Apple’s privacy changes hurt Snap and Facebook but benefited Google

paywall’d but the premise is solid—worth digging into the mechanism. Apple’s iOS privacy changes exposed the fragility of third-party cookie/IDFA reliance. Google weathered it better due to search monopoly and existing first-party datasets. classic case of how platform leverage matters more than privacy theater. the real lesson: if you’re building on someone else’s attribution layer, you’re renting permission. Meta’s pivot to context-based targeting and their eventual pivot to first-party data collection mirrors this dependency problem. worth understanding the incentive structures here—Apple wasn’t being altruistic, they were eliminating ad tech competition while preserving their own ad business.