[nerdponx]

I suspect they're doing it now because they realize they're the last company to _not_ abuse their users' privacy. Now that users have absolutely nowhere else to turn, Apple has no reason not to play that game.

Edit: how do i italics

[matt4077]

(a) This matches Searches to Apps, not users.

(b) The situations you're describing hasn't really changed since Facebook added ads, so they could've had that "realization" much earlier.

(c) Apple is positioning itself as a privacy-focused company with (for example) their lawsuit regarding iPhone unlocking and their implementation of differential privacy for their machine learning algorithms. It'd be stupid to give that up and risk a triple-digit-billion-business (iPhone) for what's bound to be a small fraction of that (ads in the App Store).

[nixos]

> It'd be stupid to give that up and risk a triple-digit-billion-business (iPhone) for what's bound to be a small fraction of that (ads in the App Store).

You don't have to outrun the bear, just your friend.

[matt4077]

Yeah, but running doesn't just mean "have better privacy" than the competition (i. e. Samsung/Google). Privacy is only one of many dimensions Apple is competing on, and running up the score there may still help them when the competition is better along other dimensions, like those cool self-igniting firework-phones I keep hearing about.

[ljk]

    *like this*

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

[baddox]

I won't try to claim that Apple is or isn't abusing their users' privacy, but they're definitely not new to advertising. They ran iAd for years until they shut it down recently.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd