Facebook is impacted by third-party tracking - such capturing information and generating profiles for people, even those without Facebook accounts. They would do this via Facebook javascript and Facebook native app SDKs.
Apple's solution was App Tracking Transparency - a user consent on whether to provide a handy identifier to use for correlation across apps, and App Store rules which ban tracking using other mechanisms (such as IP address correlation).
For apps outside the store (e.g. web apps), the privacy proxy stuff and third-party state isolation/blocking are used to greatly reduce such correlation.
For first-party data collection, storage and sharing, there are consents for sharing information from the device (location, contacts, health information, and so on). There is also a privacy label (which App Store rules require to be accurate) on what data collected by an app used, for what purpose, and whether that use is linked to you or anonymized.
So a post office app that read the letters and stored the text would say that 'user content' was captured, and whether or not it was 'linked to you'.
Apple is playing dirty. Less dirty than Facebook, but that’s not a high bar.
That would be nearly 40% of users who are not hitting the 'Allow' button on the consent pop-over.
It's not privacy if only Apple has it, it's privacy if even Apple hasn't it
It remains an open question whether Apple itself is subject to those rules, though. If a user, via a third party app, takes an action Apple can identify, is Apple allowed to use that information to sell you ads? As of right now, it seems that they're leaning to "yes".
They haven't crossed any rivers yet, but the signs are there and we should all be worried.
The solution which will likely emerge is one of local profiling, both for native applications and at the web platform level. Advertisers and agencies will not gather user profile information, even in aggregate. Instead the profile will be something managed (or reset, or disabled) on-device/in-browser, and used to drive ad selection locally.
For example, the App Store interface might give you a set of recommendations for apps when launched, perhaps based on location information. This can be driven by downloads in your area, as well as purchased advertisements. But there's no reason that exact location needs to be shared at all - a set of coarser regional files containing the needed data can be grabbed, and the decision of what to display can be made locally.
That sounds nice indeed, but it would be a lot nicer if we got a statement to that effect from Apple Computer instead of dwaite on HN.
But that's not privacy at all. Any additional confidant besides the sender and the recipient is a breach of privacy.
You wouldn't let it count as respecting privacy either if the post office read all your letters and stored the texts.