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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little confused by this author feeling like they are pulling back the curtain on Apple & Ads. Apple hasn't been anti-ad (though their products have way fewer ads than the competition. I installed Windows on a new machine yesterday and oh boy I was not prepared) but rather they are pro-privacy. Their recent crackdown on ad networks wasn't "we hate ads so we are going it make harder" but instead it was "you all are leaking customer data like a sieve and that's not ok".

The problem with most all the ad networks out there is they are not good stewards of their data and will sell it (directly or indirectly) to anyone with the money to buy it. Personally I hate ads but I understand their place in the world and if I have to see ads I trust Apple way more than Google or whatever fly-by-night ad tracking company is out there. The problem has always been that the advertisers had way more access to the info about the customer (and sometimes the customer's PII/unique id) than I was comfortable with and they would share that indiscriminately. If Apple is the one holding that info and if they design their system in a way that protects it then I don't personally see this as a problem.

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>Apple hasn't been anti-ad

You mean Apple played the tracking and Anti Ads cards with all of its PR submarine articles and marketing, how Apple is not an Ad company and doesn't sell ad ( not true then and not true now, to the point the App Store Head questioned whether putting Ads on App Store search would go against Tim Cook's public image ). Fuel the public discourse against data collection AND Ads, push the narrative on all forms of media ( including Social Media ) how every single ad is tracking. ( You may want to read Benedict Evan's piece on Ad and Tracking ) And only to backtrack when the whole Ad industry questions Apple's motive on why are they all of a sudden Anti Ad? ( Tim Cook, somehow, for some reason, had to made a few public statement on how Apple is not "Anti-Ads". )

The whole tracking and Ads PR strategy got to the point where Ad is evil on HN. It wasn't "Personally I hate ads but I understand their place in the world ". It was simply I hate Ads. ( People working inside Ad industry rarely comments on HN anymore ) And when other players in the industry does "targeting" Ads, it is tracking. When Apple does it, it is "personalised". [1]

I guess the pandemic had people forget how Apple started their grand strategy play against Facebook.

I still cant believe nearly 20 years later how Apple has outdone Google's "Do No Evil" hypocrisy.

[1] https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1532861766492774400

You're doing what the parent comment says, which is conflating Apple's pro-privacy behavior with "anti-advertising" behavior. You're far from the only one, to the point that folks like Tim Cook regularly talk about this.

"We’re not against digital advertising. I think digital advertising is going to thrive in any situation, because more and more time is spent online, less and less is spent on linear TV. And digital advertising will do well in any situation. The question is, do we allow the building of this detailed profile to exist without your consent?

"We think that some number of people, I don’t know how many, don’t want to be tracked like that. And they should be able to say they don’t."¹

Apple has never disparaged advertising as a revenue model for developers. They even have regular WWDC sessions on the topic². What they have been very vocal about is user control.

¹ https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/04/12/apple-ceo-tim-co...

² https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10038/

Right, if Apple doesn't let people hyper target it's not necessarily a privacy issue. Main issue with Facebook ads is when you interact & identify (e.g. click an ad and sign up[0]) you are confirming to some advertiser that their campaign targeting applies to you.

If this ever changes that will be a big privacy issue.

[0] Advertisers can also identify you if you only click (and don't sign up or otherwise identify yourself) via some other data source like their own data, a third party service

I can assure you, I am not.

Apple's pro-privacy behaviour was their message, explicitly speaking. But ultimately the market received it as "anti-advertising". The best of marketing isn't telling you what to think, ( pro-privacy ) but leads you what to think ( anti-advertising ). And Apple was happy to play along with it.

They were absolutely against advertising, or more precisely Facebook's advertising revenue.

The two example you show were already well pass 2020. As I said Tim Cook had to make a few statement about how they are not anti Advertising cough. after the damage was done. And only after the Ad industry were furious.

> Apple's pro-privacy behaviour was their message, explicitly speaking. But ultimately the market received it as "anti-advertising".

I hear what you're saying — privacy protections impact anti-privacy business models, absolutely — but I'd argue that it's not "anti-advertising" in the sense that more digital advertising dollars are being spent to target iOS users in 2022 vs. 2021.

> And only after the Ad industry were furious.

It's ad networks' fiduciary duty to hate this. My response to them: Suck an egg.

Feels more like their standard move, lock out competitors so they can control it for their own profit.

Not that I mind them fucking with advertisers, but let's not pretend Apple is benevolent here.

