"A day in the life of your data" - Apple privacy whitepaper

This is an obviously Apple-biased view at how the modern ad/tracking/data ecosystems work, but it’s a good overview of the sort of ways things can be plugged together without users really having any idea about what’s actually happening - and it’s written in a generally applicable and readable way, such that even not terribly technical readers understand what’s going on.

Of course, the solution is to use Apple products and technologies… but I’m also not aware of anything they say that’s actually untrue in there, about their anti-tracking technologies.

Skimming by the Apple specific stuff, it’s actually terribly accurate. And I agree, does it in a way that is fairly approachable to just about anyone.

The only thing IMO it doesn’t do is highlight that, in part, to change this we need to change how websites/apps make their money. In other words, we as the users need to become the consumer, and pay reasonable, real cost (including sometimes subscriptions) and incentive websites and developers to NOT use ads to monetize. But we, at least Americans, have gotten so used to and trained to decide that we don’t want to pay any direct cost, the Ad industry has gotten out of control in for advertisers to optimize more and more to push products and services on us.