Apple To iPhone Developers: Don’t Use Location-Based Info ‘Primarily’ For Ads

iPhone apps 65K

An obvious promise of mobile ads is that they can be location-aware; products can be pitched to people based on where they are. But Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) may have just limited that on the iPhone. In a short post on the iPhone developer blog, the company warns developers that if their app uses location-based information, that information must be put to “beneficial” use: “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.”

Lots of questions here, including how Apple will enforce the policy. An app developer could plausibly argue that ads — especially when they are location-aware — are “beneficial.” The conspiracy theories, by the way, are already on the rise. As ReadWriteWeb notes, “some people” hypothesize that Apple — which just entered the mobile ad market via its acquisition of Quattro Wireless — wants to have sole control of location-based ads on the iPhone.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post