Reframed: "iOS 17 arbitrarily modifies links you click on".
My genuine opinion:
All advertising is evil, with one singular exception: Shoe ads for shoes inside your own shoe store.
All tracking is evil, with one exception: a simple integer counter that counts how many people enter your store. And, no, I don’t mean an integer for every possible metric, justifying it by claiming each particular metric is like a unique store counter.
Everything else, and I do mean everything, is your responsibility to count on the back end. “I put out 7 shoes and only sold 1. Try something else.”
Anything more than this is simply greed and laziness.
I prefer advertisements because they can be obvious and labeled as such. Apple's changes here are moves by one advertising company (Apple) to control the flow of other advertising companies' information. It's a monopolistic move that gives them an unfair advantage in advertising, just like their SKAN solution did in mobile, leading to a huge increase in advertising revenue for Apple.
Consumer's are told by Apple that this is to 'protect their privacy' when in fact, it does not protect privacy. This is a targeted move by Apple to consolidate their position in the advertising ecosystem.
If a user chooses to do this, more power to them. If my OS does this by default, it's an insane invasion of my use.