Enshittification is riskier than it looks

Apple as a company has a lot of advantages. They have their pick of

• retail locations

• suppliers

• employees

Whether they want to hire an engineer who can design an efficient, safe power supply, or get the exact right countertop for the company’s convenient location right in Grand Central Station, Apple has more optionality than anybody. But the one place that Apple is on an equal footing with the rest of the industry is the owners. Investors want “number go up.” Soenshittification comes for everyone.

In John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope, John Gruber writes,

Here in 2026, search results in the App Store not only show paid ads — frequently for casinos — but the search results are visually dominated by paid ads now that Apple has added a second ad to results. Apple News+ is a paid subscription that offers a genuinely great value for the number of paywalled publishers whose content it includes, but articles on the News app tend to include the weirdest AI-generated ads on the Internet. (How many young blond women am I supposed to believe need hearing aids?) And — at this writing, still “coming soon” — Apple is launching ads on Apple Maps. Apple Maps remains free of charge to use, so according to Tim Cook, we’re not the customer. We’re the product. Or, if you prefer, our frustration is the product.

He makes a strong case that Apple needs to back off on the ad revenue squeeze. People will see the ads and assume that Apple is doing the same creepy, risky stuff that Meta and Google do.

So let’s just concede that the upcoming ads in Apple Maps are completely private. How many users are going to believe that? Or assume it? I think very few. People see ads and they think “I’m being tracked.” When Apple starts showing ads in Maps, many — perhaps most — users are going to think they’re being tracked by Apple and their location “is being sold” to advertisers.

That’s true. People are creeped out just as much by “privacy-preserving” ads as by the regular kind. It’s not just anecdotal.

• Towards Developing an Understanding of Consumers’ Perceived Privacy Violations in Online Advertising by Kinshuk Jerath, Klaus M. Miller, D. Daniel Sokol

• FTC PrivacyCon transcript (PDF)

• No Cookies For You!: Evaluating The Promises Of Big Tech’s ‘Privacy-Enhancing’ Techniques

But there’s one part missing. It’s not that Apple’s privacy math wizards are right and the users are wrong. The “Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement” that’s built into Apple Safari (the setting for it ishidden under “Advanced” which should be a red flag) is privacy-preserving only if you analyze it as an isolated math problem. Like the W3Cattribution cartel proposal, the Apple feature gives dishonest players an incentive to“snipe” the reporting by serving ads to Safari users likely to buy soon—and the best way to pick those likely buyers out from the crowd is with extra, riskier tracking.

This whole situation is another good example of how regular people are better applied behavioral economists than Internet Thought Leaders are. And the latter group is increasingly out of touch. (While high-profile LinkedIn posters are shocked about what they see as the new-found uncertainties of Big Tech jobs in 2026, the content moderators, search quality raters, drivers, and other “TVCs” have been living the precarious employment dream for a while now.)

So John Gruber is half right. Apple can keep a premium position, and win in the long run, by losing the shitty ads—which are seen by their customers as a dirty business with no place on a high-end device. But that forward-thinking decision would not just be sacrificing a real privacy technology for PR purposes. The so-called “privacy-preserving” ad tracking systems have their own risks, and need to beregulated appropriately.

(Quick tip for John Ternus. If you do zorch the ads to make the device feel more like the experience of an Apple Store and less like the last days of Fry’s, the enshittification pressure from the investors will return soon enough. But if Apple can switch out CPUs you should be able to smoothly swap out the owners, too. Take advantage of the fact that you make the best all-around personal finance device, add a “buy stock” button—and hook it up to buy a share that has extra voting rights but pays all dividends in store credit. Align the interests of owners and users enough to resist the pressure to festoon Apple products with ads or whatever other awful growth hacking thing starts trending next.)

Bonus links

You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy: Why It’s So Hard to Break John Deere’s Control Over Farming by Matt Stoller. (Maybe the 404 Media story on right to repair was too good to be true?)

Mastodon, The Only Good Choice by Tim Bray. Why does email stay reasonably healthy? Because nobody owns it. Anyone on any server can communicate with anyone else on any other….Mastodon’s like email that way. Plus it does all the Post and Repost and Quote and Follow and Reply and Like and Block stuff that you’re used to, and there are thousands of servers. (Like email, the spam filtering and other moderation decisions get made in a decentralized way, so it’s possible to have a Mastodon experience that’s hella worse than Big Tech “social media” too. But read the whole thing, I’m happy to help people get started.)

Valve Explains Why It Doesn’t Subsidize Its Hardware Platforms The traditional console model is to sell hardware at a loss and make up the revenue with subscription services or by selling games that are locked-in to the hardware, reads part of Valve’s blog post. We think this can make sense for a single business in the short term but that open ecosystems are better for customers over the long term. (Seems like some of the locked-in console brands are having drama—the Steam Machine looks more future-proof.)