I like to say that Apple is a marketing company that makes decent tech products. They absolutely played this market like a fiddle. They sat back and watched Google and FB absorb tons of bad press and I'm sure they were feeding it behind the scenes. It always felt to me like a ploy. As much as ads and the SEO game had their problems, they were there to support the open web. Apple kept tapping the breaks on improving their web browsers and driving users to apps because that was their walled garden. Owning an iPhone now is essentially a status symbol, owning an Android means you're poor. The privacy rules designed to kill ads was only ever designed to hurt Google, not to protect users.
As a counter example of marketing gone wrong, Amazon has very steadfastly never sold their customer data to anyone. No one ever thought for a second that they did this because they were interested in privacy.
As a counter example of marketing gone wrong, Amazon has very steadfastly never sold their customer data to anyone. No one ever thought for a second that they did this because they were interested in privacy.