The OS 26 Messages Conflict is Heating Up — It’s Apple vs. the Spammers

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Summary

Apple’s anti-tracking features, like Mail Privacy Protection, block tracking pixels and hide IP addresses, giving users control over spam and unwanted contact. Politicians and businesses claim these features infringe on free speech, but Apple allows users to decide what is spam.

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Politicians and businesses want to be able to pester you

POLITICS

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Scary headlines want you to believe Apple is destroying the freedom of politicians and businesses to spam you. Well, they say it’s a free speech issue. If that’s true, all of the junk I recently got in my Messages Spam folder is “free speech”, isn’t it?

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The politicians want to be able to pester you to donate to their campaigns. The businesses want you to buy stuff. The rest of the crap messages want to steal a few bucks from you — or even all you have, plus your identity.

Of course, the politicians and businesses want to force Apple to allow these all-so-important messages to be front and center. I suppose the thieves would like the same courtesy. Here’s the truth:

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection and other anti-tracking features don’t automatically mark political or business emails as spam. It’s your choice whether to tuck them in the bad boys box or not.

What Apple does is:

• Block email tracking pixels (so senders can’t tell if you opened the email).
• Hide your IP address (to prevent location profiling).
• Let you decide what’s spam or not — you can mark/unmark messages accordingly.
• Silence notifications from unknown senders in Messages (if you choose).

In other words, you are in control. If you want to read political donation requests, Apple won’t hide them. Apple gives you the tools to reduce tracking and unwanted contact, but you decide what gets blocked, what gets through, and what’s spam.

In still other words, tell your representatives to go pound sand if they don’t like it.

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