Meta is collecting data from people using its products to create targeting-models for advertisement. An Advertiser can then buy ads targeting a specific audience. Companies really want the individual user-information to cut out Meta, but Meta is not sharing it to the advertiser, they have to go through Meta to reach their audience based on Personas they curate.
Now Apple owns the underlying Hardware and tracks usage of every single application and service on top.
How exactly is Apple expected to operate their advertising business if NOT with the very same method as Meta/Google (creating personas, selling them for ads)?
Google, literally, buys a copy of everyone's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on your bank account and not just your online activities.
Glossy Magazines sell Ads to people interested in those glossy magazines. The Magazine-content defines its target-group. This doesn't work for platform-based advertising, the platform needs to offer ways to select the target-group to address.
Google purchased transaction data to connect online behavior to the real world and refine their Persona profile. Apple doesn't need to do this, because they already collect data from their users' behavior in the real world via their Apple Pay / Apple Card purchases.
In 2017 Google didn't know whether you actually have money to buy a new TV, they only saw that you kept looking at TVs online. So they thought it's a good idea to buy this data to refine their Ad Personas.
In 2023, Apple already owns sufficient data to know if you can afford a TV or not. They curate your persona from your Apple ID and your Apple Pay transactions and even know whether you went to BestBuy recently.
Putting you in a matching advertising cluster for that isn't a legal privacy violation, your private data will never be shared with anyone. Just like Google and Meta don't share your private data with anyone.
I don't like any of those practices, but let's not buy into the illusion that Apple is doing anything different to Meta/Google. They all create and refine Personas to allow targeted marketing, and protect the underlying data to be the gatekeeper.
> Glossy Magazines sell Ads to people interested in those glossy magazines.
It's entirely possible to sell ads based on the content of a web page, just like it's possible to sell ads based on the content of a magazine.
It's just not as profitable as relentlessly spying on everyone.
> Google purchased transaction data to connect online behavior to the real world and refine their Persona profile
Google already has more than enough data on it's customers through their search history. They don't need to relentlessly spy on every aspect of your life, including your bank account, to turn a profit.
> It's entirely possible to sell ads based on the content of a web page.
Yes. But at some point i.e. Bentley wants to spend its Marketing money only on people likely to buy a Bentley. If Bentley shops for ads tomorrow, they can select Personas like "Age 40-60", "owns a car" and many others from Meta as well as Google as well as Apple. Those are the "ads relevant to you" Apple talks about in their T&C.
Again, I don't like it either, but let's not buy into the illusion that Apple is not entering this exact same industry to sell their customers' attention to the highest bidder.
> Google already has more than enough data on it's customers
And so does Apple. Time to start a lucrative ads business.
Yes, for some reason you're pushing the straw man argument that relentlessly spying on everyone, even people who are not your customer at all, is the same thing as having a first party business relationship with your own customer.
I'm asking how the persona creation of Google/Meta for selling ads is any different to Apple doing the very same thing, and if those actions when done by one party qualify as "spying", what are the same actions done by Apple then.
You avoided clarifying your view on Apple's actions for hours and instead kept arguing how Google/Meta's action are clearly espionage.
Now you inadvertently clarified that Apple is free to do all of the same that Google/Meta are doing because when Apple is doing it it is a first-party "business relationship". When Google/Meta is doing it, it is somehow never a first-party relationship but always an outside actor spying on people who don't use their products. Despite both parties doing this to refine the persona's they have of their platform users.
You keep circling around a "good company is good, bad company is bad" narrative.
You condemn the collection of data for the purpose of targeted advertising, because that's "spying".
You don't care if Apple is also doing advertising, because it's the collection of data which is problematic.
I just asked how Apple is expected to sell targeted ads any differently than collecting their users' data (to create personas for ads), and you keep reframing it to reply how others are "bad companies" because they collect userdata. This is the straw man argument you keep creating.
You made it very clear that there is no answer. To you Apple is simply different because they are a "good company".
I've given many examples of the difference between a first party business relationship and the sorts of worldwide spying that Facebook and Google have been engaging in.
>How is a first party business relationship with your own customer different than buying a copy of people's credit card transaction data, spying on receipts emailed by other businesses, turning on location tracking by default, paying children to give root access to their device (Onavo), setting up user tracking on a huge swath of websites (Google Analytics, Facebook Like Button), and the other sorts relentless spying tactics that we have seen from companies with a surveillance capitalism business model?
As I've pointed out previously, this isn't the same thing as Amazon having a record of things I've purchased from Amazon.
>I didn't even attempt to convince you
You haven't convinced anyone of your favorite straw man.
> Advertising has been profitable without spying for many, many decades.
So was the horse drawn carriage. Where is that industry now?
George Orwell could not have conceived a time where everyone was voluntarily carrying an electronic billboard in their pocket. But we are in that world, and that world no longer has room for the Mad Men/Ogilvy/Chiat Day era of ad agencies creating one-size fits all campaigns. Google and Facebook took them out over the past 15 years.
It's not the advertising part that is problematic. It's the part where you relentlessly spy on everyone to make selling ads more profitable.