Apple may check your credit card balance to show which products you can afford

Apple is toying with the idea of selling you products it knows you can afford.

A new patent application filed by the tech giant on Thursday would give it the power to target customers with ads based on their income and credit card limits. In simple terms, the opt-in system would gauge the status of your credit and debit cards and your available balance, then only beam you mobile ads for products or services it decides are within your price range.

Goods and services are marketed to particular target groups of users sharing a common profile which may be selected to increase the likelihood of the users responding to the advertisements and purchasing the advertised goods and services. The common profile of users may be based on the amount of pre-paid credit available to each user. Basically, if you can't afford it, you don't see the ad. The upside of the approach is obvious: Better targeting, a holy grail for marketers which are constantly searching to make their ads more relevant to consumers.

Since most people treat their iPhones as practically an appendage, Apple has a pretty clear window into the details of your personal life and your everyday habits — a valuable tool for advertisers looking to reach exactly the right customers.

Another Apple patent application, from June 2015, described a system for tracking a user's friends on the iPhone, while yet another, also from June, described a technology for exchanging personal information on wearables via fist bumps. But CEO Tim Cook has been adamantly vocal in his disgust for intrusive targeted ads and maintained that the Cupertino company has no interest in turning their customers into a product.

"They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it," Cook said of Apple's ads-driven competitors in a Washington D.C. speech earlier this year. "We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be." A series of recent business plays, however, might suggest otherwise.

Last month, Apple secured a patent for an advertising platform that can create and track ads across email, texts and social networks based on viral social media and store users' phone numbers, email addresses and other personal data.

The move comes as Apple continues to beef up its advertising arm, iAd, with an expansion to more than 75 new countries and plans to make the system a lot more personal. The company will soon allow marketers to send messages to customers in Apple Wallet, target by user tastes in the News app and break up songs with commercials in Apple's subscription music streaming service.

That said, the product blueprints don't necessarily mean that Apple or the participating advertisers would actually have access to the personal financial data it amasses. It seems more likely that Apple would opt to heavily encrypt the information much like it does with Apple Pay.

It's also important to note that the famously secretive Silicon Valley company regularly files patent applications for products that never see the light of day, whether to deprive a rival from the technology or to tuck an option away for later use. But the documents do serve as instructive signals of where is Apple focusing its research and development might.