[GeekyBear]

Back when iAd was a thing, there were articles about how upset advertisers were that Apple's iAd wouldn't let them plug directly into an Apple customer's music and video store purchase history.

>Apple has a lot of knowledge regarding its users,but what it doesn’t do with that data is share it with advertisers very freely. That makes Madison Avenue very mad.

>rather than offering a cookie-based ad-tracking and targeting mechanism, it essentially requires partners to tell it what kind of audience it needs to reach, and then trust that Apple will handle the rest, AdAge says. And it’s well worth noting that Apple prioritizes customer privacy here over a big potential upside in ad revenue.

>what it doesn’t do is hand over the keys to all that data and let advertisers plug into it directly with their own data-mining and targeting software. That’s not standard for the ad industry and that’s likely the reason a few Madison Avenue feathers are ruffled over their approach.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/advertisers-not-thrilled-w...

I'm not sure why you think that Apple has had a change of heart since then, especially given their recent decision that these sort of privacy protecting policies provide Apple a competitive advantage.

[zerocrates]

I'm not extremely familiar with the ad industry, but isn't this setup (tell us who you want to target and we'll do it for you) the way that the other big platform holders work, like Google and Facebook? That's always been my impression, that the data is their "secret sauce" and they aren't interested in sharing.

[lozenge]

You can upload email addresses and phone numbers to Facebook to target and you can set cookies on your website for retargeting too.

[ENGNR]

I imagine that's only because FB/Google want to protect their distribution, and users run ads directly with them. Smaller publishers have no choice but to give it all up to the ad networks