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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.
They do the same thing.
... and get rid of your Apple products for life.
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.
1 month might be a good default, but if I want "forever" I should be allowed to.
Other intervals, from less than a minute to a year or more, should be offered.
If I want it to "change it every time it's requested" I should be allowed that choice as well.
I prefer the last one, but some may prefer the first.
Firefox is on its dying gasps, why would Apple give a shit what Mozilla thinks?
... and get rid of your Apple products for life.
... such as "Don't be evil."
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
I would, but BananaJr is obsolete not to mention originally fictional, and PearPC and Orange Micro are dead.
The various Pis are a good start but they aren't quite powerful enough for me.
"This can be used by EVIL (US) GOVERNMENT to catch innocent criminals!!! Apple help us (to protect innocent criminals)!!!"
IMHO, general public is NOT really obsessed about privacy (ask FB!!!), unlike what Mozilla & EFF & ACLU etc self-appointed "privacy advocates" always try to claim/portray!!!
Who really obsessively care about "privacy"???
Criminals & the people who are always working hard to protect them!!!
You are that part of society that is funding the continuation of this stuff.
The Founding Fathers of the US said "Fuck you, Georgie boy!" and went to war.
You're a royalist, saying "Yeah, it would be nice to have representation give that I'm subject to taxation, but you know, what can you do? Who else is going to build the roads? I like roads."
We could just not save advertiser IDs at all.
Why would any internet user want to accept tracking by a computer company, ad company?
Because the viewer finds ads less inconvenient than having to key in a credit card number and pay $5 for a month's subscription to view one document on a website that put up a paywall once privacy-respecting ads became no longer viable. Ads based on each viewer's inferred interests pay three times as much as ads based solely on the document's context.
tech Companies are scum for doing this to us.
Microsoft gets extra scum points for turning a PC in to the most surveilled product even above google.
Why can't we just make money in decent ways with out resorting to scumbag tactics and viewing users as cows?
Fuck them.
As somebody who has worked in adtech, and now works in fraud prevention, I think Mozilla's actions are ultimately of a suicidal nature- they are handing Google and Facebook even more fuel for their oligopolies at the expense of every other player in the industry, and given long enough, this will threaten the existence of the Mozilla foundation itself. Furthermore, and counterintuitively, these actions (including changes to cookie policies and attempts to defeat device fingerprinting) will have negative impacts on consumers when fraud detection technologies cease to function and everybody is forced to go through extreme steps to verify their identities. Sorry, I dont want to have to scan an ID and take a selfie every time I transact. Fraud losses at online retailers already total 8% on average, and that would easily climb to 30% if fraud prevention tech didn't work. The long term economic consequences of moving towards extreme privacy measures will be real and painful for people both inside and outside of these industries.
allowing the user to decide whether to share udid, idfa, guids, imei, esn, telephone numbers.. anything similar.. with an app.. because it's a fucking app. bar apps that 'require' any of those to function properly.
while they're mainly used to help enable the massive tracking of mobile devices.. phones can be stolen or compromised, unique hardware identifiers should not be used for authentication purposes.. so no, you can't claim it's to verify users... you're not verifying the user, you're verifying the device.
For a company that forced paid-for extension installations and ads into their browser to sustain themselves they don't really have room to attack others.
Take the board out of your eye before complaining about the splinter in others.
Well, I'm pretty sure that Google, Facebook and others store the device IDFA in a cookie, they don't just rely on Apple's value.
When the IDFA is rotated, they can see the old IDFA in the cookie and can reassociate the new IDFA with the old one.
IDFA rotation would be pointless without a cookie clearance as well, which would annoy users as they would have to relogin to everything.
You still use a web browser on a phone? How GAUCHE. It's 2019. Seriously.
I think this is a very reasonable thing to do.
Reasonable to you maybe. Not very reasonable to Apple. See below for why.
Now that we have the government looking hard at all this data collection
Which government are you talking about because it sure as hell isn't the US government. Maybe they are in Europe somewhere.
now is the time for Apple to step up and do something like this to help out the end user.
A nice sentiment but I strongly doubt Apple will actually do anything useful in this regard. Google derives the vast majority of their revenue from advertising so if Apple really wanted to stick it to Google, hurting their advertising revenue would be the way to do it. Thing is though that Apple and Google are sort of partners and Google pays Apple a reported $9 billion to be the default search engine so it's unlikely Apple cut off that revenue stream except as some sort of nuclear option.
I mean, surely, you would prefer paying pennies for articles, if there were a transparent way that didn't involve much thought from you.
So, your argument is a straw man, or it's a false dichotomy. "You'd rather be tracked than have your toenails pulled off, right?"
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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
Such as the Augur device fingerprinting library.
The iPhone currently commands 13.2% of global smartphone market share, vs. 86.8% android market share.
Though the iPhone has a smaller user base, iOS users tend to have more money per user than Android users. Users of iOS spend more not only on paid apps and in-app purchases but also on physical products. (Source: "Survey: iPhone owners spend more, have higher incomes than Android users" by Robert Williams)
And "global" reach matters little to an advertiser based in the United States who seeks to reach only viewers in the United States.
Just saying, why not get rid of this antifeature entirely?
Apple claims to be user-first, right?
surely, you would prefer paying pennies for articles
A 36 cent charge for an article means 31 cents would go to the credit card processor and a nickel to the publisher. How would you propose to improve the efficiency of micropayments?
Well, then make it Opt-In for everyone.
"This article is available to subscribers. For a free day pass, opt in to all tracking providers."
Tracking would default off. The article would display once the viewer makes a choice to pay or be tracked. Close the tab, click the next search result, and the next website would also offer the viewer a choice to pay or be tracked.
I don't think anyone reasonable is not proposing to eliminate all side-channels. 90% of the time, making this observation amounts to scope creep. What sensible people actually propose is to eliminate the fat side channels that are so plump and juicy that anyone who comes along could exploit them with incidental nonchalance.
What you are aiming to do is minimize the fat channels, and leave only the thin channels, so that anyone who is entirely serious about exploiting this kind of information keeps a well-thumbed copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of Side Channel on his bedside table.
It's almost impossible to pull of the innocent "who, me?" routine when thick editions of Side Channel Monthly are cascading onto your unkempt desk out of your unkempt in-basket, while you pour over unboxing your spanky new ACME Side Channel 9000 with 1938 festive das Blinkenlights.
Once the multitudinous side channels become sufficiently thin, the jackbooted thug of maximum entropy analysis is forced to weave all the delicate threads back together again in full flagrante regalia. The threads can not be eliminated. But the weaver can be forced to possess 300 different lock picks, each and every one sourced from the Ruhr valley.
"not" in the opening sentence was somehow left over from my immoderate first attempt. No good deed goes unpunished. My bad.
Any app that is installed when you change it can track the change and associate the old idfa with the new one.
Same goes for anything you log in to. The new ID will still be associated with your account.
It's a ruse by Apple to make it seem like they care.
I reset mine at least 5 times a day. A game I play uses the ID to identify me to ads they play so I get in free game stuff.
If I don't reset it, the ads don't play, because I already got my free stuff that day.
If I reset it, I can see another set of ads, which play while I am doing something else, and get more free in game stuff.
Settings->Privacy->Advertising there is a Reset Advertising Identifier button to do this.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
Mozilla has been acting for years like some sort of Messiah while actually being the Devil. It's bizarre to see. They don't practice as they preach in any sense, yet constantly get praise (from themselves and from others). I hate this world and all of you.