Apple's new privacy policies cost big tech billions

The new app tracking policies went live in April

Following Apple's major privacy policy revamp, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all reported losses of about $9.85 billion in revenue. Apple's app tracking initiative has caused a 15-20 percent drop in revenue for iOS advertisers.

In April, Apple introduced a new App Tracking Transparency policy that requires apps take permission from users to track data for advertisements. As a result, a lot of users opted out of the system.

An investigative report by The Financial Times (via The Verge) found that the four social media platforms were significantly effected by the policy change. Facebook tried to fight back against the policy, running full page ads against it but Apple did not budge.

In an earnings call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed Apple and said that the policy was negatively affecting Facebook. Zuckerberg said that he believes the company will able to weather the storm thanks to long term investments.

According to the report, Facebook lost money "in absolute terms" while Snap took a massive hit in revenue because its advertising business is tied to smartphones. Facebook's heavy utilization of advertising also effected its bottom line.

Speaking with Financial Times, Eric Seufert, adtech consultant, said, "Some of the platforms that were most impacted — but especially Facebook — have to rebuild their machinery from scratch as a result of ATT. My belief is that it takes at least one year to build new infrastructure. New tools and frameworks need to be developed from scratch and tested extensively before being deployed to a high number of users.”