Comment by qwerpy
2 months ago
My unpleasant introduction to Apple Maps ads recently was opening it to look for nearby restaurants, and seeing an ad for a domestic violence lawyer nearby. Apple has now lost all credibility when it comes to respecting the user, not that they had much left at this point.
What I don't understand is that all of our data is being gathered everywhere for decades now, but the ads are still not targeted with any degree of precision.
Apple is not at Google’s level of surveillance-based adware. With these new changes to Maps, they now have new incentives to eventually catch up, but their targeting is bad because they suck at targeting, because they built their business around not collecting all that data & displaying targeted ads.
That said, if that’s the direction they’re going, I don’t need to help encourage them. I deleted Apple Maps off my phone & iPad, & switched back to Google Maps after like 10 years on Apple Maps. The hardware I buy is expensive enough & has profit margins high enough that Apple should never be trying to show me ads—targeted or otherwise—inside the basic functionality of their phones, and Maps is very much marketed as a feature of the hardware they sell. Also Google Maps is just better.