They aren't benevolent but there is such a thing as a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm fine with people making money off advertisement as long as they aren't selling my data directly and the number of companies I trust to do that is very low. In a lot of ways targeted ads and the like can be beneficial, it's about connecting people selling something the the people who want/need that thing, the problem is when data companies can just hoover up or buy that data and do gross things with it.

I don't trust any company to do it because:

* Even the competent companies have data leaks.

* Even the competent companies will give it up if their government comes knocking.

* Even a company which is relatively ethical now might someday be taken over by nickle-and-dime management.

That's fine, but then you shouldn't give your info to apple at all. Or google, or facebook, or microsoft, or amazon, or ycombinator, for that matter. The fact is, unless you want to be a luddite (which you aren't, you're here, with an account, at least) then you have to trust at least some of these companies. So the question is, which ones can generally be trusted, and which can't? I personally trust apple more than facebook, ycombinator more than amazon, etc. Your ordering might be different, and that's fine, but you're drawing a bright line there, which only hurts yourself.

> So the question is, which ones can generally be trusted, and which can't?

Let's see... pretty much any of the companies listed as PRISM-compliant back during the Snowden leaks?

It's fun to be pedantic about security, but Facebook and Apple both phone home to the NSA at the end of the day. Quibbling about these differences is a zero-sum game, since FAANG's lowest common denominator is total surveillance.

Not sure if you're aware, but this is the classic tu quoque fallacy on display.

I don't think we need to trust these entities in order to interact with them. Unfortunately some information has to be leaked to engage with modern society, it is just a matter of trying to minimize it to the extent possible. It isn't trust, it is an exchange.

Companies need to increase revenue, so even if they don't do it right now there is no guarantee they will not.

They have consciously chosen to give up dozens of billions in potential revenue, because it would be against their customer's interests. That's got to count for something.

Not recalling AirTags until the privacy implications are fixed, says otherwise.

Tile predated AirTags for nearly a decade and is still worse on privacy today. If you want to argue that consumer-level trackers shouldn't exist, that's fine, but it's not at all unique to Apple.

Personally I don't think it's a solvable problem, and they shouldn't exist at all.

Tile never became ubiquitous though - but yes, I agree, if it can't be done in a way that can be abused, it shouldn't be a product.

But money talks, and Apple have decided they're comfortable with the risks because it's another brick in their ecosystem wall, and makes them money.

Any half-competent EE can throw together the equivalent of a Tile or AirTag with off the shelf parts nowadays. That genie is out of the bottle and has been for years and years

They can - but that's a higher barrier than "Pay $35".

you can go to AliExpress and pay less than $35 if you just want to creepily track people

And now you don't have to - and don't have to wait 30 days for it to be shipped to you from China.

> yes, I agree, if it can't be done in a way that can be abused, it shouldn't be a product.

What about knives, alcohol, cars, escooters, power tools, rope, bleach?

These are all products that can be abused. Should they also not exist?

There will always be a new product that can be abused. Education and threat of punishment keep a lot of people from abusing them. The same can be true for AirTags.

It can be both true that they have potential privacy problems with a product, and that they have given up dozens of billions in potential revenue due to privacy concerns.

The article is literally about them successfully locking out their competitors and moving in on those billions for themselves.

The article posted by a business entity with an agenda of its own, you mean?

It’s but one of many subjective takes by someone who earns through clicks, grabbing attention, instigating circular discourse online.

I have no obligation to support this author’s position, OR Apple’s rhetoric. I judge on the technical implementation; Apple earns through hardware sales and fees for services charged directly to service users.

Whether you agree with the price they set for those things is irrelevant; technically speaking the bulk of their revenue comes from hardware sales and direct charges for services.

Their competitors could do that too. They could charge for a phone and take a cut for app distribution, sell storage services. They don’t, because they don’t want to compete with Apple; they want the public and courts to force Apple to change.

That they went a different way of generating revenue and it bit them in the ass is not Apple's problem. Those businesses made their choices.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. All this rhetoric about those “poor” wealthy businesses being screwed by Apple are actually mad they picked the wrong path to revenue.

Apple and Google held back generations of children who got phones instead of computers. They did this for profit. They should be fined for contributing to the delinquency of minors.

All the whining about whose sports team is best belittles the tremendous disservice these profit seeking monsters have done throughout the advent of true portable computing.

Except that Apple not only hasn't done that, but has created ad network APIs and processes to support "competitors".

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skadnetwo...

