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User Tracking Back On iOS 6
First time accepted submitter connor4312 writes "Apple got caught with its hand in the cookie jar when privacy experts protested the use of a universal device identifier, or UDID, to track the online preferences of iPhone and iPad users. Enough is enough, right? Well, maybe not. It looks like device tracking is back with iOS 6, courtesy of a new tracking technology: IDFA, or identifier for advertisers."
They know I'm at Starbucks! Now how will I write my screen play in peace?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If you want to turn off device tracking using the IDFA on your iOS6 device, do the following:
1) Click on Settings.
2) Click on General to access the General Settings.
3) Click About
4) Scroll down and click on Advertising.
5) Set Limit Ad Tracking to "ON".
Default On. This seems like the mobile version of Do Not Track, and we all know how that is turning out.
Tech companies as a whole value your privacy almost as much as a fat kid values vegetables.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Full armor, full ammo, all weapons, but no keys.
I think I'll wait for IDKFA.
Not only was Apple not using the UDID for user tracking (app developers were and against developer policies might I add) but specifically for iOS beta tracking, but IDFA specifically was mentioned by Apple as the legal way for app creators to do it in the future and is opt-outable. But then you cant spook idiot users can you Sophos into buying your products if you are actually honest.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Apple: "we need to uniquely identify our users to maximize our advertising revinue stream, and to positively lock individual devices to individual users for the sake of our media partners. Not doing this means we will make less money, and since becomeing a houshold name, our share holders are more fickle than ever!"
Users: "look, do I follow YOU everywhere you go? When you go in the bathroom, do I give YOU targeted adverts for toilet paper, sanitary wipes, tampons and condoms? No? Does that sound at all like something you would like? No? Then DON'T TRACK ME."
Apple: "your concerns have been noted, and your opinion is important to us." [Delivered in robot answering machine voice.]
User: "I will contact an advocacy group if you can't take this seriously."
Apple: "we are dedicated to workmanship and quality, and the opinions of our customers are important to us."
(User contacts advocacy group. Advocacy group raises a stink)
AG: "you are aware I am sure, that pervasive user tracking violates the user's privacy in unacceptible ways, and clues about facts a user would like to keep private, such a club affiliations, sexual preferences, past relationships, and even prior citations for minor legal offenses can be publicly exposed through such tracking and directed advertisements, right? Let alone the serious safety implications, like pedophiles tracking underage children, rapists stalking women, and muggers stalking people with expensive iDevices using tracking apps right? You honestly think that these serious implications are warranted to further your financial bottom line?"
Apple: "oh, we hadn't thought about that second part!"
AG: "so you will stop mandatory tracking?"
Apple: "yes of course! We don't want to (increase our legal liabilities because we) track our customers in such a way that they could be physically or emotionally harmed!"
AG: "Good on you apple. We are glad you understand the value of privacy."
(6 months pass)
Apple: "we have devised a compromise that still let's us make money by selling compromising infrmation to snoopy advertizers, without the legal liabilities! We will offer a NEW tracking feature, that is obfuscated, and obscured such that the user doesn't know its there, and that could theoretically be turned off if they knew how, absolving us of culpability when/if it gets misused!"
User: "do you comprehend the meaning of "I DO NOT WANT TO BE TRACKED."? Does the concept even make sense to you?
Apple: "the opinions of our customers are important to us!"
Before anyone dismisses that as just a joke, it's literally true in iOS 6 if you use the new "Passbook" feature. Every time you pull up the lock screen with Passbook enabled, Passbook does a GPS fix and checks in with Apple to find out if it should display one of the little Passbook cards.
Or you could, you know, disable "show on lockscreen" for all of your passes and don't set favorite stores for your Starbucks pass ... and then Passbook won't do a GPS fix every time you pull up the lock screen.
You can still have and use Passbook passes, it just won't auto-display when your near a Starbucks. Heck, once you have the pass enrolled in Passbook you can even delete the Starbucks app off your phone.
The first time activated my phone (it is the screen where you can add your google account if you want to, and is standard on every android phone and tablet I have seen), I was asked if wanted "Interest based ads", I did not opted in and never had to worry about it. So android does not really have the same thing.
First of all, I would like to clear up a common misconception. Apple did NOT ban the use of the UDID in iOS5. The few applications that did get banned did so because they stored the UDID without telling the user. If there's some legal text anywhere in the app that says they are storing this information, then they are fine. The UDID is marked as deprecated, which is just a compile time warning, but still works just fine. It is still used by a lot of people, too.
As for the new advertisingIdentifier, the Apple documentation on this subject is perfectly clear. Anyone can request the advertising device identifier, but developers are required to call advertisingTrackingEnabled. If that value is NO, the the id can only be used for: "frequency capping, conversion events, estimating the number of unique users, security and fraud detection, and debugging"
Note that this is entirely the responsibility of the developer to make sure that's all that is being done. Apple will probably pull any developer that is caught not respecting this, but how can you ever really know?