Apple’s most recent ad has taken a strong stand against the tracking industry. Let’s say you were just shopping at a drug store and you were looking at sunscreen because you are thinking of going on vacation. You didn’t buy any, but as soon as you walked out of the store a complete stranger walks up to you and asks if you want to buy some sunscreen. This will cause any sane person to put their guard up and immediately say no and tell this stranger to leave them alone. Anyone would be very nervous and many would be willing to fight against this from happening. Well, this is exactly what is happening every time you go online in the tracking industry.
The recent ads that Apple has been running have portrayed things like this happening in a real-world setting. People shouting their private conversations across the office in which they work, a lady giving away her log-in information at a movie theater, and another lady at a dinner with guests explaining that she purchased prenatal vitamins and four pregnancy tests. These are a few of the examples Apple used illustrating how the tracking industry would work in a real-world setting. Apple made it very apparent that this is commonplace in the tracking industry and that this is happening to all of us every time we jump on the internet.
Apple is adding a new ad-tracking privacy protection feature in iOS 14 and this is causing a lot of panic in the tracking industry. This new feature will provide its users with a permission dialogue asking to allow or deny permission to have your online activity tracked by outside sources. The tracking industry is worried that users are going to overwhelmingly deny permission to be tracked and they should be worried. Apple has portrayed what the tracking industry looks like in a real-world setting and this should scare a lot of people. No sane person wants to be crept on and people need to think about online tracking as if it were the real world. Apple has made a big stance against online tracking and this is going to grab the attention of the majority of us. We need to be more careful about our online information and activity.
John Gruber comments:
This new ad from Apple touting iPhone privacy protection is good, and genuinely funny. But what makes it funny — the premise is a series of people loudly sharing in the real world the sort of information that gets unknowingly tracked online — is actually the perfect analogy to help explain how the tracking industry—what ought to be considered the privacy theft industry — has grown into existence.
Consider the new ad-tracking privacy protection feature in iOS 14. The tracking industry, led …
Read more at Daring Fireball Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy
