‘Apple ads don’t track you’ - that’s a very black-and-white statement. How is Apple defining that? 1/ https://twitter.com/gregjoz/status/1387127934633218049

This is Apple’s explanation. It seems to me that they define ‘tracking’ as something that isn’t tracking, and then proceed to describe all the ways that they, well, track you.

A more neutral description might be that Apple will track and analyse your behaviour and use it to target ads, but that advertisers will never see your data. Of course that would also describe some other big tech companies

There is a really interesting theological split between the idea it’s fine to track, analyse and target you on the computer in your pocket, but evil to track,analyse and target you on a computer in Mountain View.

Maybe the problem is that ‘privacy’ sounds like a very clear term, but it’s actually very hard to pin down precisely why particular things are good and other actually rather similar things are not…

Today a very earnest German told me that an ecommerce company shouldn’t be allowed to know your address. We are all working this out

Anyway, it would be fine for Apple to say its advertising is ‘more’ private, but to say that it doesn’t track you and then give three pages of all the ways that it tracks you suggests that Apple itself is profoundly confused about this stuff.

This is one of those irregular verbs. I personalise the ads; you track and target your users; they are violating people’s fundamental human rights