Reports revealed that the social networking sites “Facebook”, “Twitter” and “Snapchat” have lost nearly 10 billion dollars due to the new privacy policy that the American company “Apple” is currently following.
The three companies lost about $9.85 billion after Apple’s changes to its privacy policy for its users, which it announced last year, requiring all applications to ask for users’ permission in exchange for tracking their data, according to the British Financial Times.
Apple implemented its new policy, which came into effect last April, and actually banned apps from tracking users if the latter refused to give them permission to do so.
And Facebook was the company that had the largest share of these losses in “absolute terms”, compared to other social platforms, due to its sheer size, according to the Financial Times.
Snap had the “worst performance as a percentage of its business” because its ads are primarily related to smartphones, which makes sense for a product that doesn’t have a desktop version.
Apple’s new policy is expected to force social platforms and other applications to become more creative in its advertising, whether that means focusing on advertising on Android smartphones and devices, or investing in Apple’s advertising business.
And IT consultant Eric Seufert believes that in order to get out of this crisis, the most affected platforms, especially Facebook, must rebuild their systems from scratch, suggesting that building a new infrastructure will take at least one year.