Apple’s New iPhone SW Brings Big Changes
If you were using your phone and visited a web site when a message popped up that said something like “we want to sell your data to anyone we want and you get nothing for that – do we have your permission to do that?” – what would your answer be?
Well, if you are an iPhone user, that day is possibly today or at least as soon as your phone upgrades to iOS 14.5 .
Since Apple does not make most of their money from selling your data and Google, one of their biggest competitors makes 80% of their money by selling your data, this change is a double win. Apple can tell their customers how wonderful they are while, at the same time, they get to poke a sharp stick in the eye of one of their biggest competitors, Google.
Developers are now required to ask users via a pop-up if they can “track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites”. If you opt out, you will not see any fewer ads but the ads will be less targeted to you since they can’t share your data to figure out what items you were looking at on Amazon or what stories you were reading on Twitter.
The phone remembers your choices, but you can change your mind at any time.
While some data is useful to the average consumer, it is likely that data is data that the site collects itself. If you are using, for example, a fitness tracker, the app needs to know where you have been and when, but it does not need to sell that data to Amazon so that they can hawk running shoes to you. In general, that does not improve your experience of the fitness tracker’s web site, regardless of what they say.
Facebook, for one, rolled out prototype screens basically begging users to let them sell their data. We don’t know what the final screens will look like yet.
I suspect that many users initial reaction is going to be “HELL NO!!”. This is really a radical change in the United States and on a huge scale given the tens of millions of users who will get to have a small voice, finally.
Until today, in the U.S. users never had the ability to OPT-IN to data sharing – only a hard to use, hard to find, opaque and in some cases, fake, OPT-OUT capability. What a difference a day makes. While I have never been an Apple fan-boy, in this case, GO APPLE!!
It is fair that some businesses, likely mostly large ones, will have some negative impact. The small ones likely either don’t do targeted advertising or don’t make a lot of their sales as a result of that targeting. I don’t know about you, but I visit hundreds of web pages a day and if I were to click on one ad a week it would likely be by mistake.
Facebook says that by saying yes they won’t collect any more data than we already do now, it will just mean that we can show you different ads to ignore.
Companies will adapt. This is not the end of advertising. But it is the beginning of some well needed transparency.
Credit: CNN
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