This clearly shows that what NORMAL People think Apple does, based upon what Tim "Carefully" says, and The reality of what Apple does, based upon their official statement.
Are indeed two VERY different things.
It almost always is two different things. One of the pieces of corporate "DNA" that Jobs instilled in Apple (and Cook) is a constant use of misdirection and word crafting, to make people think they claimed something that they really did not. And it works astonishingly well.
First: I agree that neither Apple nor Google directly sells your information.
Correct.
But Google does sell indirect access to everything it has collected about you by targeting ads to you based upon that knowledge. And, through the magic of cookies, that info may well leak to the advertiser even though there is no direct disclosure.
Apple does not base its advertising (as far as I can tell) on any personally-identifiable information such as your search history or email. Please correct me, with links if possible, if this is not correct but I believe that it is.
Apple bases its advertising on our
location, demographics, media interests, and media/app purchase history. Anything that's in common can be used to come up a personal match.
Of course, advertisers used to use our personal Apple advertising identifier to easily match us up, so Apple added that semi-bogus "Disable Ad Tracking" button. However, it simply sets a flag to tell the app developer that he shouldn't use that identifier to track us. It does not create a hard stop, though, as the identifier is still quite visible. Most people don't know this.
Not that it matters anyway. When the id was disabled, advertisers starting building a iOS MAC address id table a few years ago. If you use the same device with multiple apps, you're nailed.
As for email,
AI recently reported that... to help boost iAd sales... Apple has offered "
a new (iAds) initiative that will enable third-party ad providers to help advertisers target specific consumers "by matching phone number, emails and other data," ... The system is similar to Facebook's ad targeting practices, which matches data from ad providers with anonymized user information and other helpful metrics."
Second: selling ads is not Apple's primary business. ...
Doesn't matter. It shows a willingness to use their customer's information to sell ad space, just as Google does.
Apple likes to claim that their customers are not their product, but that's demonstrably false, because they advertise iAds as being a gateway to their customers. Heck, Apple originally wanted a minimum of a million dollars ad purchase, based solely on the supposed quality of their target audience. You can't get a better example of a customer being a product.
Or maybe you can, as iAds is just the tip of the Apple information iceberg. Apple also hides behind indirect info sales to make money off their customers:
For years, Apple accepted over a billion dollars a year from Google just to let it be a default iOS search engine. Google collected data while Apple profited from it. Apple points at Google as being evil, while getting a kickback. That's customer pimping at its finest.
Apple Pay is the most recent example. They get a fee in large part to keep purchase data flowing freely to the banks. (Plus, the Apple Pay contract
requires the banks to kick info back to Apple, such as where most purchases are made.) Thus Apple can publicly claim that they get no info DIRECTLY from the purchase, but they carefully avoid mentioning that Apple Pay is being used to collect more money and data for both the banks and Apple.
