Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Here is Apple's privacy policy on ads:

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...

> We create segments, which are groups of people who share similar characteristics, and use these groups for delivering targeted ads.

> We may use information such as the following to assign you to segments:

> ... The music, movies, books, TV shows, and apps you download ...

> ... The topics and categories of the stories you read and the publications you follow, subscribe to, or enable notifications from ...

> ... Your name, address, age, gender, ...

> ... your App Store searches and browsing activity ...

> ... information stored on your device, such as the apps you frequently open ...

There's a lot more, that's just a sample of the data they use. The only thing they promise explicitly either not to have or not to use is:

> No Apple Pay transactions or Health app data is accessible to Apple’s advertising platform, or is used for advertising purposes. Apple does not know or make available to advertisers information about your sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or political affiliations.

basically FLOC; that's quite different than selling your PII to third-parties or targeting you based on your individual profile (i.e., you visited xxxx store so now you all of a sudden see tons of adds from that online store)

not saying it's good, but it's probably the least intrusive way to do it; and many users like it. I'd rather never see an ad, but if I do have to see any, I'd prefer to see ads for watches or cycling gear (which I like) rather than clothing or pick-up trucks.

> (i.e., you visited xxxx store so now you all of a sudden see tons of adds from that online store)

They do that also:

> When selecting which ad to display from multiple ads for which you are eligible, we may use some of the above-mentioned information, as well as your App Store searches and browsing activity, to determine which ad is likely to be most relevant to you.

> We may also use local, on-device processing to select which ad to display, using information stored on your device, such as the apps you frequently open.

(emphasis added). They don't track your activity across the web, since they can't, but they do track your activity on Apple properties, including your iPhone.

ok, I stand corrected

That's not ideal, but it's certainly much better than every other ad company out there.

Apple can at least enumerate the ways it profiles you in plan text, and most of it makes perfect sense. (Though I'd be happier if they excluded age and gender.)

The other companies profiling information requires a massive spreadsheet, or even a JSON dump that no human being can make sense of. And that's just for their internal data, not the data they sell (oops, "share with trusted partners").

That's not how it works. Every ad vendor has a privacy page with this stuff spelled out in the same way.

> We may use information such as the following to assign you to segments

My take is that this information is used to give you some sort of cohort identifier that is itself devoid of PII.

Isn't that the definition of an "advertising profile"?

Ironically that's kinda similar what Google FLoC was supposed to be.

Doesn't really matter if the segment you, if they also store the data they need to do the actual segmentation.

Besides, depending on how many segments you are assigned to, you're probably the only one in the intersection of all of them.

dont all ad platforms work this way?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com