As the article points out this is almost certainly about advertising within their own sites, apps and stores. In which case competing and networks are irrelevant.

This position doesn't even make any sense.

- Google has a monopoly on ads on Google Search.

- Facebook has a monopoly on ads on Facebook, Instagram etc.

- Apple has a monopoly on ads on App Store, News+ etc.

Every company has a monopoly on ads on their own properties.

The issue is Apple considers anything running on an iphone to be their property.

Have you ever used a Nintendo Switch?

No you can get a developer license and run anything you like.

That costs 100 dollars a year. And you can't share what you made with anyone without getting Apples permission.

Google does not "sell data" directly to anyone, so only the 'indirect' part of your comment applies.

Even then, Apple's changes have little impact on the "selling data" aspect of things... the real thing that they prevent doing is sale attribution, which is critical for advertising business and not really all that privacy invasive.

Apple has provided frameworks and technology specifically for pro-privacy sale attribution, and continues to be invested in efforts to support standardization of such techniques.

Except they deliberately delay the attribution messaage so optimising ads takes longer for buyers, and hence costs more money.

That sounds like a feature to me, the end user.

Higher costs being passed on to you?

Increases the incentive to look for brands that don't waste money on advertising.

What’s your method for discovering those brands?

You generally don't need those brands. If you do, you search for them, filter out spam, then judge.

Or you hear about them organically, by participating in specific forums or following well chosen publications.

Sometimes it could be "YouTuber advertising", where instead of a YouTube ad, the advertiser directly pays the YouTuber to market the product.

Doesn't require any of my personal information to target me (targeting is based on the YouTuber's audience and metrics I'd assume), and I have made multiple decisions to purchase a product or not based on this advertising.

I currently pay for YouTube Premium, so I guarantee you I am not conflating this kind of advertising with YouTube's regular advertising.

As someone who has found multiple small businesses that I use regularly, and wouldn't have without ads that are relevant, I vehemently disagree.

Then you can opt in to sharing data so ads can target you more effectively.

And that would be fine and dandy if the permission request was allowed to be in the same format the Apple App store one uses - but it isn't.

It's blatant.

I find it hard to believe Google research doesn’t move data in or out in the form of peering agreements. Same for other parts of the org.

Sale attribution wasn’t critical before the internet.

Motor vehicles weren’t critical before the invention of the internal combustion engine

Right, but it's the reason on-line advertising is efficient.

I would correct that to "it’s the reason on-line advertising is believed to be efficient."

I’ve been seeing reporting over the last several years that suggests that a lot of the belief in sales attribution to ads or even specific interactions on-line are tenuous at best.

Pretty easy to prove this to be false with elementary A/B testing.

For big organizations that have the capacity and data, online advertising becomes a ROI optimization game, and one that they perform quite well at.

For a random business that wants to advertise online, without the infrastructure and data capability to back it, they will struggle to compete unless they exist in a segment full of similar peers. When the former happens, we see articles about how PPC doesn't actually work, etc.

Reality is that it takes engineering work and infrastructure, coupled with some data capabilities to unlock real value in the online advertising space.

As noted, online advertising brought all sorts of insight and visibility over traditional 'offline' marketing channels, but with that comes more savvy competitors that will do all the data things you're not.

Many platforms, such as Google, make A/B testing attribution (ie. incrementality measurements) really easy to perform.

Most people don’t know how to run or interpret A/B tests, or even understand what the confidence levels should be for their sample size.

By and large, people don’t understand statistics (I mostly include myself in that).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix_modeling got big in the 1980s. It's always been pretty important for marketers to know what channels work and what ones don't.

Mail order ads used to list different PO Boxes so they could track sales attribution.

Sales attribution is often extremely privacy invasive. That data is how it works.

I would take issue with extremely. It is not tracking you all over the internet, it's just passing a token with a given ad click.

> I trust Apple way more than Google

I hear this a lot but Google is probably one of the most trustworthy stewards of the most amount of private data in the history of mankind.

Why?

I think you can say they built the first huge, impactful non-classified pile of surveillance data dedicated to advertising, and thereby set the bar for corporate behavior with this sort of thing. Of course it is inevitable that slimier outfits came along later and were worse. That's a predictable and expected outcome in any market niche.

So in that respect, I can agree.

Google is also responsible for the Android and Chrome platforms. In both cases, my impression is that they have long tolerated, if not promoted, ecosystems open to third party data collection of the more abusive sort. While Google may protect data gathered through maps, mail and their many other properties, their stewardship of Android / Chrome greatly diminishes my trust in their organization.

