Apple’s New Privacy Ad Features a ‘Data Auction’ to Drive Customers to the iPhone

On Wednesday, Apple launched a new ad campaign to showcase its major privacy features and persuade customers to choose an iPhone over the competition.

The commercial, titled ‘Data Auction,’ depicts an auctioneer selling a user’s data. It emphasizes how individuals nowadays are losing their data at numerous stages and via multiple resources, such as emails, messages, and browser history.

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency and Mail Privacy Protection are shown as some of the built-in capabilities to safeguard data tracking. However, the provided offerings aren’t entirely failsafe.

The almost one-and-a-half-minute commercial introduces the heroine Ellie, whose personal information has been sold at auction.

Ellie’s data is auctioned off in various forms by the auctioneer. Emails, purchase history, location data, contacts, browsing history, and text messages are all included.

To understand user trends, advertisers and marketers collect data from various sources. According to the Cupertino corporation, it designed its products and services to “minimise how much of your data” anybody may access.

Ellie switches on App Tracking Transparency by requesting applications to “not monitor” activities for sharing with advertising or data brokers, as seen in the commercial, the second following the previous privacy campaign published last year.

After some delays owing to implementation problems, the functionality was made available to customers in April of last year.

Although Apple claims that the feature allows users to select whether an app may follow their behaviour across other applications and websites for advertising and sharing trends with data brokers, it has recently been shown to be insecure and potentially enables developers to track users.

The video also shows how the Mail Privacy Protection function protects information like your IP address and other data when sending an email to a recipient.

It works with the Mail software, preinstalled on iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices.

Apple has also recently implemented tools such as Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari and Location Services privacy settings to help iPhone users protect their privacy.

The goal of the advertisement is to emphasize these features to persuade consumers to purchase an iPhone.

Apple’s latest privacy changes have already helped the firm increase its iPhone market and its advertising business, as new partners approach the company to have their advertisements shown to iPhone users.

Nonetheless, Google has been following in Apple’s footsteps for the last several months, making comparable adjustments to Android to make it a formidable rival to iOS in terms of privacy.

The Mountain View, California-based business recently launched a campaign dubbed ‘Protected by Android’ to promote its native privacy-focused features on the world’s most popular mobile operating system to compete with Apple.

Users may now block monitoring on their devices more easily thanks to privacy upgrades available on both iOS and Android.

Advertisers, data brokers, and marketers, on the other hand, are looking for new methods to get beyond system-level limits and continue to follow users to some degree to keep their ad businesses.

Companies like Meta and Snap, who previously used activity monitoring to target the masses, are now incurring costs due to the privacy obstacles since it is becoming more challenging.

However, Apple’s new ad campaign has begun airing in 24 countries and will be translated into languages other than English in certain regions to reach a larger audience.

The corporation will install new billboards in each nation where the advertisement is airing to get its prospective clients further.