As a thought experiment, ignore the moral implications of tracking and look at things in purely economic terms. From that perspective, tracking is sort of like a charge for using the Facebook app. Since Apple forbids apps from disabling functionality if the user declines tracking, they’re effectively forcing Facebook to provide their service for less compensation. If this were an actual paid service and Facebook were being forced to let the user opt out of payment, you wouldn’t just say, “Making a payment setting default to free but still allowing the user to change it leaves the user in control. Facebook objects to this because nobody wants to pay money, so nobody is going to turn it back on.”
Of course, that argument is totally invalid if you believe privacy is a right. In that case, it’s fundamentally illegitimate for Facebook to treat it as a form of payment in the first place. That’s the view espoused by the EU with the GDPR and California with the CCPA. It’s the view Apple has explicitly made into a tagline (“Privacy is a fundamental human right”). And it’s a popular view, so Facebook can’t just go out and argue they’re being short-changed. Instead, they’ve made the economic argument only in terms of indirect claims about unnamed smaller websites supposedly being unable to survive – while muddying the waters with vague warnings about “freedom” and “forced updates”, and trying to insist that tracking is actually a benefit to users. It’s a largely incoherent argument, because they can’t say what they really believe: that privacy is not a right.
As a thought experiment, ignore the moral implications of tracking and look at things in purely economic terms. From that perspective, tracking is sort of like a charge for using the Facebook app. Since Apple forbids apps from disabling functionality if the user declines tracking, they’re effectively forcing Facebook to provide their service for less compensation. If this were an actual paid service and Facebook were being forced to let the user opt out of payment, you wouldn’t just say, “Making a payment setting default to free but still allowing the user to change it leaves the user in control. Facebook objects to this because nobody wants to pay money, so nobody is going to turn it back on.”
Of course, that argument is totally invalid if you believe privacy is a right. In that case, it’s fundamentally illegitimate for Facebook to treat it as a form of payment in the first place. That’s the view espoused by the EU with the GDPR and California with the CCPA. It’s the view Apple has explicitly made into a tagline (“Privacy is a fundamental human right”). And it’s a popular view, so Facebook can’t just go out and argue they’re being short-changed. Instead, they’ve made the economic argument only in terms of indirect claims about unnamed smaller websites supposedly being unable to survive – while muddying the waters with vague warnings about “freedom” and “forced updates”, and trying to insist that tracking is actually a benefit to users. It’s a largely incoherent argument, because they can’t say what they really believe: that privacy is not a right.