It's fair to say that Android is a big attack vector. Google is responsible for leaving the door unlocked, sure. But the data that's stolen is not Google's data. It's independently grabbed data.

So you can use Googles platforms to gather data, but you won't be getting what Google has.

I'm a bit of cynic and I think part of Apple's privacy push is that they see the writing on the wall - advertising is way less valuable than the current customers of advertising think it is, and by removing a bunch of the "targetability" of said advertising they can get closer to the more profitable advertising of yore (where you couldn't directly track all metrics all the time).

Have you ever run a business that relied on advertising to drive revenue or are you just relying on what you've read online?

Anyone running a small business in a niche space knows that targeted advertising works.

The other aspect of it is that targeted advertising allows you to make money from niche advertisers even if you operate a general-interest website.

Third party general interest websites generally don’t care where their advertising dollars come from, which is why they outsourced it all in the first place.

If anything, they would probably prefer advertisements at least tangentially related to the content so that their readers don’t get creeped out by some Amazon product following them around the internet.

Right, but they care about how much advertising dollars they make, and they can make more dollars if the pool of possible advertisers is larger.

Which is what Google initially promised web site owners: Targeted advertising. That's why it's called Google AdSense. Because, thanks to Google's crawling ability, it was supposed to sense the content of the page and place appropriate ads there.

Only later, as Google's managers became more greedy, did it become ads for forklifts on granny's sausage-making recipe page because must... wring... every... last... penny... for... rhetorical... shareholders... Gah!

Third party websites can more or less only serve Google ads, or from some tiny competitor like Carbon Ads.

Every other ad product is walled-garden specific. Facebook ads are shown only on on Facebook properties. Same with Twitter, Amazon and Apple. You may see ads for these companies on third party sites, but they are being served via Google Ads.

> Anyone running a small business in a niche space knows that targeted advertising works.

My partner runs a small business in a niche space and spends a million/year on ads.

She doesn't need customers to be tracked across sites or long term information maintained about their interests or behaviour. She really just needs to sell ads via (a) direct searches and (b) retargeting people who have visited her own site.

What do you think is the practical difference between “track[ing] across sites” and “information maintained about their interests and behavior”, and “retargeting people who have visited her own site”?

“We just attach a beacon to everyone who visits our site so that when they walk in front of billboards our ad is shown but we’re not like trackkking users.

How does she know whether the ads are working for her business?

Also retargeting is not possible with Apple's changes.

Anyone who is seriously in the advertising game knows how to measure the incrementality of their advertising spend.

There isn't some vast conspiracy of people paying way too much for useless advertising. Advertising works, this is why people pay for it.

Apple's changes don't really prevent people from targeting onsite ads... what they do block is the experiments advertisers do to see if their ads are working (ie. on-platform incrementality studies).

At HN, only a few things are certain. Death, taxes, and advertisers and MBAs colluding to ruin every company.

> Apple hasn't been anti-ad (though their products have way fewer ads than the competition.)

> Personally I hate ads but [...] if I have to see ads I trust Apple

You don't have to see ads. There have been and still are operating systems with no ads, and Apple is absolutely swimming in cash. There is no necessity here— Apple is not integrating ads because they 'have to', and we don't 'have to' see them because we don't have to use operating systems that integrate ads.

The resignation here just kills me.

Someone down in the comments was waiting for the Apple defense squad to pop up and say that this has been in consumer's best interest the whole time, and there you are.

of course they do it because they care about your privacy, and not for their revenue. Of course.

And if I had added a "and of course someone will come into the replies and say it's only about profit" then that would have negated your comment?

Welcome to the real world where 2 things can be true at the same time: Apple cares about profits and Apple cares about privacy.

Hey whatever, if it makes you feel better.

Apple is better than other big tech for sure, but don't let them fool you into believing they actually care about your privacy, because they don't, and they often use privacy as a an anti-competion weapon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r38Epj6ldKU

Breaking new: capitalistic companies are capitalistic. I don’t give a shit as long as their corporate interests reasonably align with my own

Does anyone remember this?

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/28/the-downfall-of-the-walled...

Apple tried before with ads in iOS. Right now it seems like they advertise only in the App Store but adding more ads to the core OS would be bad but I could see a play where you get free Apple Music and tv+ but you just have to tolerate ads (and I would switch to that).

