[dude_abides]

This would have sounded credible if Apple didn't have an iAds business that mines user clicks and offers retargetting ads to paying customers.

Instead, now, this sounds like Microsoft's Scroogle campaign, where it accused Google of doing all the things that Bing also did, but wasn't successful at doing.

[k-mcgrady]

"One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd. We built an advertising network because some app developers depend on that business model, and we want to support them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether."

https://www.apple.com/privacy/

[dewitt]

Google has a one-click opt-out as well:

http://www.google.com/settings/ads

I remain opted in, fwiw.

[k-mcgrady]

I know about that but that's simply an opt-out of interest based ads - they're likely still collecting your data in case you enable the ads again.

[dewitt]

You might be also interested in https://myaccount.google.com, which offers full visibility and fine-grained control into everything in one place.

I wasn't personally involved in building it, but in my opinion it's really impressive. I wish other companies would do the same.

[k-mcgrady]

Yeh I really like Google's account section. They also do a nice monthly email report of your account activity.

[vilmosi]

So how exactly does iAds work without any data?