MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.
Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1518973
page after 2-point type page that was made even longer by the inclusion of a prenup agreement in the case you ever decided to leave them. OK, we’re kidding about the prenup, but you can never tell … For more than 30 years, the “free for some of your information” relationship worked well for consumers, services and marketers. No one was “abused,” and advertising was the lifeblood of the internet and social media services. Folks increasingly took advantage of the search, social networking, news/information/entertainment services without charge in return for allowing the services to use some of their personal data. But as with any good thing, services and marketers got better and more creative to the point that up until about 2019, people could be tracked from site to site thanks to “cookies” – unique bits of compute code that were unique identifiers of a consumer as she/he moved from one site to another, thus allowing the personal data to enable services to target you with relevant marketing messages. It became so good – for marketers – that it totally changed the advertising industry to the detriment of newspapers, magazines and even television ad sales. Companies were able to efficiently and effectively splash their ads across websites with promotions that would be tailored to a person’s specific interests. Digital advertising was so good that it was most recently a $350B industry with prospects of getting even bigger and more efficient/effective as data was compiled, massaged, parsed, used and abused. Yeah, personal data got to be too personal, too used so governments stepped in to draw a set of hard lines in the sand as to what was a matter of good practice and what was overreaching. The EU got really tough with services, apps, advertisers with their privacy law – GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation – and to no one’s surprise, personal data and ad sellers thought they were being picked on and would go broke without using all of that rich, beautiful personal data. After all, with AI just entering the scene, folks envisioned all of that universe of data being even better to mine and pay for all those “free” services. OK, everyone but Apple, because in Tim Cook’s words, the company treated users’ most personal data as stuff that deserved, needed to be protected. To emphasize how committed the firm was, Cook went into gory details on how services/advertisers made money based on folks likes/dislikes, friends/families, relationships/conversations and bits of information/data that became valuable when they were put