Apple as Godzilla ⇥ youtube.com

I have to say, it is quite an odd thing to be listening to a podcast and hear one’s own name. This recently happened to me on the latest episode of “Upgrade”. It feels like I am about to be called to the principal’s office or something. But I was not.

Myke Hurley and Jason Snell discussed an article I wrote about the more granular control available to users in iOS 18 when apps request access to their contacts. (My piece is a response to a New York Times story; Snell also linked to both with some commentary.) Their chat centres Apple’s scale and influence. Even little decisions the company makes are capable of transforming entire industries.

Hurley raises an apt comparison to App Tracking Transparency, which is exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote my piece. I am similarly unsympathetic to corporate empires built on illicitly obtained data. If you cannot make money when users are given a choice to consent, your business model probably sucks. But I do think it is concerning how powerful both of the major players were in the aftermath of that announcement: Meta, for hoarding behavioural data on billions of people; and Apple, for its ability to give users options.

I see parallels to Google’s power over the web. The near-uniform layout and structure of webpages is thanks to Google’s specific suggestions for improving the likelihood of ranking higher. The main difference is Google’s suggestions are sort of optional; if a website’s owner does not care much about search traffic, they can do whatever they want. The prompts on iOS, on the other hand, are baked into the system.

As Snell says, these apps “have to make the case” for granting permission. I do not think that is such a bad thing, and I am amenable to their suggestion of Apple’s built-in apps being placed on a level playing field. I think a lot of this would be more predictable if privacy laws were stronger. A basic level of privacy protections should not be a competitive advantage, nor should users be required to navigate either unceasing permissions dialogs or terms of service agreements to understand the myriad ways their personal information is being exploited — because their personal information should not be exploited.