They advertise in Apple News too. I don't think they've ever released a real number but estimates are that they did $3-4billion in advertising revenue in 2021. Not big by the standards of GOOG or META but growing fast.

IMO Apple is pro-privacy from competitors and 3rd parties. They are not pro-privacy from Apple itself and the governments that force them to disclose things.

There is a lot of tracking from apple you just cannot opt out of from apple straight out. A lot of logs are just uploaded and you can't stop it from the device itself as a setting, such as battery analytics and more. Just investigate what comes out of your iphone & mac still data wise even when you opt out of things you are given as an option.

You cannot open an apple id without a phone number or other strong identifying information, even if all you want to do is download free apps. iPhones are mostly unusable without an Apple ID.

Apple does not give you an option to not have any encryption keys kept in escrow by apple, like they do with iCloud and iCloud backups. And backups are on by default, including the contents of your iMessage logs. They don't keep your iMessage keys in escrow by default, so they've always been capable in not doing that. They keep iCloud data within China, so the Chinese government probably has continuous full access to whatever is on iCloud for Chinese users, because apple keeps the iCloud keys in escrow. The same goes with the NSA in the USA, because we all know those governments invest enough to fully compromise apple's data centers. Apple could chose a design that allows users to avoid the key escrow and make these government spy agency jobs much harder. The examples go on and on. But they are very good in not highlighting these facts.

> A lot of logs are just uploaded and you can't stop it from the device itself as a setting, such as battery analytics and more.

You actually can. It's one click to opt-out of all device analytics: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/device-analytics...

For anyone curious about what's being sent when device analytics is allowed to phone home, that's found at Settings > Privacy > Analytics & Improvements.

In addition to this:

They’ve been building ad tools because that’s what developers have been asking for as a way to surface their app.

Otherwise all developers had was a situation where only Apple’s algorithms decides which app is similar to another app, which is largely generated through user searches/behaviours (something that is easily exploited as seen on amazon with the “customers also bought” exploits). That left developers with limited ability to surface their ad honestly and absolutely no way to feature event-based activities, expansions and other promotional industry norms.

HN won’t like it because it’s Apple - but this largely improves the experience for the developers. While consumers get relevant ads without the unscrupulous on-selling of data.

Will this really improve the experience for the average developer, or will this be a way for those with deep pockets to blanket the platform with ads and drown out small-time indie devs even more?

It feels like a more lasting solution not based on being able to buy eyeballs would be making the search experience on the App Store more robust and modernized. To fix the solution with an UX upgrade. That feels more like an Apple solution, not by adding more ads into the mix.

Why not both? Improve the UX which they do regularly and introduce ads which developers have been screaming for.

With or without ads in the app store, the problem about being out marketed exists outside the app store.

What this is merely apple’s privacy-protecting solution for what is seen inside the app store.

Im yet to see an argument which isn’t just some thinly veiled distaste for apple.

Hate apple all you like, but actually challenge the conversation with a valid argument.

I don't hate Apple; I've worked there myself, continue to be a shareholder (and thus have vested interest in its fortunes), and given the way the industry works, may return there eventually. But I find blind faith in the company from die-hard fans both misplaced, and frankly, distasteful. As with any organization, Apple is deserving both scrutiny and critique, and it is wrong to dismiss critique as hatred. And the image of Apple as a scrappy underdog beset on all sides by haters is two decades out of date by now. It's a corporate giant that deserves as much skepticism as the others.

> Improve the UX which they do regularly and introduce ads which developers have been screaming for.

If ads can be better, then developers will like them. But I question the supposition that developers have been screaming for ads, given that the status quo with App Store ads is situations like this:

https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1270568780712706049

https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1197642397854777344

https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271154427034918912

Granted, that's from two years ago, and any new ads rollouts would presumably be of greater quality. It's just that track record doesn't inspire a lot of confidence, and really throws into question the idea that developers really want ads. How do you prevent the big players with the biggest marketing budgets from buying up all of the space? I'm not going to pre-judge the feature, but I do believe some healthy skepticism is warranted.

If App Store ads follow even a modicum of some of these feature requests, then perhaps they will really be what developers want.

https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1271185023744397312

Edit: an example from six months ago

https://twitter.com/tgrapperon/status/1492460177001431042

https://twitter.com/miguelkennedy/status/1492529534729654274

Shifting the topic and implying i’m some sort of fanboy doesn’t address the argument. Indeed blind faith, i.e making assumptions before something is even seen, works both ways. Since i see a lot of critique that is literally based on an ad opening. Do you realise how ridiculous this sounds? I don’t care about anecdotes plucked from twitter, anyone can form a counter point with a whole other set of tweets.

