Regular readers know that the Irreal bunker is a resident of the Apple Exosphere but we don’t consider ourselves fanbois. We like Apple but it’s not a religion. One area where we are especially critical of Apple is their embracing of advertising. Not advertising of Apple and its products, of course, but of its deciding to sell advertising spots to third parties that sully their users’ experience. The inevitable end is that the user gets replaced by the advertiser as the customer. It’s an ugly and disgusting process and those who pursue it deserve the backlash that they will surely experience.
Case in point: General Motors. Despite fierce opposition from their customers, GM decided to eliminate Car Play from their new cars in favor of their own multimedia system. Their given reasons for this are so laughable that they don’t deserve comment. The real reason, of course, is that they want to capture user data so they can sell it to advertisers. And so the car buyer is replaced by the advertiser as the customer.
We nerds are probably going to tell GM to go pound sand and take our money elsewhere but what about the normies? Will they look elsewhere or will they just shrug and go along? Now, serendipitously, we have an answer. The TL;DR is that Honda was behind in their electric vehicle program so they arranged with GM’s Chevrolet to sell their EV under the Honda brand. The vehicles are identical in every way that matters except one. Honda includes Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration. It’s the perfect A/B test1. The results are just what you’d expect. Honda significantly outsold Chevrolet. See the article for the details.
GM and the suits that drove the decision to drop Car Play in the face of customer fury deserve what they get. Maybe a couple of years of plummeting sales will open their eyes and result in a more astute C-sute.
Between writing and publishing the above, I stumbled upon another egregious example. LG Smart TVs were caught spying on their customers. This goes way beyond the sadly normal practice of capturing what the user is watching. It includes recording ambient audio even when the screen is off and the TV unplugged from the network2; scanning for other devices on the local network, including things like smart watches; and even discovering nearby WiFi systems, their signal strength, and their locations. All this information is sent directly to LG’s targeted advertising arm.
Once again, we see the users—the buyers of LG’s products—being replaced by advertisers as the customer. People who care about their privacy should not buy products from this company and, really, never enable smart TV features or plug them into the Internet.
Footnotes:
John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball is not so sure. He posits that maybe Honda is just a more popular make or better at selling cars. I’m not convinced by his demurrals.
When the TVs are not attached to the network, they store the audio until they get reattached.