Tim Cook May Have Just Ended Facebook

Currently ad networks, including Facebook, link all their data together to create profiles of individual people. They then target these people with ads because they know more than just demographics. They are able to target a user by determining things like: a user is of a specific demographic, with a certain income, who tends to make frivolous purchases this time of the month, even more so during certain times of the year, has friends who have made similar purchases recently, have been in the same location with those friends recently, has clicked on related ads on a completely different website in the past month, recently opened a new credit line, etc.

Apples restrictions stop ad networks from aggregating all of their data together at the user level, unless the user opts in to allowing that.

When a user opts out of tracking, as networks have to rely solely on the demographic information the users provided manually (in their Facebook profiles), like age, race, location, likes, etc.

Source: I am a software engineer at a large US tech company and have been working on supporting these new restrictions since they were announced. These changes make it harder for us to target a user with marketing campaigns, but only in grossly invasive ways.

/r/technology Thread Parent Link - inc.com