That is an argument Apple could put forward as to why they ban advertisers from their platform…
Nobody is trying to ban advertisers. They are trying to prevent advertisers from stalking users across the internet.
If an advertiser wants to pay a website to paste up a rotating set of images, or to analyze the site content or the content of a page for context-aware ads, thats great.
If they want to have the blender you glanced at follow you across the internet for days, thats just not going to work anymore.
…but people need to stop and think that data collection for the purposes of helping a company to improve it's products is very legitimate.
Nobody is saying a company can't collect data on their site to improve their products.
But you aren't going to be able to collect data _across the internet_ as easily.
Note that Apple does provide click attribution systems for both web and native app usage. This allows engagement with advertising that converts to a purchase or download to be attributed back, including allowing for things like A/B testing of advertising promotions. This is done through proxies/on a time delay so that it gives you statistics across the user base, rather than behavioral information for individual users.
Unfortunately, Facebook's advertising model relies on being able to engage with people on Facebook and then follow them across the internet to build an individual profile, and then compare everyone's profiles to one another. Stalking people is their core business model.
For example, Heinz releases a new product and thus they want to know how that product is recieved by the buying public so they hire an advertising company to get their product out their and too see how it is doing. Heinz will want to know if people clicked on the ad or did they even scroll down a page to look at the ad or did the person move their mouse of the ad but decided not to click on it.
Most of this is possible with API Apple provides. However, the use case is backward. You don't check advertising to see how a product is being received. You advertise to influence how a product is received.
People don't say "oh hey its that new grape-flavored ketchup I bought last week. I was shocked it was even edible, but it turned out to be delicious! I should click on these ads to let them know I liked it"
Generally your ability to capture non-engagement is going to be limited. The behavior you defined, with third parties monitoring scrolling behavior or mouse hover also happens to be really creepy.
This thing is, all of this is legitimate and the courts and the law see's this practice at legitimate BUT and here is the but, where this all falls down is in how much information does Heinz want to know about the people clicking or not clicking on it's ad's.
First, many of these practices are not even being performed legally. IAB for instance just got slapped for GDPR violations.
Second, there is _zero_ legal mandate that a company's business model be viable or successful. Apple has no requirement to protect advertiser's business model - except where they would fall foul to things like antitrust. Luckily, Apple is not competing with advertising companies.
Us the public say only very very small amounts of our data should be made available to Heniz but Heinz would then come back and say well we need to know the devices people used because that would give us an idea of the type of person viewing our ad, are they using mobile devices, which tends to be the young generation or are they using laptops or desktops which tends to be the older generation. Then Heniz will say we need to know the Geo location of where that person is because that would could tells us the demographic of who is likely to purchase our product. If it shows that thousands more people in Spain are viewing the product than those in Mexico Heinz will want to know why.
There are ways to gather some of this information without being shady. But they have zero _right_ to this data.
Again, Apple isn't trying to stop advertising-driven models, but just to prevent privacy-violating practices. So for example, telling you have a particular piece of hardware or particular Safari version is likely being restricted in the future. iCloud Private Relay means you no longer can track people by their home IP address, and instead only get a rough view such as what city they are coming from.
Instead of allowing advertisers to do what they want, there needs to be a world wide watchdog who's job it is to make sure advertisers only get the minimum amount of information required to be able to do their job. Until that day happens there will always be calls for tracking to be disabled because past actions by advertisers and companies have proven they cannot be trusted.
Yeah not likely to ever happen. The browser makers are instead serving that role.
Examples such as the attribution API I mentioned above are new technologies Apple developed based on what advertisers needed, rather than what they wanted.
Apple recognizes that a good portion of the sites on the internet is paid for through advertising revenue, and they want that to remain viable. But they have drawn a hard line at tracking individual users across sites.