What I’ve said, all along: It’s a privacy preserving ad product, an already announced solution to not being able to feature events, upgrades, expansions which currently doesn’t exist.

Getting caught into an irrelevant philosophical debate on the virtue of ads does reveal your bias, regardless of who you say you are.

I have shifted nothing. I am clarifying where I am coming from. I am explaining that my words come without "hatred" for something I am incentivized not to hate. That implies nothing about yourself, but it does explain why I take the positions in conversations in threads like this. To accuse someone of hatred addresses no argument.

If you are unwilling to accept the experiences of developers who are out there, and claim that developers have been clamoring for ads without showing evidence, and discount evidence clearly presented to you, then it seems like you have made up your mind and there is a deadlock.

> Getting caught into an irrelevant philosophical debate on the virtue of ads

I have not been caught into any of that. I am simply expressing that the ads that have been present when it comes to exact search results matching have led to a subpar UX, as seen by many, and this is a known situation, which you are unwilling to accept. Thus we are at an impasse, so I am willing to table this conversation until the actual ad product is revealed and in public. That said, a willingness to reject evidence out of hand is clearly representative of bias. And that's absolutely fine! Human beings are all inherently biased. We are not the machines that we are talking about. We ought to recognize our biases, accept them for what they are, and transcend them.

Here's something that happened off Twitter- an HN user literally encounters the App Store's poor search capability today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32371796

I just tried it out myself and even though the search bar suggests "papers please" as a query, the results truly do not immediately yield the popular game with that title.

If Apple wants to offer ads, perhaps that will make up for the shoddy search UX. But it seems like a poorer solution than simply improving App Store search functionality.

>HN won’t like it because it’s Apple - but this largely improves the experience for the developers. While consumers get relevant ads without the unscrupulous on-selling of data.

No. Developers are forced to only use Apple ads, as any possible competing ads have been completely demolished. Instead of having a market of possible partners Apple is forcing it to only be them.

No. Anyone can link into the app store with an ad from any provider, and this still happens today. This is ads inside apple’s own app store. The same way that I can’t use anyone else to place an ad in youtube. Your argument is utterly farcical.

Advertising itself is not necessarily bad, but it is how it is done. All FAANGs are growing their shares of the pie.

It is time for someone to do it right. Abusers have lived for too long, we need someone to beat them at their own game. Apple is rightly positioned to do so.

How do you think Apple can "do advertising" right? Advertising by its very nature is abusive to users: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_theft.

Maybe they should make all advertising (not just targeted) opt-in like they did with the advertising ID! I'm sure plenty of users will click allow.

The fact that someone has made this claim and given a name to the concept doesn't make it valid.

The article doesn't make it clear whether this will be applied to the App Store only.

If this is the case, apps are not a life-necessity in the information era - unlike information (search), shopping (e-commerce), or communication (social media).

They do not intrude our everyday living unless we intentionally look for it. Every other kind of advertising does so and thus are open to abuse.

Banking apps (for example) are absolutely a necessity. This is kind of a silly distinction to draw.

My take is that either all advertising is bad or none is. That's why I use Linux, which has fewer ads (zero) than any other OS.

You can go to your local bank or use the desktop app instead.

How do you deter off bad/unethical advertising if everyone is subjective to it anyways?

Like almost any tool, you have both bad and good actors.

The how matters https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%20end%20justi....

Interesting. If something as abstract as "intellectual property" can be a thing, then surely so can "attention theft".

Unsolicited advertising is necessarily bad. It is an invasion of cognitive space for financial exploitation of the victim.

> Advertising itself is not necessarily bad, but it is how it is done

As someone who worked in it for 7 years, nah it's all bad.

That's like saying that money is all bad. Technically true, but good luck with that maximalist position.

Apple managed to make the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone and iPad without an advertising business so yeah being maximalist and saying "This industry has nothing of value to add to our company" can result in great things.

How many billions do you think Apple spent on advertising to get to this point, what do you think? Seems like that's a tremendous amount of value for Apple, as a customer at least!

Running an ad campaign != running a advertising banner company.

Absurd to suggest these are even remotely related.

Apple is positioned to expand their ads business and take market share from their competitors. "Doing it right" doesn't have a good enough ROI, especially in tech.

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