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Apple DOES warehouse and sell your data. This is a significant revenue stream for them.

IMPORTANT NOTE: They likely get around this by using the phrase in their SLA of “personally identifiable” data. If you download an application from The App Store (Apple) such as the Target or Walmart application, and when you launch it, it asks if you wish to allow geolocation services. This gives them the legal right to do that.

In America, Big Tech owns your digital data. By contrast, in Communist China, the CCP owns your digital data.

Asking you for that permission to use Location Data Services is one of the very first things that happens when you launch that application.

Most people click “Allow” and you do it for those companies and their application. Once you do that, the can, and have done, pretty much what they want with your data within the confines of those 10 page long SLA (Service Level Agreements that EVERYONE reads. (that was indeed a capital letter emphasis for sarcasm)

Apple sells your data that it collects on you from Maps, Find My, etc.

It just sells your data without any personally identifiable data, thus fulfilling its promise to customers to be an advocate for their digital privacy.

People buy that data. If you run ABC Business, you can buy geodata from one of the many data warehouses by working with them to say “ABC business is at this location. I want to get geolocation data from everyone who comes to ABC Business from this one mile radius.” So, a geofence is drawn around your business, and every identifiable (yet anonymous) phone that penetrates the small geofence drawn around the ABC Business location is harvested, and the sum of all the movements of THOSE phones that entered the ABC Business Geofence are provided for whatever distance around the ABC Business locations is extracted and sent to the ABC Business.

With that data, they can confirm what routes people take to get to their physical store. Did they come up Route 95 from the south or from State Highway 786 from the west? Oh...it is from State Highway 786 from the west. Let’s put up more signage out that way.

Or they can have a second geofence drawn around the locations of their competitors, and they can see if people are driving straight to their physical ABC Business site, or are they stopping at XYZ Shop first to look for their product so they can either buy it there and go home, check availability, or simply get prices for comparative purposes. They may determine to buy a physical property to the west of XYZ Shop on State Highway 786 so that people stop at THEIR store first, and hopefully, buy THEIR product first.

And this is all divorced from knowing who the individual person is. For these purposes, they may not care in the least who the individual is, just what their “pattern of life” is.

For other purposes, it may vitally important to know who that person is, so they sell an application that tells them who that user is, what their shopping history is, where exactly they are coming from to shop, how often they shop (they can target them with sales to keep them coming if their competitor up the road is taking more business, etc)

This is big, BIG business. That True The Vote spent $2 million to get this data, and it was freely given with the exchange of cash should tell you just how big that is.