<story><title>Apple&apos;s Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-23/apple-s-reinvention-as-a-services-company-starts-for-real-monday</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zmmmmm</author><text>One interesting question is how viable this can be if they continue their strategy of differentiation through privacy. Doing &amp;quot;services&amp;quot; for people intrinsically means knowing about them. What they watch, what they read, what they listen to, what they need, who they are. The more you know, the better you can &amp;quot;service&amp;quot; them. By pursuing this path they may quickly find themselves sucked into a slipperly slope that puts them into conflict with the primary identity they&amp;#x27;ve tried to build up. You can see it already starting:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; divide up the revenue between developers based on how much time users spend playing their games&lt;p&gt;So they&amp;#x27;re going to spy on their users, huh? Of course, it&amp;#x27;s perfectly innocent, but they will quickly find that with deeper metrics they can better model what games to fund, etc etc. And before you know it they&amp;#x27;ll have a tab in their account page just like Google with a list as long as your arm of all the things they know about you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blihp</author><text>Take the marketing pitch with a grain of salt.  They&amp;#x27;ve been keeping track of aggregate usage data pretty much from the beginning.  Also,  they already have to keep track of things like which apps&amp;#x2F;music&amp;#x2F;movies you have bought for accounting purposes at the very least.  For subscriptions they most likely also have to track consumption (i.e. per access data) for royalty&amp;#x2F;revenue share payments.&lt;p&gt;I remember a story from the tail end of the Jobs era when they were trying to get their ad network going that their sales force was using as a selling point to advertisers the fact that they had metrics such as how many minutes a day users spent using various apps etc.  They just don&amp;#x27;t share this data outside of Apple and also (according to their public statements) don&amp;#x27;t access the private data that you create.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple&apos;s Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-23/apple-s-reinvention-as-a-services-company-starts-for-real-monday</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zmmmmm</author><text>One interesting question is how viable this can be if they continue their strategy of differentiation through privacy. Doing &amp;quot;services&amp;quot; for people intrinsically means knowing about them. What they watch, what they read, what they listen to, what they need, who they are. The more you know, the better you can &amp;quot;service&amp;quot; them. By pursuing this path they may quickly find themselves sucked into a slipperly slope that puts them into conflict with the primary identity they&amp;#x27;ve tried to build up. You can see it already starting:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; divide up the revenue between developers based on how much time users spend playing their games&lt;p&gt;So they&amp;#x27;re going to spy on their users, huh? Of course, it&amp;#x27;s perfectly innocent, but they will quickly find that with deeper metrics they can better model what games to fund, etc etc. And before you know it they&amp;#x27;ll have a tab in their account page just like Google with a list as long as your arm of all the things they know about you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GeekyBear</author><text>Back when iAd was a thing, there were articles about how upset advertisers were that Apple&amp;#x27;s iAd wouldn&amp;#x27;t let them plug directly into an Apple customer&amp;#x27;s music and video store purchase history.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Apple has a lot of knowledge regarding its users,but what it doesn’t do with that data is share it with advertisers very freely. That makes Madison Avenue very mad.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;rather than offering a cookie-based ad-tracking and targeting mechanism, it essentially requires partners to tell it what kind of audience it needs to reach, and then trust that Apple will handle the rest, AdAge says. And it’s well worth noting that Apple prioritizes customer privacy here over a big potential upside in ad revenue.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;what it doesn’t do is hand over the keys to all that data and let advertisers plug into it directly with their own data-mining and targeting software. That’s not standard for the ad industry and that’s likely the reason a few Madison Avenue feathers are ruffled over their approach.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;techcrunch.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;18&amp;#x2F;advertisers-not-thrilled-with-apples-practice-of-protecting-its-users-data&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;techcrunch.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;18&amp;#x2F;advertisers-not-thrilled-w...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure why you think that Apple has had a change of heart since then, especially given their recent decision that these sort of privacy protecting policies provide Apple a competitive advantage.</text></comment>