John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has an excellent article about the slippery slope Apple is on with their embracing of advertising. I’ve written about this before. For a company like Apple, advertising is deeply corrupting and inevitably ends with the user being replaced by the advertiser as the customer.
As Gruber points out, Apple really does care about their customers’ privacy and puts in extraordinary effort to preserve it. The problem is, he says, that other than a few technically competent folks, like Irreal readers, people don’t believe it because any semi-sentient person has learned to equate advertising with surveillance. It’s mostly a good assumption even if it doesn’t apply to Apple.
Gruber’s worry is the advertising will erode the perception of Apple as a company that cares about their customers’ privacy. It’s something to be concerned about but my worry is that it will corrupt Apple’s values to the point that they, in fact, no longer care about privacy.
As Gruber says, Apple doesn’t need the extra money that advertising brings in and, in fact, earns far more—greater than 20 billion dollars annually, apparently—from their deal with Google to make their search engine the default on Apple products. It seems foolish to tarnish their brand for what, in Apple terms, is small change.
Gruber hopes, as I do, that John Ternus will reverse Apple’s descent into the fiery pit of online advertising. Whatever extra dollars they reap from advertising won’t be worth it in the end. They will lose far more in customer goodwill and trust.