Understand with this article what happened to the value of Facebook shares.

 Share value in Facebook parent company Meta tumbled 26% on Thursday after the company revealed Apple's privacy changes to its platform.

Facebook President Mark Zuckerberg said that this year the company will earn $10 billion less.

How did this happen?

It's simple. iOS and iPadOS devices have an Identification for Advertisers, or IDFA, software tracker. An IDFA is Apple's random identifier that allows advertisers to track your activity across apps and across the web while preserving personal information.

Apple has been making continuous changes to increasingly preserve user privacy across its product lineup in recent years. Previously, it had already limited the ability of companies to track user activities through the Safari browser.

The new feature made available by Apple in April 2021, which was first made available as part of iOS 14.5, gives users a pop-up window that opens an app that asks if they want the app to track their data.

So if a user chooses not to be tracked, which is more often the case, the IDFA technology becomes useless and advertisers can't see the type of site you visit. Apple has introduced a replacement for IDFA that it says is more privacy-friendly, but Meta and Snap have criticized it for being less efficient than IDFA.

And where does it all affect meta/facebook?

Zuckerberg's company's biggest source of revenue comes from advertising.