Back in May we noted how there's a lot of money to be made by carriers in selling your personal location data -- and they're only just starting to figure out how to cash in on it. Meanwhile the LA Times notes that with the launch of "iAd" and the new iOS 4, Apple has updated its 45 page privacy policy to allow the company to collect the "precise," "real-time geographic location" of its users' iPhones, iPads and computers for the incredibly vague purpose of "improving our services, content, and advertising." The specific paragraph that caught LA Times' eye, if you're interested:Note that Google Android's agreement has a similar statement, and this data is sold and used in part for behavioral advertising -- a sector that's largely unregulated in terms of protecting consumer privacy. You'll recall that efforts by ISPs to impose behavioral ads resulted in a privacy firestorm that effectively put several such ad firms out of business -- in large part because users weren't adequately informed they were being tracked, and opt-out mechanisms either didn't exist or didn't work. In Apple's case, their privacy policy explains how users can opt out further down the page:While Apple saves its users the now-standard sales pitch about how such ads "improve your Internet experience," several of our users running iOS 4 say that the opt out process currently isn't working for them.

Of course Apple and others claim this data is anonymous, though it's obviously easy to tie data to an individual (people usually sleep in the same location each night after all). While there are legitimate concerns here about transparency and user data security and justified questions about the need for consumer privacy protections, this latest outrage over behavioral ads still rests on the mythical foundation that Internet users have any privacy in the first place.