Why does then Apple have a Ad service?. Should they not be tracking nothing?
The problem is companies selling customer data to each other and snooping on customer activity outside the company's own web site or app. This is what is meant by tracking and Apple doesn't do this in their ad service.
It seems like what Apple is doing is trying to cripple tracking for other ad services to make their own service more competitive.
Amazon and Google have abused this data in the past to undercut the competition with their own better promoted offerings and make purchase decisions with data the competition just could not have access to.
I'm sure Apple is going to offer exactly that, as the conversion-rate data of an Ad into an actual purchase elsewhere is where the big Ad-money is. Apple will just do all that without handing off any data to another party, providing only the persona of an end-user to the Ad-customer.
Their dilemma is that doing this today at an "Apple-price" has limited competitive value to Advertisers. But if Apple cripples the competition to become the ONLY company able to provide such data, they suddenly become a mandatory supplier for every Ad-campaign in the world, as only Apple will be able to provide effective Ad-analytics on iOS.
>> It seems like what Apple is doing is trying to cripple tracking for other ad services to make their own service more competitive.
Exactly. Which should be a strong sign that regulation is urgently required, but somehow people still are stuck on the wrong narrative.
But second, sure they didn't sell it, they gave it away. Facebook claims the data delivered to Cambridge Analytica wasn't sold. No, it was given away because facebook calculates that it benefits from research which improves targeting on their platform. Nobody is fooled by any of this, unless they choose to be.
But you don't know who that person is [ until they create an account or give you info ]
This is exactly what they're doing to FB and i hope FB wins a maassive anti-competative suit. I hope they still don't get to track but i hope apple is given a slap on the wrist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd
Selling search ads on the App Store kinda sucks--I wish they hadn't done that.
But summary is they use a bunch of stuff about the device (past purchases, location, fingerprinting-like data such as carrier and so on) and your usage of a bunch of apps like apple news and stocks.