Apple ‘biggest competitor’
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has opened another front against Apple, saying that iPhone manufacturers and governments have the potential to access messages from most users and that their future performance may be damaged by privacy improvements in Apple's iOS 14. Stressing that Apple has every reason to use its dominant position on the market to interfere with how our apps and other apps run, Zuckerberg said the company "sees Apple increasingly as one of our biggest rivals." iMessage is a huge pillar of their ecosystem. On every iPhone, it is pre-installed and favoured with private APIs and permissions, which is why iMessage is the most used messaging service in the United States. "And now, we are also seeing Apple's business increasingly relying on us and other developers to gain share in apps and services," stressed the Facebook CEO. Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook, also said the company would find ways to amplify stories about small businesses concerned about improvements to Apple's iOS. In the next iOS 14 beta, Apple's latest privacy feature requiring developers to request permission to monitor iOS users for ad targeting is expected to go live. Zuckerberg said Apple recently published so-called nutrition labels, which focused mainly on metadata gathered by apps rather than the privacy and protection of the actual messages of individuals. iMessage stores your messages with non-end-to-end encrypted backups by default, unless iCloud is disabled. So when it comes to what matters most, preserving the messages of people, I think WhatsApp is obviously superior,' he noted. Zuckerberg argued that the iOS 14 privacy updates would affect the development of millions of companies around the world. Many small companies, with targeted advertising, would no longer be able to attract their clients. Apple may now say they're doing something to benefit consumers, but the moves clearly track their competitive interests, and I think it's crucial for people to consider this dynamic because for the near future, we and others will be up against it, he noted. Source: www.expresscomputer.in
