The face of Facebook advertising is about to change. With Apple’s rollout of iOS14 in September, Facebook issued a short statement to advertisers letting them know that their formerly hypertargeted ads, as facilitated by the Facebook Audience Network platform, might not work anymore. As first reported by Axios, this will likely have a huge impact on the advertising industry, of which Facebook plays a huge part in the U.S. But while this may be bad for the advertisers and for Facebook, this could be a win for users’ privacy
The next update of the iPhone software will feature a new function wherein users have to opt in to being tracked by advertisers. This will require apps to ask iPhone users’ permission to collect and share their data. This puts advertisers who rely heavily on Facebook’s platform in a pickle, as Facebook’s ads are notorious for being extremely specific to the user.