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> 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". |
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...