Except of course it's total cobblers.
No, it doesn't. It doesn't even have a record of your recent transactions through Apple Pay, should you use that service, let alone anything else. All transaction info is direct from your financial institution, although being part of the Apple Pay scheme means the bank provides a mechanism whereby the Wallet app can request recent transaction data to display, Apple itself has no access to that data. It has no access to your bank account. It has no record and no way to get a record of any transaction that takes place outside Apple Pay. The idea this is in any way equivalent to your financial history in a way that would be useful to demographic profiling is laughable.
If Apple were to be caught 'scraping' data out of the Wallet app to use for itself, the implications would be catastrophic. Apple Pay would be shut down overnight, Apple would be sued for billions of dollars and people would go to jail.
The idea they are doing this is
stratospherically dumb.
So it's the amount of phone credit you have, not the content of your bank account. Not quite the same thing, is it? And in the EU even for that you'd have to explicitly agree to the sharing of information between your phone provider and the ad agency. I wonder what will happen to the first UK telco that decides to roll that into their end user agreement?
And even given all this, it's not actually been implemented, it's a 'it may work like this' in a patent application.
It's like facts just don't even exist, isn't it? I heard tomorrow the sky is going to fall. I was told this by a 'tech analyst'.