Targeted Ads

You probably don’t think “advertising” when you hear the name Apple in the same way you do for Instagram, Facebook, or Google, but that may change in the future. After kneecapping other tech companies that make their money on ads, Apple quietly started building out its own advertising network. The company has slipped more ads into the App Store, wants to bring ads to Apple TV, and is reportedly working to poach ad tech engineers from other companies.

Guess what’s fueling all of those ads? Your personal data. Apple doesn’t do a ton of targeted advertising so far, but you see it in the App Store, and there are a lot of indications that more is on the way.

For its targeted advertising system, Apple uses your name, location, address, age, gender, the other ads you’ve seen, the products and services you use, things you search for in Apple apps and more. It uses all of that data to assign you into different advertising audience segments. The company also uses that data to provide advertisers with aggregated reports about how well their campaigns are working.

Apple’s ad system is slightly more private than a lot of other companies’ advertising platforms, and it promises not to share personally identifiable information with third parties. But don’t think for a second that your data isn’t getting sent back to Apple’s servers.

According to Apple, what it’s doing doesn’t count as “tracking” because Apple only collects data about what people do the company’s own products. Whatever you say, Cupertino.