> what is Meta doing to get around Apple's iOS privacy protections?

Money always finds a way. Everyone thought the changes made a few years ago would hurt Meta but they make $70 billion net profit. At a minimum, they only need a good relationship with advertisers, and a (sort of measurable) increase from a campaign. Also ads are different now. One address may see the same five seconds of an ad hundreds of times. That is a much easier ecosystem to correlate targets through data enrichment.

Let’s pretend that the Apple restriction is 100% effective- how much impact would you expect to Meta’s bottom line? Sure, Meta would love to know every spicy detail of your life, but just following in app activity probably reveals more than enough to sway advertisers.

Meta hoovers up every detail because they can. Knowing that user #7227724 spends 23 minutes a day in Spotify might make the ad targeting 0.4% more accurate, but does not seem like the lynchpin for the entire business.