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Mozilla Wants Apple To Change Users' iPhone Advertiser ID Every Month (zdnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

Mozilla has launched a petition today to get Apple to rotate the IDFA unique identifier of iOS users every month. From a report: The purpose of this request is to prevent online advertisers from creating profiles that contain too much information about iOS users. IDFA stands for "IDentifier For Advertisers" and is a per-device unique ID. Apps running on a device can request access to this ID and relay the number to advertising SDKs/partners they use to show ads to their users. As experts from Singular, a mobile marketing firm explain, "IDFAs take the place of cookies in mobile advertising delivered to iOS devices because cookies are problematic in the mobile world." IDFAs are different from UDIDs, which stand for "unique device identifiers," which are permanent and unchangeable device identifiers. Apple added support for IDFAs specifically to replace UDIDs, which many apps were collecting for all sorts of shady reasons, enabling pervasive tracking of iOS users.

3 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Seems pointless by Altus · · Score: 4, Informative

    If apple does this people will simply save the ID locally and when the app launches and the ID that the system gives you doesn't match the one you have saved you make a call to record the new ID and bingo you have a running, relatively up to date ID tied to a history of different IDs as the same devic.

    --

    "In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson

  2. Your theory breaks down by SuperKendall · · Score: 3, Informative

    A nice sentiment but I strongly doubt Apple will actually do anything useful in this regard.

    They already did.

    The iPhone used to offer a unique device ID that never changed, and was the same across all apps.

    But Apple realized that was being misused for tracking, so they changed the system (at a time Google was paying them to include Google as the search engine) so that advertisers could just get an advertising ID, that can in theory change any time.

    In fact the thing that really scratches your theory - any IOS user can reset the advertising ID manually any time they like, via the Reset Advertising Identifier feature under Settings->Privacy->Advertising.

    That was introduced in iOS6...

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:Your theory breaks down by viperidaenz · · Score: 1, Informative

      An ID that can be changed at will isn't much different from a fixed one.
      Any app that has access to the ID and another form of state can track the change. So basically every single app installed on your phone when you make the change, or any app that requires some kind of user log-in.

      Your new IDFA will just be added to the same ad profile as your old one was. It's nothing but a false sense of power given to the user.