Your Apple Maps Will Soon Serve You Ads

Within its announcement for Apple Business, the company made one thing very clear: there will be ads in Maps now. The brand's new push for a tool that will be "a new all-in-one platform that includes key services companies need to effortlessly manage devices, reach more customers, equip team members with essential apps and tools, and get support from experts to run and grow efficiently and securely." The company says Business is intended to help companies "grow their reach" and connect with users across platforms like Maps, Mail, Wallet, Siri, and others.

For now, ad placement in Maps will be limited to the US and Canadian markets. It's possible that tighter user privacy regulations overseas in the EU have led to Apple sticking to core North American markets for now. Ads will appear when users search for destinations in Maps. Worse, Apple also says that the ads "can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance," and at the top of a new Suggested Places interface that will appear below the search bar.

The brand insists the new ad payload will build on its "privacy-first" approach to advertising with its users. Apple also said in a press release that these ads will maintain the same privacy protections users have in Maps already: "a user’s location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user’s Apple Account." Apple users' data will also stay locally on their devices and will not be shared with third parties.

Apple treads a thin line with its new ads. The company maintains its privacy-first approach, but many others have pivoted to allow user location data and other parameters to serve increasingly relevant, and therefore increasingly potent, ads. Apple didn't specify whether this new aspect of its Maps experience would be coming to CarPlay, yet. Rollout should occur on April 14 with the broader Apple Business release.