Apple is becoming an ad company despite privacy claims
proton.me
proton.me
Can I pay 2x to get an ad-free iPhone? 3x? Surely there is some point where it makes sense to sell an ad free phone for those who _need_ to not see ads. They won't even take my money ;_;
Anything short of that and you're just sitting under the Sword of Damocles of value extraction, ripe to be used and abused (within personal tolerance or otherwise).
I can't contribute because I only have so many hours in a day. I'd rather pay. I'd pay a boatload for an operating system that replaces Android with something that has a good user experience and has no ads.
That's the reason I stay with android. The Apple version of the app (which has to come through the app store) is not allowed to block anything for Apple apps or services. This they exempt themselves from user control.
It's not the same for telemetry. There's no way to verify none is transmitted, and difficult to intercept it or distinguish it from essential traffic. Not all telemetry goes to an HTTP endpoint. Some telemetry-like fingerprinting data can be gathered from basic requests (like an email provider scanning email headers, a phone app developer screening spam calls/numbers, a password manager storing domains of your accounts, and so on). More can be sent along with basic requests. And there is much more data/telemetry engineers could do if the number of users interfering with their methods became statistically significant.
I don't mean to fearmonger. I believe that most telemetry gathered is harmless to any particular user and is just used by data scientists and MBAs trying to see trends they can exploit in their business strategy. Ads probably have a much larger impact on an individual (emotional and mental effects), and there is value to ad-blocking services like Adguard. Still, apps claiming to block tracking, fingerprinting, and telemetry seem to target a very naive audience.
I don't want to see ads. I will pay to not see ads. I earn well and can afford to spend a lot of money on making my life less bad/more good. Due to the way the world is, my phone is one of the most used items I own. I view ads as one of the biggest uncontrollable annoyances in my life. Yet I have no option to pay to not see ads.
In my humblest of opinions, those who accept ads are the ones without self respect. Please share what you think the problem is though.
Besides perhaps an Apple Music “ad”, I haven’t seen anything factual.
"… On Nov. 20, a pair of iOS developers known as Mysk discovered that Apple has a specific identifier (a “directory services identifier” or DSID) for every Apple iCloud account. …"
– as if Mysk discovered this. Not so.
DSID-related analysis was performed more than seven months earlier – by a group of five researchers, including four at the University of Oxford.
Konrad Kollnig, Anastasia Shuba, Max Van Kleek, Reuben Binns, and Nigel Shadbolt. 2022. Goodbye Tracking? Impact of iOS App Tracking Transparency and Privacy Labels. In 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 508–520. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533116
(Version 1 was submitted on 7th April 2022.)
I'm totally not surprised about this, although it will hurt their privacy USP (unique selling point).
Phrased another way: adding a few billions of advertising revenue wouldn’t make Apple an advertising company, just as selling smartphones hasn’t made Google a hardware company
Everyone has their own limits, but I left the ecosystem after Mojave (with this being one reason).
If anything, it is more analogous to my friend telling me about that vacuum cleaner he bought that he finds a great buy when I bring up the topic of vacuum cleaners. Surely, it is still an ad, but you get the difference.
If I got an advertisement for a new iPhone every time I woke up my current one, IMO ‘intrusive’ would be too kind a word to use, too.
I also think “related to the context” is debatable. Headphones aren’t only used to listen to music.
It is not true, simple as that
I use a mac and an iphone without apple music and never seen anything like that.
Being an ad company and respecting user privacy are completely at odds. The incentives are misaligned.
* bill boards and similar
* printed media ads
* ads that respond to keyword searches - without relying on any other user data
* display ads on topical websites (e.g. guitar ads on guitar related websites) - without relying on any other user data
Apple doesn't fit the pattern of any of your examples.
Because the whole article is based on this evidence and peoples’ desire to dog pile on apple.
And iirc they have stopped doing that with the browser also.
Ad companies generally don't. Data brokers will set user data, but advertisement based companies do not sell user data.
