Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

>Apple in fact uses and sells your data for the same purposes it is "protecting you" from when other developers do it.

I don’t believe this is true, can you cite a source? The recent buzz about ‘targeted ads’ was actually about adds on their own App Store, no third party data sharing or sale was involved, so I believe you are mistaken.

View on HN

By that definition, Google doesn't share your data either. But they do, by monetizing it in the form of targeted ads. Both Apple and Google try to gussy it up with 'anonymous' labels, but the business of tracking and monetizing your habits is shared by both.

It’s still not the same as selling your data to third parties, with all the many very considerable additional privacy and accountability problems that entails. It’s also not using your data to provision ads on third party sites and apps. I’ve seen people claim Apple does both of those things here before, and the fact is they don’t.

What they are just starting to do is no different from Amazon using your past purchases to place ads on their own site. I have no problem with that either.

If your going to criticise them and think what they are doing is wrong, fine. That’s fair, but could people at least get what they're complaining about factually correct.

Apple has an ad network, which has special privileges on iOS. Are you saying they don't provision ads on their ad network based on all the special access they have? They'd be kind of crazy not to, they've secured themselves a very valuable information monopoly here, and it's pretty obvious why...

They don’t have an ad network in any meaningful sense, because there’s no distribution network for their ads. The ad targeting everyone is talking about is only for ads for apps on the App Store. Not in third party apps or web sites and such. That’s why I compared it to Amazon targeting ads in their own store.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com