Spend a few minutes browsing Apple’s privacy pages. Privacy is a big issue and Apple has clearly made protecting user privacy a primary design pillar in its products. That’s great for consumers, but privacy also offers a significant competitive advantage against competitors like Google and Facebook.
As an example, take a look at this excerpt from the Privacy Built In page:
Some companies mine your email for personal information to serve you targeted ads. We don’t. To protect your privacy even more, all traffic between any email application and our iCloud mail servers is encrypted. We’ve also updated our mail servers to support encryption in transit with other email providers that also support it.
From Seeking Alpha (free reg wall):
Apple takes pains to highlight how its business does not depend on datamining its users because it sells no advertising.
What if Facebook and Google adopted similar policies with regard to datamining their users? What happens to the value of their advertising business model if the data used to target those ads is no longer captured?
Companies like Google and Facebook have built their business models on mining user data. They can’t simply pivot away from this dependence to follow Apple’s lead.
Protecting user privacy is good for consumers and offers Apple a strong competitive advantage.
What then, about iAd?
This is one that surprised me:
That’s some serious extra work they’ve put in just to separate out journey information.
As far as I’m aware information available to iAd customers is almost non-existent. I believe they can ask Apple for their ads to be targeted in a highly generic way but they never get access to any user information and users can opt out of “interest based” advertising altogether by just changing one switch to “On”.
“What if Facebook and Google adopted similar policies with regard to datamining their users? What happens to the value of their advertising business model if the data used to target those ads is no longer captured?”
SRSLY? That’s like asking, what if GM adopted a policy of not selling cars?
What about it? It’s generic, the same kind of advertising you’d get from watching a TV show or opening a newspaper. It’s just more interactive than either of those two.
Are you seriously suggesting apple has built its business around iAd? is that what you’re seriously suggesting?