On February 3, 2022, Facebook saw its largest dip in stock price ever. According to CNBC, the social networking giant closed 26% down from the day before. The company’s market cap decreased by more than $230 million in a single day. Facebook attributes the hit to the new privacy changes Apple has introduced.
Apple has made their privacy changes the forefront of their brand in recent years. Giving their iPhone and Mac users the option to avoid online tracking from companies all over the world has become a major disruption to the way advertising has worked online for some time now.
Now that Apple’s privacy measures reach across more than just their own applications, but also onto other applications users install onto their phones, individual user data is staying locked onto users’ devices and not being harvested for large batches to be purchased for target demographic information to be sorted.
Google has also recently announced they plan to implement privacy changes, but according to The New York Times the changes will not be nearly as disruptive as Apple’s changes have been.
Because companies can no longer rely on third-party data that is becoming less and less available to them, they must adapt to this increase in personal data security. In the financial services industry, marketers depend on accurate third-party data harvested from applications that are necessary to better target potential customers. With this crackdown from Apple and potentially Google, the industry is going to need an overhaul of how to target these potential customers.
It is hard to say how the financial service industry will respond (as well as many other sectors relying on data harvesting) because this practice has been so integral to marketing for the past decade or so.
One thing is for certain, consumers are thrilled with the increase in privacy protections companies like Apple and Google are providing them. So, it is essential to adapt to these changes that are likely to become more common practice in the future.
Follow Sharp Decisions on LinkedIn and Twitter for more updates. For job postings, see our Careers Page.