Daring Fireball: John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope

By John Gruber

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John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope

Thursday, 9 July 2026

In September 2014, in the wake of a series of hacks that stole private photos from the iCloud accounts of multiple celebrities, Tim Cook wrote an open letter to customers that was published at apple.com/privacy. Apple seemingly no longer hosts a copy of the letter. (That tends to happen to memorable open letters from Apple CEOs.) The Wall Street Journal’s fast-loading website still hosts a copy of the letter, as does the Internet Archive’s essential but slow-loading site.

Cook’s letter is cogent and clear, and well worth reading in full today. But when you do, you can see why Apple no longer hosts a copy:

A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that<br>when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re<br>the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience<br>shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy.

Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great<br>products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or<br>web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize”<br>the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we<br>don’t read your email or your messages to get information to<br>market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our<br>devices better. Plain and simple.

One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and<br>that’s iAd. We built an advertising network because some app<br>developers depend on that business model, and we want to support<br>them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the<br>same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It<br>doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage,<br>your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail,<br>and you can always just opt out altogether.

Some of this remains true, but has lost some truthiness — and truthiness matters. But some of it is no longer true, period. It’s no longer just “one small part” of Apple’s business that serves advertisers. Here in 2026, search results in the App Store not only show paid ads — frequently for casinos — but the search results are visually dominated by paid ads now that Apple has added a second ad to results. Apple News+ is a paid subscription that offers a genuinely great value for the number of paywalled publishers whose content it includes, but articles on the News app tend to include the weirdest AI-generated ads on the Internet. (How many young blond women am I supposed to believe need hearing aids?) And — at this writing, still “coming soon” — Apple is launching ads on Apple Maps. Apple Maps remains free of charge to use, so according to Tim Cook, we’re not the customer. We’re the product. Or, if you prefer, our frustration is the product.

I thought to revisit Cook’s 2014 “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” letter today in light of Meta’s new policy of defaulting Instagram users into having their personal content serve as grist for AI-generated content created by other users. The New York Times described Meta’s on-by-default policy as “surprising”; I say it’s not surprising at all. Meta has never shown any respect for its users’ privacy, and when they’ve claimed to, everyone knew it was a sham. They no longer show any respect for their own engineers’ privacy for chrissake.

But Apple? Apple meant it. And I think they still do. But I think they’re lost in the weeds on two fronts:

Squeezing out every extra cent of Services revenue they can.

Satisfied in their own deep knowledge of how their systems are designed to safeguard users’ privacy and personal data.

Issue #1 is self-explanatory. The ratio of ads to organic results in App Store search — especially when measured in screen area — is clearly not aligned with Cook’s 2014 statement that “Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.” Obviously not. The design of App Store search today is to generate more revenue for Apple. That’s not criminal, but it’s a change.

Issue #2 is more subtle. Apple really does have a religious fervor for privacy. Consider ads for Maps. It hasn’t shipped yet but Apple states, “Run ads in a privacy-first environment that respects your customers, who already trust Maps. No tracking — just helpful discovery.” I’m quite sure that’s all completely true. I just wrote last week about how Apple has never had to deal with “geofence warrants” for its location services because Apple has never kept personally-identifiable usage data for location. They not only don’t give advertisers — or law enforcement — your location data, but can’t, because they don’t collect it and never did.

So let’s...