Except that Apple not only hasn't done that, but has created ad network APIs and processes to support "competitors".
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skadnetwo...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skadnetwo...
1. Apple - examples include Apple Arcade, AppleCare+, Fitness+
I was so shocked when I saw an ad in Settings I took a screenshot. It's dated December 8th, 2020. Prosecution of Apple for abuse should have started at least that long ago.
I think integration with a specific product is ok with branding and a link to their website. Like you'd have FitBit, Nike+, or whatever under a fitness tab in settings.
But it sounds closer to the banner ads on the bottom of the screen like a lot of free android apps do.
How do they display the ads?
It's not "ads" per se, but when you are eligible for a promotion such as free Apple TV+, Music, etc - there's an option all the way at the top that appears. You can open them and press "decline" and that particular promotion goes away.
Not great (especially considering the services are shit), but very tame compared to the advertising you usually see.
And, sure, it can be viewed as a privacy feature, and that's great. So what happens next year when Apple rolls out their own user-targetted ad system based on the same tracking data they disallowed to competitors?
It's a slippery slope for sure. Apple deserves the benefit of the doubt, but I don't see how anyone would look at this as good news.
All they have to do is offer a buying platform where you can track conversion on Apple devices and software better. In other words, they don't have to offer more user-level accuracy to the end buyer, they simply need to measure campaigns more accurately on iOS (a bit of a simplification but not much).
That alone will make their DSP a dominant player in the industry.
No trillion dollar corporation deserves the benefit of the doubt, including Apple.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/09/apple-a...
[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3646190/apple-is-sneak...
"Ask Apps not to Track" was about an advertiser you did not have a relationship with, building profiles across multiple organizations to profile you without any consent. So a policy was created where apps did have to prompt, and to make it a business requirement to work with Apple. If you track without explicit OS-gathered user consent, you can be kicked from the store. AFAIK, even if you do so via means like IP address correlation.
But the feature wasn't "privacy", it was "ask apps not to track". It is very clearly specified about whether you want multiple organizations to correlate you. It is not meant to be a policy to limit e.g. what the Meta learns about you while you are interacting within Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Clearly the iOS marketing of the past few years has led people to believe that Apple is opposed to advertising technologies that rely on persistently-stored and correlated user behavior, because that persistent store can be plausibly (and terribly) misused.
And remember that the misuse itself hasn't really happened anywhere. People like to complain about Facebook and Google's (also Amazon's, and TikTok is in this conversation now too) accumulation of this data, but so far the actual abuses haven't happened. Tech companies have been, on the whole, actually pretty good stewards of this stuff. But people hate that they have it anyway, and mistrust them.
And now Apple's going to do the same thing.