For years, Apple watched Google and Meta make billions by collecting every scrap of people’s data to target them with ads. Now it appears it was just taking notes.

Apple’s advertising operation follows the surveillance capitalism model of its rivals, using data it collects from various Apple services and your Apple account to show you ads in the App Store as well as its News and Stocks apps. Notably, these are all platforms or services that Apple has complete control over, allowing it to lock out its competitors. 

Apple currently brings in roughly $4 billion from advertising and is forecasted to bring in as much as $30 billion by 2026. While these amounts are an order of magnitude smaller than the $210 billion Google made from its ad services, they represent a change in philosophy for Apple, which only earned around $300 million for ads in 2017.

This new emphasis on advertising also undermines Apple’s claims about privacy with its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature and its “Privacy. That’s iPhone” ad campaign. In fact, it appears ATT may have been more about blocking competitors than protecting user privacy. Since Apple introduced ATT, its ad revenue has skyrocketed, leading German regulators to investigate Apple to see if it’s abusing its power.

How Apple’s tracking works

On Nov. 20, a pair of iOS developers known as Mysk discovered that Apple has a specific identifier (a “directory services identifier” or DSID) for every Apple iCloud account. It uses DSID to collect detailed information about your behavior in Apple apps and the App Store, and there’s no way for you to turn it off. 

This technically doesn’t violate Apple’s privacy policy because it has multiple privacy policies, one for its device, one for the App Store, and one for each Apple app. The Apple device privacy policy states that Apple doesn