Yesterday, we ran a post featuring a New York Times takedown of Facebook and a direct response to the Times piece by Facebook.
From that post:
Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said.
In this NPR interview, Tim Cook fires back:
“We’ve never been in the data business,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told NPR on Monday, responding to a report that Facebook struck agreements giving Apple and other device makers access to Facebook users’ personal information.
And:
“The things mentioned in the Times article about relationship statuses and all these kinds of stuff, this is so foreign to us, and not data that we have ever received at all or requested — zero”
And:
“What we did was we integrated the ability to share in the operating system, make it simple to share a photo and that sort of thing,” Cook added. “So it’s a convenience for the user. We weren’t in the data business. We’ve never been in the data business.”
Smart response, as the New York Times article definitely gave the feeling that Apple was somehow in cahoots with Facebook, sharing user data.
Facebook is in a PR tail spin. I was at the movie theater yesterday and Facebook actually ran an ad talking about how important privacy and stuff is. Right.
I saw one on TV a couple weeks back. If only it were real.
Not for nothing, but I said it then, repeatedly; Apple is going to rue the day it integrated Facebook into their OSs. You lay down with pigs…
I don’t think there’s any need for it anymore, either. Third parties can do pretty much the same thing now, right?
It doesn’t appear that Apple either used data inappropriately or contributed data to Facebook inappropriately, so I don’t see how they are harmed.
Facebook: “All these great things we enable you to do? There’s really only one way to provide them.”
Apple: “Hold my carrot juice.”
As too often the case, Apple was damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. Had they not made it easier to post things on FB, people would have been upset.
Now that they have integrated FB in iOS, and done nothing wrong either, people will still see headlines like “Facebook” and “Apple” and “data”, and read only the headline. Then they’ll presume Apple uses data too like everyone else, and there you go, damage done.
But I see no way any company could have handled it any better. People need to actually READ once in a while.
The Times really failed at the details on this one. But then since I got my journalism degree I’ve been saying that there are two areas journalists never seem to get right. Tech and religion. I suspect it’s because they’re not terribly interested in either one on average, and so they have facile understandings of both worlds. And that leads to bad reporting.
Tesla should learn from Apple how to cope with negative press.
The New York Times looks really bad here, tho.