What exactly did they do?? I’m very curious.<p>I have this sick feeling that in the past year, Apple is experiencing a brain drain and again the assholes with the spreadsheets (the bozos as Steve Jobs called them) are showing up and starting to chip away at things like privacy or in-app purchases for an extra .5% of profit.<p>My son was surprised to see an ad or in app purchase in an Apple Arcade game. But I still have to verify whether that’s what he saw.<p>But the rest of the games on the App Store are so disgustingly sly in how they prey on their users to buy more more more.<p>And Tim Cook doesn’t do anything while talking about curation. Where’s the curation?
$8.5M is just expenses to Apple, as would be to many others; certainly not working as a deterrent.
To give a figure of the money involved: Vizio made more profits during Q3 2001 by selling advertising and users data than by selling TV sets: $57.3M vs $25.6M.<p><a href="https://doctorow.medium.com/vizio-makes-more-money-spying-on-people-who-buy-tvs-than-it-does-on-tvs-themselves-fb5e40fdd21b" rel="nofollow">https://doctorow.medium.com/vizio-makes-more-money-spying-on...</a><p>Like it or not, users data is the new oil. I don't expect any related business to resist the temptation soon or later to jump to the dark side, if not because in a saturated market you either adapt or go belly up.
This is a nothingburger. I'm surprised to see such shallow responses here.<p>A giant company made a small regulatory misstep in one country. Laws change constantly, missteps likely happen all the time. It's a tiny fine for a small mistake.
I don't use Stocks or News and I don't use the App Store for discovery so I don't see ads. I am fully bought into the Apple ecosystem. The second I see an ad, I am dumping all of it.<p>Obligatory Bill Hicks: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0</a>
> Apple failed to “obtain the consent of French iPhone users (iOS 14.6 version) before depositing and/or writing identifiers used for advertising purposes on their terminals”<p>Why is it so specific to that dot version?
Always impressive and a bit saddening seeing the Apple shills crawl out of the woodwork when news like this hits the airwaves. What is it about apple that turns people into such rabid fanboys?
Apple getting into ads is not what Steve would have wanted. And all teh "well wall st." responses can stop typing because Steve didn't give an f about wall street.
To all down voters and apple fanatics .<p>Told ya 7 years ago : <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303190" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303190</a><p>"Think different" is just a slogan
Everyone's focussing on the small fine but the bigger story here is it's <i>Apple</i>. They've gotten the reputation for being the user privacy company, for protecting you from ad companies like Google/Alphabet or Facebook. Turns out they're acting like another invasive ad company themselves. The fine may not be big but the symbolism of it is.
Wow, that's going to teach them a lesson! A whole $8.5M - That's literally only 23 minutes of 2022 revenue lost (I did the maths). I'm sure they will never do it again, despite the fact that they likely made way more than $8.5M from doing it.<p>If we want companies to stop doing illegal things, then the punitive consequences need to be so high that they prioritise not doing it. If a person steals $100, they could spend a decent amount of time in jail for it. Time that is worth a lot more than then $100 benefit they received. Companies want all the benefits of being a "person", so let's apply the same principles to them.
Rant: I'm so sick of the Apple App store. It absolutely pales in comparison to app stores like Steam, Epic Games or GOG. On those stores, you can buy a license, and then use that license almost anywhere. (Except, of course, on Apple Devices.) These stores compete with eachother, so they also sometimes have very good deals. (Hello actually good free games from Epic.)<p>On the horrible Apple App store, you buy a piece of software and you can <i>only</i> use it on <i>some</i> Apple devices. If a developer stops updating their software, odds are you'll no longer be able to use the software at some point in the future.<p>Even worse, most apps are listed as <i>free</i>, but of course, they're not free. They charge you for them, but only in some way that is completely hidden to everyone who doesn't download and install the software. Either that, or they <i>are</i> free, but you're overwhelmed with huge numbers of ads.<p>I've come to resent our overpowered iPad. I'd love to install games that I own on other devices, but Apple has chosen to make this impossible. That's extremely disrespectful to me, their customer. They sell me a device that is completely locked down. It's horrible, and in no way the dream of computing that almost everyone had when I was growing up.
Just look at Apple's recent job postings. Here's one, but simple searching reveals the pattern:<p><a href="https://g.co/kgs/tV5rGG" rel="nofollow">https://g.co/kgs/tV5rGG</a><p>They need<p>1. Recommendation systems experience<p>2. Machine Learning<p>3. Auction theory<p>4. Ads pacing<p>5. ML / Reinforcement learning<p>Gee, I wonder what they're scaling out...
Any firm making more than zero in advertising revenue is automatically untrustworthy when it comes to privacy and data collection. Apple is no exception, and their stance is more hypocritical than most.
> In 2021, the company made $3.05 billion from ads in the US, and that figure is expected to grow to $4.24 billion in 2022, according to Insider Intelligence.
Wait up, I am not sure what the company worth is now, I keep reading two or three <i>trillion</i> dollars, so let me get this straight:<p>Company valuation: 2*10^12<p>Your fine for some wrongdoing: 8.5*10^6<p>So, they were fined roughly 4.25*10^-6 (or 0.00000425) <i>of their worth</i>. This sounds like a pretty small fine. Not sure if that even stings, a little.