[timssopomo]

I'm an iOS user and spent 6 years working in the bowels of adtech. I'm generally skeptical of the industry. Apple's posture and position here seems like a net good for me as a user.

Apple's and Facebook's approaches are totally different. Facebook vacuumed up reams of data from themselves and third parties and spat it back out into the industry indiscriminately. It _did_ likely allow some niche businesses to reach target audiences. It _also_ created and enabled a rube goldberg machine of third parties to access behavioral data in a way that likely made it personally identifiable. The same was true of most third party platforms. Cookies were fundamentally broken and users have no idea what data they were creating and no meaningful control of how it was being consumed (or by whom). All sorts of harm was done in ways that was difficult to quantify.

Apple giving individuals meaningful control over their data within Apple's ecosystem and protecting anonymity at the boundary of their platform is a net good. Apple's segmentation and targeting of users is fundamentally different than cookie based targeting utilizing 3P data. The fact that this hurt parties who unknowingly relied on 3P data in good faith is a sad externality, but nobody should lose sleep over it. I wouldn't feel bad about mom and pop groceries losing revenue from cigarette sales either.