> Apple monitors your every move in the App Store and its News and Stocks apps and then uses that data to sell ads targeting you in those same apps. To meet its growth forecasts, experts expect Apple to start selling ads in its Maps, Podcast, and Books apps, meaning it could replicate this model across more of its services. Much more of your activity could be monitored in the future.

Tracking every click in the App Store/News/Stocks is not great but it is in NO WAY similar to tracking every website I view and reading every email I send.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Is there any evidence that Apple is lying, and is actually decrypting them and using them for advertising purposes, rather than for the "coherence" feature?

I don't actually want browsing sessions to be unified across devices, so I do wish that it was turned off by default. (Though being able to close tabs remotely is a sort of interesting capability.) However, it doesn't seem to be actual spyware used for advertising or tracking purposes.

And it’s not going to google first. If you type an address the “link” at the top is to Apple Maps. They seem to do a similar thing with place names. I’m not sure but one can be fairly certain they’re using the phones location to help….

Is it? How exactly are encrypted payloads to a secure, opaque and generic endpoint easy to distinguish?

For spotting it going to Apple you'd have to do more fancy correlation over time and such, but you can find people out there who are researching this stuff... so that's who I'm waiting for to hear more from.

This's on Gmail's homepage:

"We never use your Gmail content for any ads purposes. Gmail uses industry-leading encryption for all messages you receive and send. We never use your Gmail content to personalize ads."

On a different note I attended an apple event for IT Government and Education in Chicago. Eye opening.. Apple's "privacy" stance is all just a horse and pony show for marketing. Unbelievable how open they were about tracking everything at the event.

I'd not be surprised to learn there was some level of phoning home though.

Apple knows that I bought the app (they charged me for it).

In order to charge Clash of Clans for the conversion, my phone needs to connect to Apple and send them a record of the ad click. What if clicking on that ad and buying the app are the only thing I ever did on the phone? There’s nothing to aggregate locally, and Apple knows they got the conversion data from me.

Perhaps the claim is that my phone is going to send all these records to Apple, and Apple is just going to do the right thing and run programs that do the business without letting any of their people look at anything they aren’t supposed to look at (they could internally accomplish this by differential privacy, rigorous internal controls, etc). That’s the same claim Google and everyone else is going to make.

Even the ads can be anonymously downloaded using a shuffler/mixer, such that nobody knows which ads out of the universe of ads the device chose to target the user with.

The ad still has to come from a server, unless the phone downloads all possible ads the person might be interested in (which I doubt).

The transfer would at a minimum include the IP address of the phone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts

FLoC is definitely more anonymous than "davidlumley visited nytimes.com twice on December 1st 2022". However, that particular usage information was previously only available to nytimes.com, any ad/data vendor using third party tracking cookies that were present on nytimes.com at the time of my visit, and finally any company that purchased data from the ad/data vendor.

My FLoC was theoretically available to any website and had much of the same intent data that intent ad/data vendors were/are selling.

If my understanding of Apple's ad platform is correct, advertisers don't know which cohort the user davidlumley belongs to, or that their ads are being served to me because that's all handled on device.

This is a distinction without a difference. Do you regularly share your phone with other people, to the extent that "device data" can not be correlated back to you?