Mark Zuckerberg said Apple is becoming Facebook's biggest competitor

Agencies | Washington 

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg attacked Apple during Facebook's quarterly earnings call on Wednesday.

Zuckerberg talked up Facebook's suite of messaging apps, lauding their privacy practices. He then segued into criticizing Apple, saying it makes "misleading" privacy promises to consumers while offering a messaging service, iMessage, that has less privacy than Facebook-owned WhatsApp.

"We have a lot of competitors who make claims about privacy that are often misleading," he said.

"Now, Apple recently released so-called nutrition labels which focused largely on metadata that apps collect rather than the privacy and security of people's actual messages, but iMessage stores non-end-to-end encrypted backups of your messages by default unless you disable iCloud," he said.

Apple's introduction of privacy nutrition labels for apps is part of a broader privacy update that has caused a major spat with Facebook, to the point where Facebook took out full-page newspaper attack ads in December.

Zuckerberg said WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption makes it "clearly superior" to Apple's messaging service.

"I do want to highlight that we increasingly see Apple as one of our biggest competitors. iMessage is a key linchpin of their ecosystem," Zuckerberg added. He also appeared to accuse Apple of anti-competitive behaviour.