Apple’s vision of a more private web is not necessarily a more profitable one for internet companies that depend on advertising revenue.
That lesson was clear Wednesday in an earnings report from Meta, the company that Mark Zuckerberg founded as Facebook. Meta said privacy features introduced by Apple last year could cost Zuckerberg’s company $10 billion in lost sales this year.
The news, along with increased spending as Meta tries to focus on the new idea of the metaverse, dropped Meta’s stock price more than 26% Thursday morning. Zuckerberg said Wednesday that Apple’s changes and new privacy regulations in Europe represented "a clear trend where less data is available to deliver personalized ads.”