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

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.

Comments

Reasonable And Good Idea

[omfglearntoplay]

I think this is a very reasonable thing to do. Now that we have the government looking hard at all this data collection, now is the time for Apple to step up and do something like this to help out the end user.

Re:Or take matters into you own hands...

[Penguinisto]

... and get rid of your Apple products for life.

...and go straight to Android, where they -

Oh, wait.

Yeah, nevermind.

Perhaps going back to an old school flip-phone isn't such a bad idea anymore?