Comment by radlad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by radlad | Hacker News Reader

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> We don’t know that. We know that they put ads in the App Store, that’s it. I wish they did not, because it made the store even more of an unusable mess, but it really is not even in the same league as Google and Facebooks, systematic surveillance.

They also put ads in Maps, Stocks, and News, and they "started asking people last year if they wanted to enable personalized ads on these apps."[0]

> This sounds truthy, but is there any evidence of this? Apple is famously the company that tells rent seekers after more ROI above all to fuck off (both Jobs and Cook).

"Inside the ads group, Teresi has talked up expanding the business significantly. It’s generating about $4 billion in revenue annually, and he wants to increase that to the double digits. That means Apple needs to crank up its efforts. "[0]

Plus the advertise iCloud in the Settings app with a red badge, which is just annoying.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2022/08/15/appl...

> "Inside the ads group, Teresi has talked up expanding the business significantly. It’s generating about $4 billion in revenue annually, and he wants to increase that to the double digits. That means Apple needs to crank up its efforts. "[0]

This doesn't mean they need to do it with targeting/data mining. I swear all the data mining does is show me ads for stuff I just purchased 3 days ago, and that's with google-level surveillance.

I don't like the idea that we discuss this as a law of nature.

I am an iPhone user since three years ago but if at some point I get a better deal elsewhere, I'm off.

And with Apple I pay extra for premium, and there is only so many ads[1] one can shove in before the premium feel is gone.

As for the targeted ads, I share your feeling that the targeting is badly over hyped, except you are lucky compared to me:

Ads for products I bought 3 days ago would be wildly relevant compared to most of the ads I can remember from Google. It was almost always scammy-looking dating sites. For a decade. Don't know what I did wrong but it seems there was a fluke with my account. Or they just god more money from scammy-looking dating sites than from anyone else.

Oh, and when it wasn't ads for scammy-looking dating sites it was pay-to-win games, and based on the ads you could be forgiven for thinking they were made by the same folks.

[1]: I'm no hardliner here: contrary to many on HN I actually see value in some ads and think I have sometimes made better purchases/been reminded to do things I wanted to do anyway.

> It was almost always scammy-looking dating sites. For a decade.

Every time people tell me that AI is great, I remind them that the most frequent ads I see are: 'Goth Muslim hookups' and 'automatic chicken coop door'.

It unfortunately seems to work if you don't go out of your way to block all trackers everywhere and never sign up for anything. I don't personally get any ads I would ever give a crap about, but my wife has been complaining like crazy and constantly blowing up our family plan with data overages since I started ad-blocking at the DNS level because she's constantly being served ads for stuff she actually wants and tries to click on it only to get blocked by my DNS server when it tries to go through a known tracker redirect to grab conversion stats for their campaign or whatever, and then she switches from WiFi to data in order to use the ISP's DNS instead.

They either have to do way more ads, or way more targeted ads. Would you prefer an endless stream of low-relevance ads, or a few high-relevance ones that required massive amounts of data mining to produce?

Definitely the former. Also the actual difference between "endless" and "few" is like 3 (by price)?

If all this additional surveillance, sorry "targeting", is that worthless why should we even consider allowing it?

Curious. I use maps all the time. What ads are in there? Or is this a US only feature?

(I don’t use stocks and news isn’t available outside the US, or atleast Singapore/Taiwan.)

No ads yet, but they say they're planning it. If we all complain loud enough maybe they'll change their mind, like they did here with encryption.

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/08/15/apple-could-bring-ads-t...

Become the screeching minority you always knew you could be (;

For a maps app I'd imagine it'll be more a case of businesses will be able to 'boost' themselves to people in the area. Slapping big banner ads across a maps app isnt going to generate much ROI given most people will be using it in carplay mode.

I'm not sure that there are any ads right now, I guess Apple will plan to expand their business by adding more ads in the near future.

Best to just be cautiously optimistic I suppose. It’s not like there’s much choice.

for real though, people are such apple fans, even if they charge $500 a month there are people who'd still pay

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