[noizejoy]

Lovely free advertising for Proton. Very smart blog post, since numerous employees and fans of Apple competitors, as well as anyone who dislikes Apple for whatever reason, has plenty motivation to upvote this post.

Also: Calling someone an ad company when approximately 1% of revenue seems to be generated by ads would seem quite a stretch.

Also: Being tracked while on someone’s property isn’t exactly the same as tracking someone across unrelated properties.

Also: Every company with a decent CRM system and culture has been tracking all kinds of (often personal) details about their (potential) customers gathered from their interactions and whatever sources they could get their hands on. This has been going on since before the Internet was widely used.

But while this blog post (attack ad?) doesn’t seem to have that much meaningful substance, it’s also kind of just doing the same to Apple as Apple often does to others.

[politelemon]

Also: Yet I see many comments rushing to perform mental gymnastics on their behalf.

There are several attributes here that match up exactly with other companies that are somehow vilified. The blog post is on point, the user have been in denial for a long time and will continue to be.

[noizejoy]

> Also: Yet I see many comments rushing to perform mental gymnastics on their behalf. There are several attributes here that match up exactly with other companies that are somehow vilified. The blog post is on point, the user have been in denial for a long time and will continue to be.

I’m all in favour of calling out Apple on their crap. But Apple’s evils aren’t the same as Google’s and Meta’s evils.

I just prefer my conversations and criticisms to be more nuanced, rather than brushing everyone with the same simplistic brush.

Also: Calling users to be in denial is a cheap attack. The reality is, that all of us users live in a world filled with nothing but imperfect choices. — So all we can do is pick our poison according to our personal priorities and preferences at any given time.

[paulryanrogers]

> Also: Being tracked while on someone’s property isn’t exactly the same as tracking someone across unrelated properties.

Do you consider Apple-made devices property of their buyers or do they forever remain property of Apple?

[noizejoy]

> Do you consider Apple-made devices property of their buyers or do they forever remain property of Apple?

The original post talked about advertising on cloud properties, not devices. And that was the context of my post.

So I’m puzzled why you’d be moving the conversation to the topic of devices.

[paulryanrogers]

Because Apple is showing ads on devices with some captive services, like the app store.

[noizejoy]

I’d categorize that as a beef with the walled garden system, more so than Apple becoming an ad company.

I don’t have an issue with criticism of the walled garden approach and that being a reason for many individuals to avoid the Apple ecosystem.

But I think that’s quite a different discussion than the business model of companies who make most of their revenue from ads and the tracking they do while one is visiting different properties all over the web.

Approximately 1% of revenue from ads doesn’t really make someone an ad company.

Again, I have no problem with critical comments about Apple (I have a lengthy list myself) - but advertising is not an equivalence between Apple and other truly advertising based companies.

[paulryanrogers]

My concern is that ad revenue is just too tempting, especially as other revenue sources plateau. That's why once paid and ad free services like cable devolved into paid-with-ads.

[noizejoy]

If you’re essentially extrapolating into what Apple may become one day, rather than what it is now (i.e. if/when the 1% of revenue from advertising becomes a meaningfully larger share like 51% or whatever the threshold for being an advertising company is in your thinking), then I understand where you’re coming from.

However, I’m coming from a perspective to let history play out a little more before trying to predict the future too far out.

In addition, I find calling Apple an advertising company distracts from much more legitimate complaints about Apple.

And it whitewashes Google, Meta and their ilk.

Apple is far from perfect on privacy issues, but todate also nowhere near as horrific as the much more fully ad dependent companies.