You can be an ad company and respect your users privacy. They’re not mutually exclusive as the headline seems to suggest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And iirc they have stopped doing that with the browser also.
But not when Apple has themselves contributed, if not started the whole Ads, or Tracking is evil campaign.