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0 pointswutbrodo10y ago0 comments

It sounds from your comment like you think that other ad networks (Google, Facebook, etc) _don't_ work this way? Sigh, I knew this would happen eventually as long as people kept cynically saying that ad networks "sell" your info to advertisers, knowing that those not familiar with the context would assume that meant that advertisers actually had access to the raw profile info.

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derefr10y ago· 1 in thread

As far as I understand, the usual approach executed by Google et al is first figure out your demographics data server-side, and then use that data to send targeted advertising to your device when it requests an ad.

Apple, meanwhile—having direct access to your phone's OS—just pre-download a full ad-inventory database to your device, and then your device, using demographics data stored only on the device, targets itself; Apple's servers don't learn anything about you, only what ads your phone decided to show you.

wutbrodoOP10y ago

Your original comment was about _third parties_ getting access to ads, and that was what I was claiming doesn't apply to basically any large ad network. It sounds like what you're saying now is that all the handling of user data happens fully on device and the ad network itself doesn't have access to demographic data, which is definitely not true for Google/FB/etc.

That's interesting if true, but I'm pretty sure that's very, very wrong. Do you have any source for this? I tried Googling it and was unable to find anything saying that, and I would be pretty surprised if that's how it works (especially pre-downloading inventory), given my passing familiarity with how ad networks work. Especially since their privacy page (which talks about iAd)[1], makes no mention of something which would be a drastically different way of operating an ad network (and thus excellent for marketing onself as the privacy-conscious alternative).

[1] http://www.apple.com/privacy/