Apple’s privacy changes create windfall for its own advertising business

That was the plan along - a decade ago or so, Apple initially had a big plan to roll out an advertising platform. But the success of Sailfish OS and Jolla Phone (it outsold the iPhone when it was launched) that tauted privacy as a feature made it pause and re-evaluate their marketing strategy. Apple decided to embrace "privacy" as a short-term marketing strategy to differentiate itself from Android, it's main competitor in the mobile OS, and to stave of potential threat from the likes of Jolla / Sailfish OS. They even shutdown their advertising platform (iAd) with some subtle PR claiming it was part of their move towards enhancing "user privacy" (at that time it only had around 5% marketshare in mobile ads industry).

Initially, they actually did reduce mining their users data on ios. But probably after Steve Jobs death, Apple increasingly started to collect more and more user data while also preventing its competitors from doing so. They also started to offer services like Apple Pay to get more financial data of their users to make their future advertising platforms even more attractive to advertisers.

Now, I guess they finally believe that they can sell "privacy as a service" and the pitch now seems to be "trust" them with your personal data - and so we have all those icons in apps that will "inform" you when Apple will use your personal data for personalisation (creating a profile of you, to be shared with various services) or proxying browsing data through iCloud. Apparently Apple is confident of its market position today (and lack of competitors) to believe that users will not notice that "privacy" on Apple platforms no longer means less data collection, but less data collection by Apple's competitors ...

Non-paywalled link: https://archive.is/PI7pl