Apple wants to clean up digital advertising (and maybe get back into the industry)
Chief executive Tim Cook is positioning Apple as the face of "responsible tech."
After taking some verbal shots at Facebook, Apple on Monday announced its first major step toward ending the pervasive surveillance culture of the internet. Apple is updating its software to block Facebook's like and share buttons, which enable the social media company to track people across the internet, according to NBCNews reporter Alyssa Newcomb.
Cook explained that it's reasonable for consumers to assume that an app or website knows some info about them but that all the data collection and ad targeting that goes on behind the scenes is questionable at best.
"We think that when a person leaves one web site, and goes to another and another and another, they do not have a reasonable expectation that that original website is still following their every move," Cook said during an interview with NPR. "And so we want to do what we can do there to try to prevent that."
"It's the crafting of a detailed profile and tracking you in places were you don't reasonably expect to be tracked, and companies gathering information well beyond what you would have voluntarily shared if you knew what they were doing - that's what we have a problem with," Cook told NPR.
That doesn't mean Cook is against digital advertising.
Apple is looking at ways to create a new kind of ad network business. It has held talks with Snap and Pinterest about it, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Apple's last foray into the ad business, iAds, was unpopular and ended in 2016 because advertisers found it was expensive and didn't offer marketers enough data. That Apple is revisiting the idea is intriguing.
Separately, Cook told NPR that it denied Apple had ever requested or received Facebook user data, as suggested in a New York Times article.