All Your Data R Belong to Us
Intro
With all this talk about data, privacy, tracking, surveillance advertising, regulations, and related topics I noticed that there is little discussion on what is actually collected and how it is being used. So I went on and put the consumer hat on, going down the rabbit hole of checking what some of the largest corporations are tracking and how they are using the information. And yes, Apple is one of them.
Hop on. This will be a wild ride!
What is this about?
Let’s start with the questions I will try to answer. Questions like what data is collected? By whom? Why is it being collected? How is it used? And is it useful? Can it be used to harm the consumer? Can consumers be sufficiently informed about their digital footprint and understand the value exchange for free content? I’ll answer some of those in the paragraphs below, as I take a look at the data some of our industry peers are collecting on me.
I will try to skip the jargon 1st party vs. 3rd party or how differently each company or regulatory body defines “privacy”. (see also this discussion for more info)
Let’s start with Google. It seems their view of my digital persona is quite comprehensive. If you are like me, you nearly always agree to share your data and click “allow” whether it’s permissions in apps or cookies on websites. Because as a consumer you really just want to get to the content as fast as possible, whether it’s checking the news or playing a mobile game. Also, Google is much more. With Chrome and Android, Google is basically the internet for the majority of the users of those platforms, for instance, I use mainly Google apps both on my iOS device as well as on my Mac. With Gmail, Youtube, Maps, Keep and many more — Google provides a utility level that can not be easily replaced. At the same time their products are better than Apple’s, at least for my use case. What comes on top, is that these apps are free. Why are they free? Because of Ads!
Except for personal information like gender and age, Google has categorised my data into a long list of interests exceeding over 20+ screenshots. Here are a few of them:
We can also see the data collected by Google App and Chrome Browser through Apple’s nutrition labels below:
As I mentioned earlier, Google collects a long list of data points on me. This means that Google knows a lot about what interests me, what I am looking to buy and utilises this for selling ads both on it’s own properties as well as on other publishers’ properties, ultimately dominating the open advertising ecosystem.
Coming back to my preferences and my data — I am comfortable sharing it and comfortable with the value exchange, though I would say it’s rather implicit than explicit.
Here is the Google Privacy link to check your own.
Apple
Let’s now look at Apple’s practices. Probably the moment you have all been waiting for. The self crowned privacy king, in a data collection conversation. How can that be?
Here are Apple’s privacy principles:
However, what we don’t see here is how Apple covers their tracking (yes, tracking) under the guise of 1st party data and privacy by their own definition, enforcing these standards on the rest of the ecosystem.
Let’s take a deeper look. Here is what Apple tracks on me:
Now let’s look at their apps privacy labels (Apple News):
Notice something different?
Now let’s go into settings. No ATT (App Tracking Transparency) pop-up? Hm, curious. And how well hidden this one is, isn’t it?
Nothing else to add, your honour!
I almost didn’t add Facebook to the list as I haven’t used the FB app in years (same for Instagram), but I do use Messenger and WhatsApp though. So far Facebook always seemed like the bad actor in almost every conversation about their practices. It’s probably the first time I see them humbled and on defence. What they did is nothing short of a super catalyst — they accelerated the growth of the app ecosystem and the D2C movement. How? Once again, with data. More specifically, and in simple terms, matching their user base data with the advertiser data thus closing the machine learning algorithms feedback loop. Add scale/reach and you have a money making machine.
Here are some of the categories I am placed in as well as their privacy label:
As with Google, there are many of them. What makes these perform is actually the feedback loop mentioned above. The deterministic power of that feedback loop is exactly what they are missing with the ATT roll-out., which makes them start raising their walls and bringing the content (e-commerce or games news) within the platform.
Amazon
Another “beast” — only recently joining the advertising game but already taking a place at the top — Amazon. How many products have I bought using their service? Hundreds? Who knows? (they do). How many products of theirs do I use? Most of them (Prime, Shopping, Alexa, Kindle, etc.).
Their ads are mostly on their own properties but quickly expanding into the open web (including mobile) via their own DSP.
