Apple and Facebook face off in an epic user privacy showdown

“This could signal a pretty big paradigm shift for digital privacy and for digital advertising going forward,” says Michal Lev-Ram, co-host of Coins2Day Brainstorm.

And ads are just the beginning, says Gennie Gebhart, a privacy researcher and the acting activism director with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for consumer rights in the digital world.

“Even for someone like me whose job it is to track this stuff,” Gebhart says, “I’m learning about new creepy things that are happening every single day. And the different kinds of sharing, tracking, profiling, behavioral monitoring, and all of that is designed to be … really hard for users to see and understand.”

This week Gebhart joins Lev-Ram and co-host Brian O’Keefe on Coins2Day Brainstorm, a podcast that explores how technology is reshaping our world.

Also on the show is Coins2Day‘s Aaron Pressman, a tech writer who regularly covers Apple. Pressman explains why the tech giant dust-up is happening.

“The implication of this is that lots and lots of advertising networks—of which Facebook runs one of the largest—that collect information [about] everyone using the iPhone so that they can sell more ads and sell more apps,” Pressman says, “probably won’t have much of an audience … if [iPhone users] click ‘no’.”

Meanwhile, he adds, “lots of little developers and little businesses and little direct-to-consumer clothing manufacturers and stuff are the main users of these targeted ads.”

Rounding out the show is Todd Parsons, chief product officer of Criteo, which develops advertising technology solutions. Along with discussing how Apple’s move will change the digital advertising world, he says that this will usher in a more privacy-focused era.

“Consumers are pulling,” Parsons says of the desire for increased privacy protections, “and regulators are pushing.”