The other day, I saw this disturbing post on Daring Fireball. The TL;DR is that Procter & Gamble (P&G) has been working with several Chinese trade and advertising groups to develop and test a way of bypassing Apple’s upcoming iOS change that requires a user’s permission to track them. You can read the details in this Mint article or, if you have a subscription, the Original Wall Street Journal article.
The adtech scum hate Apple’s new policy, of course, and Facebook has been particularly vocal about it but we don’t usually think of P&G in connection with all this. They are, however, one of the largest advertisers in the world, depend heavily on targeted advertising, and even maintain their own database of over 1.5 billion profiles.
If this sort of thing bothers you, you’re probably thinking that you’ll make your own silent protest by refusing to buy P&G products. Unfortunately, P&G is even harder to avoid than Google. You’d probably be surprised at how many of their products you use everyday. If you’re curious, here’s a list of their brands. As you can see, they’re everywhere1. That’s too bad because they really should be punished by the customers they’re abusing.