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I’m genuinely surprised it took this long for Apple to do this. Having a full contacts list has long been one of the most valuable pieces of information for ad targeting. It’s why you can not be on Facebook but they still know everything they need to know about you because enough of your contacts are on their platforms.

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Why surprised? Because of a belief that Apple care about your privacy?

Judge them by what they do, not say

Surprised because Apple is the company that made this sort of permission request so granular. Contacts contain some of the most permanent and “graph-building” data you can imagine, but they let this through for 17 years.

One possible reason they didn't address it sooner was Apple was receiving a cut of google's ad revenue on iPhone that had grown to 36% share, until Google's own antitrust case deemed the arrangement illegal earlier this year. The more data available to Google the more effective their advertising. /conspiracy

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