What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast, we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month, on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.

So much of what we do on our phones is tracked.

Our swipes and taps become data points that are shared with advertisers and brokers.

Then they use it to sell stuff we maybe don't need.

But what happens when all that data disappears?

Patience Hagen from the Wall Street Journal is here to explain.

Hey Patience.

Hi, thanks for having me.

So Apple made some changes to its privacy policy back in April.

What did they change and why?

Apple created a policy where every app on iPad or iPhone has to explicitly ask you for permission to track you.

They have to show a little prompt that asks if you're going to give this permission to track you.

And that change has really thrown a wrench in the digital ad complex in the way that companies are used to buying selling trading data across the web.

And what about the impact that these changes have on small e-commerce companies?

For e-commerce companies, it's kind of been a tsunami.

Some of them really rely on ads in Facebook and Instagram.

I've really built up an ad business that can be extremely powerful because it collects so much data from apps and from websites across the web.

With Apple's new change, you know, for people who opt out, Facebook basically can't use any of that data anymore.

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