> Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, faulted Apple for not adhering to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy rules. Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk users will refuse, the associations argued.
I was taken aback when I read that sixteen(!) agencies had banded together, including collusion from Google and Facebook.
This starkly reminded me of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (book I chapter X):
> People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible, indeed, to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary.
>
> A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies. It connects individuals who might never otherwise be known to one another, and gives every man of the trade a direction where to find every other man of it.
>
> A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves, in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary.
In other words, legal rules meant to restrain corporations' behavior instead often facilitate their collusion, which almost always results in a "conspiracy against the public."
Apple is a bit unique in this regard, as their current brand positioning entirely removes their incentive for collusion. But only as long as the benefits to employing a pro-privacy-and-security brand posture are greater than the benefits it might enjoy from hoovering up as much data as it's rivals in Mountain View and Menlo Park.