Ben Thompson publishes good analysis on Stratechery, but I don’t agree with his latest piece. It’s about Apple’s privacy campaign and the new iOS 14 privacy “nutrition labels.” If I understand them correctly, he seems to have two main points: We should feel bad for small businesses because they won’t be able to collect our data in the same capacity as before, and that Apple’s attempts are futile because the internet is a giant shopping mall and “personal data wants to be free.” My summary is an oversimplification but I believe we should be combining Apple’s privacy with regulation like GDPR. In my opinion you can still have ads that don’t invade your privacy.
While transparency for customers is definitely a good thing, Apple’s simultaneous appeals to analog analogies and simplistic presentation of privacy trade-offs risks a similar path when it comes to the GDP of the Internet and to what extent power is disbursed versus centralized.
Check It Out: Will Apple’s Crackdown on Data Tracking Hurt Small Businesses?
