Jun
22
Apple’s location based update to privacy policy
Brilliant!
The current buzz around the Internet is about the new addition to apple’s privacy policy and how evil it is.
Essentially, Apple is forcing a new updated privacy policy agreement on users when they are downloading apps from the App store. The agreement states that, “…Apple and unspecified ‘partners and licensees’ may collect and store user location data. The data will be anonymous, but given the infancy of privacy related precedance to new media technologies Apple is treading on thin ice.
It seems fairly obvious what they are going to do and that it’s all for iAd, Apple’s new ad side of the business. I love the idea only because I thought of this a few years back in relation to local advertising and the Internet…or at least an iteration of it 
Geo-targeting via IP allows local advertisers to target specific people within a certain proximity to their physical store. So, the local sandwhich store down the road can tempt you with their new tuna melt while you search for “Sub sandwhich” on a search engine. This still requires the searcher to actually get up off their butts and drive down to the advertisers store.
What if you could deliver the offer to the user when they were standing right outside your store OR at least within close walking proximity? All of a sudden I am advertising to a person that can probably see my sandwhich store from where they are standing. That’s extremely powerful advertising and ads location to the mix of demographics used for targeting advertising.
What Apple needs to do now is build a self-service system into iAds similiar to Google Adwords. If all of a sudden a massive amount of people can access people real-time and present them offers the revenue opportunity could be enormous. The self-service system also has low overhead and doesn’t have a barrier to entry.
I can see this working great in shopping malls, because I know when I go shopping with my family I check my phone a few times. How many times have you seen the “dad’s” sitting on the bench outside of the stores playing with their phones?
I realize the knee jerk reaction to all of this is privacy and the last thing I really want to happen is to have Apple know EVERY step I take, but with great power comes great responsibility. If implemented correctly, this could be a very powerful advertising system and the future of local advertising as we know it.
