A company keeping records of it's own interactions with it's customers is fine, nobody is arguing against that.

The problem is companies selling customer data to each other and snooping on customer activity outside the company's own web site or app. This is what is meant by tracking and Apple doesn't do this in their ad service.

It seems like what Apple is doing is trying to cripple tracking for other ad services to make their own service more competitive.

>> ...snooping on customer activity outside the company's own web site or app. This is what is meant by tracking and Apple doesn't do this in their ad service.

I'm sure Apple is going to offer exactly that, as the conversion-rate data of an Ad into an actual purchase elsewhere is where the big Ad-money is. Apple will just do all that without handing off any data to another party, providing only the persona of an end-user to the Ad-customer.

Their dilemma is that doing this today at an "Apple-price" has limited competitive value to Advertisers. But if Apple cripples the competition to become the ONLY company able to provide such data, they suddenly become a mandatory supplier for every Ad-campaign in the world, as only Apple will be able to provide effective Ad-analytics on iOS.

>> It seems like what Apple is doing is trying to cripple tracking for other ad services to make their own service more competitive.

Exactly. Which should be a strong sign that regulation is urgently required, but somehow people still are stuck on the wrong narrative.

Legislation to ban tracking and respect customer privacy? Yes, absolutely. Discipline and integrity in this area should be the standard.

Even when that company is responsible for more than half of the mobile software installs in the US?

Amazon and Google have abused this data in the past to undercut the competition with their own better promoted offerings and make purchase decisions with data the competition just could not have access to.

Facebook doesnt sell data they sell access to demographics generated based on data.

First that's like saying a bar that gives away drinks with every bag of peanuts isn't selling alcohol. The fact that ad was only shown to a specific demographic reveals that the person clicking it is in that demographic.

But second, sure they didn't sell it, they gave it away. Facebook claims the data delivered to Cambridge Analytica wasn't sold. No, it was given away because facebook calculates that it benefits from research which improves targeting on their platform. Nobody is fooled by any of this, unless they choose to be.

> reveals that the person clicking it is in that demographic.

But you don't know who that person is [ until they create an account or give you info ]

That's how you end up with a single megacorp that does everything.

> It seems like what Apple is doing is trying to cripple tracking for other ad services to make their own service more competitive.

This is exactly what they're doing to FB and i hope FB wins a maassive anti-competative suit. I hope they still don't get to track but i hope apple is given a slap on the wrist.

They should stop advertising, they created a conflict of interest for themselves. That said, they do not track across applications: they don’t need to.

Different ad services provide different levels of targeting, based on the data that different platforms collect about consumers and what those platforms are willing to let you use for targeting.

FWIW, iAd for third-party apps was shut down. They still sells adds for Apple News and the App Store.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd

Selling search ads on the App Store kinda sucks--I wish they hadn't done that.

What ad service? App Store ads? Those are based only on the actual search term.

No they aren’t. Here https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin... have a nice read.

But summary is they use a bunch of stuff about the device (past purchases, location, fingerprinting-like data such as carrier and so on) and your usage of a bunch of apps like apple news and stocks.

If you set brand image aside and just think about the huge amounts of money at stake, it becomes obvious that the whole app tracking transparency thing is just Apple taking over the ad market on iOS. They invented the term “cross app tracking” and defined it to not include their own conversion tracking through their various apps to purchases of their advertisers’ products via Apple Pay. Then they forced their ad-sales competitors to send all their conversion data to Apple, while providing separate APIs with richer data to their own advertisers.

Beside AppStore ads, how can I buy ads from Apple for the Apple ecosystem to replace Facebook ads?

Apple is also selling app install ads in the News and Stocks apps. Tens of billions of dollars are spent on app install ads on iOS each year, so this is a very lucrative market for Apple if they can corner it (and probably necessary if they are going to achieve expected Services revenue growth in the years to come). It remains to be seen whether they’ll take another crack at the rest of the ad market, after the failure of iAd. They seem to be laying the groundwork for it.