A couple of things stuck out at me in the article.
- Don’t you have to agree to allow an app to access your location?
- How is Apple profiting from this?
Here let’s look at this closer, Ryan Singel:
If an app passes along that number to an advertisers, the advertising company can use it to build up a profile of the user, as well as keep track of which ads it has shown to a user before and which of those ads a user clicked on.
With browser cookies, however, a user can easily block them or delete them, essentially cutting off the profile. Neither is possible with apps that use UDIDs, since that number can’t be changed.
I am not sure that this is really that big of a deal — Google does it to you all the time. I do however take stand to the second sentence quoted — in no way do I think that most users think it is easy to block browser cookies. To make such a claim would mean that walking down the street and asking any computer user how to block cookies in their browser I should get more than 50% of people asked telling me how to do that. I dare you to try and actually get that.
“Apple knew this was an issue,” said Majed Nachawati, one of the lawyers who filed the suit. “They had a duty to warn consumers and at a minimum, if they intend to profit from this, they need to let people know and get their consent.”
Again how is Apple profiting from this? Is iAds at fault or is this other advertising platforms? If iAds, then sue Apple. Don’t tell me that Apple is profiting because they take a 30% cut — they take that from the sales price of the app, not from revenue derived from ad sales, unless they are iAds.
This though just made me lose all hope in humanity, I mean who wants to play “Pimple Popper Lite”:
Other apps named in the suit include Toss It, Text4Plus, The Weather Channel, Talking Tom Cat, and Pimple Popper Lite.