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> Have you heard of MobileMe? MobileMe is paid up front, and not ad supported. There is no collection of private data for the purposes of targeting ads, and y

by ynniv 17y ago

> Have you heard of MobileMe? MobileMe is paid up front, and not ad supported. There is no collection of private data for the purposes of targeting ads, and your actions are not correlated to your search history, or any website that uses AdSense or DoubleClick. Your email may be on their servers, but it is not connected to a tangled net of tracking information that follows you everywhere that you go. Maybe Apple could add these things, but their business model has been for the customer to pay for their service up front, not for them to find creative ways to monetize any personal information they might have. They did recently purchase Quattro Wireless for mobile advertising, but they say this is to provide a framework for iPhone developers to include ads in their apps. It's probably a competitive play to get developers to not use Google ads.

cookiecaper 17y ago
MobileMe still gives them a pretty extensive network of information about you ... all of your emails, contacts, etc. Google might track more, but you have no evidence to support a postulation that we should fear for its evilness. I agree that we should try to break the monopolies where Google has them, but they've been friendly heretofore. And MobileMe isn't Apple's only source, it's just the most directly analogous to Google's data, but as pointed out above, all of Apple's offerings are closed-source and at least on the iPhone you have no idea how often Apple is pinging your phone or what data they're sending back. They have plenty of opportunity to gather even _more_ data than Google. I don't think the "paid up front" thing matters very much, either. I would be surprised if Apple wasn't after the same kind of profiling that Google performs insofar as it has adequate data on a group of users. The same information that advertisers want (that Google automatically applies to their ads) so that they know what to sell you, Apple wants so that it knows what to sell you.
haberman 17y ago
Sort of how you "pay up front" for newspapers and cable TV, and therefore don't see any ads? Oh wait. No, it must be how you "pay up front" for printers, and therefore the manufacturer isn't trying to make money off you on the ink. Oh wait. "Paying up front" is no guarantee that the company isn't still trying to make money off you after the fact. Do you know that your MobileMe isn't connected to your iTunes search history, the songs you've bought, the sites you visit on your iPhone, the apps you search for and buy on the app store, etc?

by ynniv 17y ago

cookiecaper 17y ago

MobileMe still gives them a pretty extensive network of information about you ... all of your emails, contacts, etc. Google might track more, but you have no evidence to support a postulation that we should fear for its evilness. I agree that we should try to break the monopolies where Google has them, but they've been friendly heretofore. And MobileMe isn't Apple's only source, it's just the most directly analogous to Google's data, but as pointed out above, all of Apple's offerings are closed-source and at least on the iPhone you have no idea how often Apple is pinging your phone or what data they're sending back. They have plenty of opportunity to gather even _more_ data than Google. I don't think the "paid up front" thing matters very much, either. I would be surprised if Apple wasn't after the same kind of profiling that Google performs insofar as it has adequate data on a group of users. The same information that advertisers want (that Google automatically applies to their ads) so that they know what to sell you, Apple wants so that it knows what to sell you.

haberman 17y ago

Sort of how you "pay up front" for newspapers and cable TV, and therefore don't see any ads? Oh wait. No, it must be how you "pay up front" for printers, and therefore the manufacturer isn't trying to make money off you on the ink. Oh wait. "Paying up front" is no guarantee that the company isn't still trying to make money off you after the fact. Do you know that your MobileMe isn't connected to your iTunes search history, the songs you've bought, the sites you visit on your iPhone, the apps you search for and buy on the app store, etc?