[ca_tech]

Your point is interesting because I see this across the home hardware industry. Cheap electronics were subsidized by data collection and I suppose that market was lucrative until it wasn't. It happened behind the scenes, we knew it was going on, but it was abstracted away enough that we did not think about it. Now what is happening is that the hardware providers are getting into the marketing game directly. Personally in the past year I've given up on two pieces of hardware Alexa and Roku because they have morphed into ad machines. The market is open for privacy, convenience, and quality. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be the only major player in that space right now and we are paying their premium.

[gigel82]

Apple is already one of the largest ad companies in the world and they are clearly working very hard to get bigger($10.34 billion ad revenue in 2023).

Sure, they're great at PR and marketing themselves as "private" but they're just as bad as the rest of them. Also fan boys, I'd be willing to bet if Apple launches a "private personalized ad platform", the fanboys will be singing its praise instead of being appalled.

[Terretta]

> Sure, they're great at PR and marketing themselves as "private" but they're just as bad as the rest of them.

Apple's $10B of ad revenue primarily comes from promoting apps within its App Store, similar to how grocery stores charge for premium shelf space or end-of-aisle displays. This is an in-store, first-party system where data collected is used exclusively within Apple's ecosystem to personalize the user experience. These ads aim to increase app visibility within the App Store, maintaining a controlled and private "first party" environment.

In contrast, Google’s $300B advertising ecosystem extends far beyond its own platforms, surveilling and tracking user behavior across millions of websites and even physical locations. Google integrates with 85% of credit card transactions in the U.S., creating extensive user profiles that feed into a global ad tech and data brokering network with thousands of data brokers. This system supports highly targeted ads that follow users across the internet and beyond, typically sending users to third-party sites and services.

The difference lies in the scope and method of data collection and usage: Apple’s approach is about, and data remains within, its ecosystem, while Google’s extends to pervasive cross-platform tracking and profiling.

> if Apple launches a "private personalized ad platform", the fanboys will be singing its praise

This is indeed likely, since as an example, Apple spends extra time and energy to prevent even themselves from getting data, such as how they break up your Apple Maps trips directions requests into anonymized segments, to avoid letting themselves capture users' full trips. Apple deliberately makes their own data use more difficult, and in some cases makes certain uses impossible for themselves, to serve users' privacy. When you look at Alphabet or Meta engineering, you see their schemes serve to give them the ad profile data, while making it inaccessible to competitors.

TL;DR:

For both ad platforms and privacy engineering, as the Gus Fring meme goes, these "are not the same".

[gigel82]

> When you look at Alphabet or Meta engineering, you see their schemes serve to give them the ad profile data, while making it inaccessible to competitors.

That's exactly what Apple did with their supposed "opt out" work a couple of years back - they take a lot more data than apps on their platform are allowed to.

BTW, they only did that privacy work because they couldn't reach an agreement to get direct cash out of Facebook abusing users on their platform, to spite Meta: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/12/23303095/apple-meta-faceb...

[talldayo]

Kinda crazy then, that advertising is a mandatory feature of the iPhone whereas it's something that Google lets you disable on the AOSP. You'd think that a company like Google is a pretty low bar, but even they get some stuff down better than Apple does on iOS. I'd never switch back to iPhone having seen what a clusterfuck cloud storage is on iOS...

> as the Gus Fring meme goes, these "are not the same".

Don't people mostly use this meme ironically to derisively compare two things that aren't distinguished by much of anything?