> does that make Google respect user privacy a lot better than other ad companies?
"better" is the operative word in that statement. Just because Google spies on me and is slightly less worse about how they use that data, does not mean that they respect my privacy.
I mean, I haven't audited their systems and haven't seen any reports from independent auditors, but at least they are making direct statements about privacy that the other ad networks aren't.
As an ad broker, you usually cannot. If you respect the users privacy, and another competing ad broker does not, then the competitor will make better ad placement decisions, get a higher click through rate, and give advertisers better ROI. Therefore, the ad broker that respects privacy will get less and less business and die.
The only way an ad broker can respect privacy is if they can prevent any other ad broker operating in the same marketplace. Ie. You need to be a monopoly in your niche.
Apple can do this by hobbling any other ad provider operating on iPhones or targeting iPhone user through their app store rules.
But not when Apple has themselves contributed, if not started the whole Ads, or Tracking is evil campaign.
They also have too much power, too much money, not enough competition and a deteriorating company culture.
But aside from their dominance, they also have a few gems, their bet on ARM is paying off big time.
Could you elaborate on this? Genuine question, because how Apple is so successful is a complete mystery to me.
I worked there during the pandemic and my experience was that there is no company culture, it's just a bunch of totally siloed small teams. Culture grows as a result of people speaking to each other, which I didn't really see happening.
Could be that I was in a particularly siloed part though.
I'd be curious as to how the iOS team would be independent of the hardware team or the app dev experience teams. I suspect your team experience was a corner case.
I was hoping it might be good considering the dev was paying for ads, it was not.
Regulation is too toothless to do anything about it so I think we'll naturally see all corporations evolve this way
Indeed. Look at anything you or anyone spends money on. It all comes down to controlling your environment. The environment that corporations inhabit is structured in such a way as to demand user attention and data exploitation in order to survive.
Also: Calling someone an ad company when approximately 1% of revenue seems to be generated by ads would seem quite a stretch.
Also: Being tracked while on someone’s property isn’t exactly the same as tracking someone across unrelated properties.
Also: Every company with a decent CRM system and culture has been tracking all kinds of (often personal) details about their (potential) customers gathered from their interactions and whatever sources they could get their hands on. This has been going on since before the Internet was widely used.
But while this blog post (attack ad?) doesn’t seem to have that much meaningful substance, it’s also kind of just doing the same to Apple as Apple often does to others.
There are several attributes here that match up exactly with other companies that are somehow vilified. The blog post is on point, the user have been in denial for a long time and will continue to be.
I’m all in favour of calling out Apple on their crap. But Apple’s evils aren’t the same as Google’s and Meta’s evils.
I just prefer my conversations and criticisms to be more nuanced, rather than brushing everyone with the same simplistic brush.
Also: Calling users to be in denial is a cheap attack. The reality is, that all of us users live in a world filled with nothing but imperfect choices. — So all we can do is pick our poison according to our personal priorities and preferences at any given time.
Do you consider Apple-made devices property of their buyers or do they forever remain property of Apple?
The original post talked about advertising on cloud properties, not devices. And that was the context of my post.
So I’m puzzled why you’d be moving the conversation to the topic of devices.
I don’t have an issue with criticism of the walled garden approach and that being a reason for many individuals to avoid the Apple ecosystem.
But I think that’s quite a different discussion than the business model of companies who make most of their revenue from ads and the tracking they do while one is visiting different properties all over the web.
Approximately 1% of revenue from ads doesn’t really make someone an ad company.
Again, I have no problem with critical comments about Apple (I have a lengthy list myself) - but advertising is not an equivalence between Apple and other truly advertising based companies.
However, I’m coming from a perspective to let history play out a little more before trying to predict the future too far out.
In addition, I find calling Apple an advertising company distracts from much more legitimate complaints about Apple.
And it whitewashes Google, Meta and their ilk.
Apple is far from perfect on privacy issues, but todate also nowhere near as horrific as the much more fully ad dependent companies.