Apple has made all kinds of hay portraying Google as the evil one for :spying on you” but I have always maintained the Apple is also doing the same thing. I actually give Google hte win here Google is at least upfront about it. Apple however is not. consider the following article excerpt:
For a company whose CEO has repeatedly asserted that it is not interested in selling its customer data to advertisers, Apple sure is putting a lot of effort into developing new products that sell customer data to advertisers.
In a patent application filed today, Apple proposes a new e-commerce system that uses a mobile phone to deliver targeted ads to users based on what they can actually afford. This new patent comes on the heels of another recent in-development project for creating and tracking ads — and the Apple users who look at them — based on social media content that goes viral.
Apple describes its new ad format as having one key improvement over regular mobile advertising:
An advantage of such targeted advertising is that only advertisements for goods and services which particular users can afford, are delivered to these users.
Broken down simply, the system sits on your phone, tracks the status of your credit or debit cards, sees what the balance on them is, and then targets ads at you based on what you can actually afford. This is a genuinely innovative marketing idea, as ads today are currently targeted at you based on what advertisers would like you to buy — not what you’re actually able to buy.
I cannot wait to see how the Apple apologists spin this one…:)