Too often, information is collected about you on an app or website owned by one company and combined with information collected separately by other companies for targeted advertisements and advertising measurement. Sometimes your data is even aggregated and resold by data brokers, which are third parties you neither know nor interact with.
Advertising that respects privacy is not only possible, it was the standard until the growth of the Internet. Some companies that would prefer ATT is never implemented have said that this policy uniquely burdens small businesses by restricting advertising options, but in fact, the current data arms race primarily benefits big businesses with big data sets. Privacy-focused ad networks were the universal standard in advertising before the practice of unfettered data collection began over the last decade or so.
By contrast, Facebook and others have a very different approach to targeting. Not only do they allow the grouping of users into smaller segments, they use detailed data about online browsing activity to target ads. Facebook executives have made clear their intent is to collect as much data as possible across both first and third party products to develop and monetize detailed profiles of their users, and this disregard for user privacy continues to expand to include more of their products.
Apple is being accused of monitoring and tracking people's private data from their personal computers without their customers' knowledge through its latest update to macOS - and today's letter is a distraction from that. They have a history of this. The same happened when it was revealed that Apple had violated people's privacy and allowed millions of people's private audio to be accessed without their knowledge through a vulnerability in FaceTime. In that instance, they enforced against our internal business apps to change the topic. Sadly, we're not perfect and it worked.The truth is Apple has expanded its business into advertising and through its upcoming iOS14 changes is trying to move the free internet into paid apps and services where they profit. As a result, they are using their dominant market position to self-preference their own data collection while making it nearly impossible for their competitors to use the same data. They claim it's about privacy, but it's about profit. Don't take our word for it. Small business advocates are speaking up about the crushing effect this will have on small business's personalized advertising. As the Executive Vice President for Policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau said today, 'Don't be fooled: the ad industry is still in a bind & Apple's chokehold on small business is still real...Sadly, for consumers & businesses, it'll change the rules of the game in its favor.' Indeed, we are not fooled. This is all part of a transformation of Apple's business away from innovative hardware products to data-driven software and media.
We introduced intelligent tracking prevention, several years ago, and at the time, parts of the ad industry were saying that the sky was going to be falling in and that their business was going to be destroyed by the fact that they couldn't track everyone from website to website to website. Well, in fact, if you look at what happened to the industry, that didn't happen at all, and yet we also protected user privacy.
If we sell cars without airbags, and we decided to put airbags in our cars before someone else did, and customers want to buy those, I think it's great that we've provided that that choice. We're not waiting for someone to require we do it, we're making that part of what it means to use our platform.
Dit digitale stalken zou bij wet verboden moeten zijn.
Maar in afwachting van een dergelijke wet (als die er ooit komt, wat om verschillende redenen zeer te betwijfelen valt), zou het heel fijn zijn als Apple de gebruiker van een iPhone de mogelijkheid gaf dit stalken onmogelijk te maken. En die stap heeft Apple nog niet gezet. Pas als het zover komt, zal ik beginnen te geloven dat Apple's inzet voor privacy meer is dan een geraffineerd marketingverhaal.