After Apple effectively banned other companies from gathering analytics data from the iOS in April, they have now reportedly relaxed this policy some, allowing some company’s with Apple’s permission to collect limited data from users. Analytics data, is of course used by ad agencies to determine who their audience is, and so on. This move by Apple initially looked like a way for them to hamstring the competition shortly after announcing iAds, which is of course, Apple’s own advertisement service for iPhone developers.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs publicly stated that a analytics company called Flurry had grabbed sensitive data off of Apple’s devices on their corporate campus, that could potentially reveal current Apple projects. Flurry then published this data. Jobs reported that this move by Flurry “pissed them off” and that they were still willing to talk to these analytics companies, “but it’s not today.”
Well, MediaMemo is now reporting that Apple has changed the analytics portion of their developer agreement, section 3.3.9, to now allow limited data collection for analytics.
If you compare and contrast with Apple’s earlier version, you’ll see the message is clear: It’s OK to collect user data to help sell ads — though you will need to get their permission to do so.
Apple does state however that a company collecting the data be an “independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads (for example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent)”.
The word “independent” seems to rule out Google’s Admob mobile advertising subsidiary from collecting data on the iPhone. Oops.
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