‘It’s not creepy, it’s commerce!’ Apple releases new privacy ad, insists no tracking in own ad products

News 18 May 2022 - 3 min read

‘It’s not creepy, it’s commerce!’ Apple releases new privacy ad, insists no tracking in own ad products

By Sam Buckingham-Jones - Deputy Editor

A screenshot from Apple's new privacy ad, showing "Ellie's location data" up for grabs.

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Tags: Apple tracking digital advertising

Apple is pitching its suite of privacy services to consumers in a new ad showing a young woman discovering an auction of “digital treasure trove” of her private data. Apple’s own ad business in the App Store has grown dramatically over the past year, but the company insists it segments users in big groups and doesn’t use or sell data.

What you need to know:

Apple has stepped up its pitch to consumers on privacy, launching a new ad imagining a reallife user data auction.
The ad promotes two services, App Tracking Transparency and Mail Privacy Protection.
The company says it doesn’t support Real Time Bidding on consumer data, and that its own ad products in the App Store segment users in groups of at least 5,000.

Apple has released a new ad promoting its privacy features, showing a real-life auction of a user’s data.

The ad shows a character called Ellie who discovers an auction of her own digital data (the auction house is called ‘Dubiou’s’).

The auctioneer proceeds to sell her data – her opened emails, drug store purchases, contacts, recent transactions, browsing history, and late-night texting habits – to a crowd of people. “It’s not creepy, it’s commerce!” he says, selling her location data.

The ad promotes two specific features in Apple’s products. Mail Privacy Protection stops the sender of an email learning a user’s information, including IP address, whether the email gets forwarded, and how many times a user looks at it – but only while using Apple’s Mail app. App Tracking Transparency is a service the company introduced last year that asks users whether they consent to apps tracking their activity across other apps.

The services stop the auction of Ellie’s private data, a “digital treasure trove”.

These features, especially App Tracking Transparency, have had a material impact on the broader advertising market – it made attributing sales to ads more difficult. Facebook’s share price dropped by 20 per cent after it reported “headwinds” and a drop in daily active users, while Snapchat’s share price fell in October following similar disruption.