Apple promises to stop ‘Data Auction’
By Ibidunni Banjoko
Apple, a leading technological company, has released a new campaign tagged, “Privacy on iPhone – Data Auction” to highlight its commitment to privacy on iPhones.
The new campaign has started running in 24 countries and will be translated in languages other than English in other select markets to reach a larger audience. The company will also place billboards in every country where the ad is running.
The ad basically highlights its ‘App Tracking Transparency’ feature that rolled out in April last year after much protest from Facebook’s Meta and ‘Mail Privacy Protection’. Both features aim (or rather claim) to reduce sharing of data like email, location, and advertising Identifier with miscellaneous apps. Meta, the parent company of most-used apps like Facebook and Instagram, heavily relies on user data to feed personalised ads. Interestingly, Google has also released a new video to highlight its security features on the android operating system.
The Apple ad titled, “Privacy on iPhone – Data Auction”, begins with a female user discovering her ‘private data’ is being auctioned at an auction venue, a euphemism for a smartphone in this case. We can see data such as location, contact, and email ID are being auctioned to multiple buyers, a parallel for multiple apps on your device. The auctioneer amusingly justifies this data selling process as not “creepy” but as “commerce”.
Apple released a white paper last year where it pointed out that the average mobile app has six embedded. The company noted, “Trackers are often embedded in third-party code that helps developers build their apps. By including trackers, developers also allow third parties to collect and link data you have shared with them across different apps and with other data that has been collected about you.”
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