Their privacy labels look quite extensive, while their own preferences are not that detailed; see below:
I couldn’t say I fully get the value exchange here (as I already pay for the products + subscriptions) but it shows that a hybrid model can work, and at least I am not that bothered by it.
This is similar to what Apple is trying within their ecosystem (subscriptions + ads) one side. And on the other side it’s similar to Facebook’s ecommerce ecosystem, in the sense that it keeps advertiser data and conversion events for optimization within their walls.
Note: this applies to most of the other closed gardens (TikTok, Snap, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.) — I just chose the largest ones.
Open AdTech
Let’s take a look at some players from the more diverse open advertising ecosystem. Whereas it’s easier to find data collected on you in some apps/websites, when I tried to access my data on Oracle, it showed up empty.
Here is some of the data the app Journeys (by Sentiance) collects on me:
The open ecosystem is what I call a beautiful mess. It’s the reason I spent most of my adult years working as hard as I could to add value across its different parts: from content (publishing) to advertising (e-commerce) to now (ad)tech. It mostly works, but it relies on collaboration, takes a while to get it right and faces internal and external challenges. Still I have a strong belief that in the end it will prevail (and recently the stock markets believe the same, only took them a decade).
I found this post by Terence Kawaja quite revealing:
Now off with the rant and into the data.
The open advertising ecosystem sees much less data because of its vast amount of players, fragmentation and silos. We have the web (and news), apps (with gaming + utility) and we have Connected TVs. In each of these channels there are hundreds of players with different data sets being collected (including Telcos). I don’t intend to cover those, since the landscape is quite impressive in terms of diversity — see below:
Instead, I’ll focus on what’s easily accessible to me as a user, and that’s mainly the type of data consented via GDPR forms, either on the web or in mobile apps (an example below)
There’s quite some data being collected but it’s not really surveillance advertising, is it?
In terms of what data in-app data can be available, here are some screenshots from some apps I use from AppLovin’s Privacy app (used for understanding what kind of apps I am interested in):
Regarding Privacy Nutrition Labels it varies (at least on my uses). Here are WeatherBug, Sudoku and Brave
There are a few data points but in the end it doesn’t seem outrageous. Even so, I would not be completely honest if I wouldn’t admit that the value exchange is much clearer to the user within the walled gardens (Google, FB) vs. the open ecosystem. But that’s something we need to work together on and find a way to represent the common value our ecosystem (pubs, advertisers, tech providers) unlocks.
No Data
Now when I was a kid I read a story about salt in food in a Romanian classic. The gist of it is that you don’t realise its value until it’s gone, and at least on iOS we are already there. What does the world look like when all customisations are turned off? (LAT on, cookies off) Again this is through my consumer lens (example for WSJ):
Exhibit A (incognito) — I get either random ads or house ads:
Exhibit B (cookies on) — I get at least some personalisation and an ad from our friends at Appodeal (who should know by now that I am already in their CRM)
And this is when I don’t get a paywall, which i an increasingly prevalent occurrence.
Certainly more “private” (by some definitions). But is it better? for me, not. And even if we’d fund everything with subscriptions or paywalls, how many would the average user have? 10? 20? 30? I have quite a few already and I have reached subscription fatigue. Wondering what it’s looking like in developing economies with lower GDP/disposable income.
So Mr. Craig — I choose Allow!
Closing thoughts
I don’t have the right answers and I think no one does at this point. But in order to get to those answers we need to ask the right questions, have the right conversations and not fall into easy traps.
For example, is all tech that uses data or data collection in itself bad by default? What are the right use cases and practices? Is it reasonable to assume that the normal consumer will understand all of this?And is it ok to assume others are bad actors and kneecapping them while privileging oneself? Are IDFAs and 3rd party cookies inherently bad? And are we making the internet more “open” or less accessible? How will regulators solve for this? Last but not least where is the user in all of this? Where is the real choice? As it seems right now (at least in EU) consumers prefer free content to paywalls. And to be frank, I could live without the cookie pop-ups also.
