[noahtallen]

Maybe it will be lucrative for them, but I disagree that it requires them to wipe away their privacy stance for a few reasons:

1. Privacy makes them a lot of money right now; it's a huge part of their brand, and one the CEO talks about frequently.

2. Media coverage of Apple Intelligence talks a lot about how privacy is a core differentiator for Apple's AI approach compared to Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI. Apple's approach is on-device-by-default approach, going as far as to have an explicit opt-in per interaction if you want to talk to chatGPT.

3. Apple clearly spent a lot of time and money on their "private cloud compute" approach to larger server models -- why would they immediately squander that by switching to ad-tech.

4. If they were going to use that treasure trove of information, why would they spend so much time not doing that in the lead-up to their big launch of Apple Intelligence?

5. Apple has spent a lot of effort making that personal local context local-only, and designing APIs and training models on schemas for apps to provide local context & local actions to local Siri. That's part of their killer feature set.

Ad tech team doesn't really require any of this data. That's an entirely different business model, and Apple is a lucrative business because they didn't do what Google did.

It all comes down to this: Apple spent the past decade plus building up a brand based on privacy, and spending a lot of extra time, money, and effort doing things more privately than their competitors. It's now a compelling differentiator for Apple, and I have a lot of trouble seeing why they would squander a reputation they clearly spent a lot of energy building.

[throwaway2037]

    > Privacy makes them a lot of money right now

Why do I see this repeated over and over again on HN? Can you offer any concrete evidence on the matter. It looks impossible to prove.

Most users do not care about privacy. They care about price and convenience.

[mikestew]

If they care about price, why are they buying iPhones? Just convenience?

It’s a bit moot without surveying users, and I’m sure those surveys exist somewhere. But I don’t accept at face value that users don’t care about privacy.