I have nothing against location based advertising … if it were done right. The fact is, I rarely see any ads relevant to my location whenever an app is providing “location based” advertising. Most of the ads I see are, as @Brian said, “Find sexy singles in your area”, or an ad for a product/company that is nation or world wide and has no need for my location.

I have yet to see an ad that is actually relevant to my location. I’ve never seen an ad for a local merchant, bar, restaurant, or any other local business.

All that really ends up happening is they collect my location and push me some generic ad that could have been displayed without my location information. Using my location information to replace the text of the ad from “Find singles near you” to “Find singles in Atlanta” is not, in my opinion, a legitimate “location based” ad.

Until I know for sure that an app and/or an advertising company isn’t using my location improperly, I’d rather not give them my location if it’s not going to provide me a tangible benefit.

I’m far from a conspiracy theorist, but the fact remains that if we do not defend out rights, we forfeit them.

I’d rather not let every app/company and their mothers know exactly where I am at all times if it’s not going to provide something useful in return.

For those against location-based-advertising let me remind you how postive the feature could be and why Apple shouldn’t ban it — though they may want to limit it to legitimate uses. Take, for example, an app for a local newspaper. They may want to use core location to make sure you are served “local” news (with the standard opt-in warning many apps already have). Then, they can offer a map that shows you local merchants — complete with local ads. I see nothing objectionable about this since you want that local content and you want those local merchant ads, otherwise why download the app?

If Apple bans this type of usage, it is a sign that they want to go into this market themselves. I think that at that point Apple could run into some trouble from the Feds who might want to take the side of the local media companies for both consumer and political reasons. Apple should be very careful here.

Don’t much like the word ‘evil’ being levelled at corps or people (or used in corporate mottoes for that matter) – I could say ‘not being evil’ means providing utility to customers and value to shareholders; and from a corporarte POV it does. I guess if your customers are military contractors and shareholder value is tied to the lethality of your product it gets more complicated, but neither Apple nor Google are anywhere near that category.

The first time an app tries to access the GPS components the iPhone OS pops up a message asking if this is ok. If the user says no then the app does not get access to your location data.

This isn’t so much about privacy as it is using the GPS unecessarily and also worrying average users that they might have downloaded a virus or similar when their app that has nothing to do with location asks to use their location.

The news from Apple does not mention any specific ad service so any similar location based ads from Quattro are presumably equally banned.

And that patent is silly. It reminds me of the hype surrounding TPM and Microsoft’s old ad-based Windows patents. It’s a rights claim. 99% of that stuff never gets surfaced, and if Apple really surfaced that patent in a consumer product, I’m betting most of us would choose not to use that product.

There’s no “Force users to use our ad product” patent, is there?

All big companies can’t help but be evil. Their interests generally don’t coincide with customers’. That said, there’s just so many zany conspiracy theories we can put up with, so until there’s smoke with the fire, it’s just FUD.

You are missing the point. Apps that already use location sensitive information are banned from using it for advertising.

@MrC

This does nothing to prevent apps from collecting your location data. Nothing.

@frog This has zero to do with peace of mind for users. Apple BOUGHT AN ENTIRE COMPANY whose entire purpose was to make what they forbid third parties to do. Apple has patented locking OS features while advertisements run. This is not to give peace of mind to users; this is to squish any competitors until Apple gets their own play into production, at which point this feature will magically be made available again — but only if you go through the Apple network.

This is just more Apple being worse than Microsoft in their own garden.

Well done Apple!

Google wouldn’t have the balls to do this, they’ll totally sell out on a users privacy to earn more ad revenue!

I imagine it has been leading to support calls when a random ad-supported app asked an iPhone user if it can use their current location. I know it confused me the first time I saw that and the app had nothing to do with location based services.