Report: Google is the default iPhone search engine because it paid Apple $1 billion →

Caitlin McGarry, writing for PCWorld:

"Apple has admonished Google for violating user privacy with practices like mining emails for keywords to generate ad revenue. Now we know that Apple financially benefits from Google’s ad-targeting practices."

This quote (and  the article's headline) strikes me as bothersome. First-- Google has a revenue sharing agreement with Apple on search ad revenue. They didn't cut Apple a check for $1 billion up front to exclude other search engines. The arrangement is performance-based. It doesn't seem as if there's any sort of barrier to MS's Bing outbidding Google for the same arrangement. 

As for the quote-- this statement simply doesn't ring true. In fact, Apple's making money on search ads-- ads that have context based not on scanned emails but on terms that users input to a search engine for the purpose of receiving a contextually relevant response as output. The ads they receive are based on the search terms, not on scans of email or browser tracking.

Disappointing.