Apple attacks data brokers in new ad campaign

Apple has launched a new ad campaign attacking data brokers and the vast amounts of personal information they collect and sell.

Data brokers collect information on people, gather it together and sell it on to companies including advertisers. The practice has been widely criticised in recent years, including in a celebrated Jon Oliver segment.

The marketing campaign is the latest in a range of combative ads put out by the company, which has in recent years taken on Facebook and others for the ways they collect information in users.

The ads seek to distance Apple from such practices, and highlight the ways that iPhones are built to minimise the amount of data that people are able to collect on the people using them.

It highlights tools such as App Tracking Transparency, a feature that requires apps to ask for explicit permission before tracking users’ activity across different websites. That was introduced in 2020 before being rolled out last year – and was immediately hit by criticism from companies such as Facebook, which argued that such data collection is key to their business.

It also points to the protection from features such as Mail Privacy Protection, which stops businesses seeing how often and when an email is opened; encryption in iMessage to keep the contents of messages safe; and more.

In the ad, a person is showing using those feature and others to make the data brokers that are collecting information disappear.

Apple has been criticising data brokers for some time. In April 2021, it published a white paper titled ‘A Day In The Life Of Your Data’, which aimed to show how personal information is collected and used, and included criticism of the industry.

“Over the past decade, a large and opaque industry has been amassing increasing amounts of personal data. A complex ecosystem of websites, apps, social media companies, data brokers, and ad tech firms track users online and offline, harvesting their personal data,” it wrote.

“This data is pieced together, shared, aggregated, and used in real-time auctions, fueling a $227 billion-a-year industry. This occurs everyday, as people go about their daily lives, often without their knowledge or permission.”