John Gruber is pressing John Ternus to stop Apple’s expansion of advertising, arguing that the company’s App Store, Apple News and planned Maps ads have made its once-clean privacy message harder for ordinary users to believe.
Writing at Daring Fireball on Thursday, Gruber pointed back to a 2014 open letter from Tim Cook published after private photos were stolen from celebrity iCloud accounts. Apple, according to Gruber, no longer hosts the letter, though copies remain available through The Wall Street Journal and the Internet Archive.
Cook’s letter drew a sharp line between Apple and companies built around ad targeting. Cook wrote then that Apple sold products, did not build profiles from email or browsing habits to sell ads, and did not use iPhone or iCloud data to market to customers. Cook also described iAd as “one very small part” of Apple’s business that served advertisers.
Gruber’s complaint is that the sentence no longer fits the company Apple has become. He cited paid placements in App Store search results, including casino ads, and said search pages are now visually dominated by advertising after Apple added a second ad slot. He also criticized Apple News+, saying the paid subscription includes a strong bundle of paywalled publications but is accompanied by strange AI-generated ads inside the News app.
The next step is Apple Maps. Apple’s ad site says Maps ads are “coming soon” and pitches them as a way to advertise in a “privacy-first environment” with “No tracking.” Gruber said he believes Apple can make that technically true because of how it handles location data. He also linked that view to his recent argument that Apple has avoided geofence warrants for its location services because it does not keep personally identifiable location usage records.
The mechanism is the point. If Apple does not collect identifiable location history, it cannot hand that data to advertisers or police. That is a stronger privacy posture than the usual “trust us” boilerplate. Gruber’s concern is that most users will not parse the architecture. They will see ads in a maps app and assume their location is being used to target them.
Gruber contrasted Apple’s position with Meta’s new Instagram policy, which he said defaults users into allowing personal content to be used as material for AI-generated content made by other users. The New York Times described Meta’s policy as surprising. Gruber said Meta’s behavior was consistent with its history on privacy.
His argument is less that Apple has become Meta than that Apple is spending down a rare asset: believable restraint. In 2014, Cook could say Apple did not monetize user data for ads while Apple itself showed few ads to users. Today, Gruber wrote, Apple can explain to engineers and privacy specialists how its ad systems avoid tracking, but many customers will treat the presence of ads as evidence of surveillance anyway.
Gruber also noted the awkward economics. He said Apple has made large sums through its search traffic deal with Google, citing more than $20 billion a year from Google for Safari search placement, without Apple having to sell or display ads itself. In his view, App Store and Maps ads risk more reputational damage while producing much less money than that arrangement.
His recommendation to Ternus is blunt: return Apple’s privacy stance to the simpler 2014 version and stop giving customers reasons to wonder whether Apple is turning their attention and behavior into ad inventory.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.
