Well the Doc opened up the old mailbag today and here’s what poured out.

Dear Dr. Ads,

There I was, minding my own business and tooling around MediaPost, when I came across this Todd Wasserman piece about a new Apple ad that addresses data privacy.

Watch Data Buyers Go Up In Smoke

Apple has taken a public stance in favor of the privacy of its users, but rarely has it made that stance as understandable as in this new ad.

The ad, via TBWA\Chiat\Day Media Arts Lab, shows a young woman at a record store (remember those?) who hears music through a door (“Fantasy” by Esquivel) and runs toward it, only to see her picture on the door with the words “Ellie’s Data Auction.”

She enters an auction room with a life-sized hologram of herself as an auctioneer announces, “Lot Number One: Her emails.” Next up, her location data — again sold to a suspicious-looking data buyer.  “It’s not creepy,” the auctioneer says. “It’s commerce!”

Eventually Ellie gets her revenge thanks to an iPhone, but is that really what happens to our digital data, Doc? Seems totally creepy.

– Android Al

Dear Double A,

Gotta agree with you there. Here’s the Apple ad in full.

The ad suggests that an iPhone puts all your data in a –  shoutout to Al Gore – digital lockbox. But Sara Morrison at Vox says, not so fast.

The [privacy update], called App Tracking Transparency, doesn’t stop all the ways companies follow you around the internet and in your mobile apps because Apple can’t stop all tracking. Nor does it want to. Your data is still being collected, but what’s being collected and how may have changed. The end result, however, is roughly the same: You’re being targeted with ads . . .

From a user privacy standpoint, App Tracking Transparency seems like a good thing. It’s just not as good of a thing as you might have thought, or perhaps as Apple wanted you to think it was.

Memo to Ellie: Maybe you want to look into some other vaporizing tools. Just saying.