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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.

17 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Reasonable And Good Idea by omfglearntoplay · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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. Re:Reasonable And Good Idea by alvinrod · · Score: 2

      Better to constantly rotate existing IDs than to randomly generate new ones. If you reuse existing ones and change them randomly, it pollutes data sets in ways that are harder for the companies that maintain them to detect. People are creatures of habit, so it likely wouldn't take very long to tie a pattern of behavior to an existing profile with a high degree of certainty.

      At the end of the day if the user has full control over their device (which they don't with Apple), there isn't anything that advertisers can attempt to do that the user can't thwart in some way. Add in a VPN or some other service that obfuscates your IP / location and there's not a lot that they can do.

    2. Re:Reasonable And Good Idea by Wrath0fb0b · · Score: 2

      At the end of the day if the user has full control over their device (which they don't with Apple), there isn't anything that advertisers can attempt to do that the user can't thwart in some way.

      Add in a VPN or some other service that obfuscates your IP / location and there's not a lot that they can do.

      True in theory.

      Devilishly difficult to implement in practice, because what you are proposing is the elimination of all side channel information leakage from the browser to the web host. And all those tiny bits of information that can add up (user-agents, DOM support) to a pretty good identifier. Check out the EFF's Panopticlick site, which details all the tiny information leakages and sums them up.

      Add to that canvas fingerprinting and other skullduggery, and even with full control over a device, it's an uphill battle to thwart all the ways an advertiser can assign you a unique stable identifier.

    3. Re:Reasonable And Good Idea by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Ask all the people who don't install an ad blocker I guess.

      For companies like Apple and Google the issue is that if they do start a war with advertisers, it will get nasty very quickly. Say they decide to remove HTML5 pingback and disable Javascript entirely, the advertisers will just change the links to go via a redirect page that logs the referer. Block the referer and they will encode it in the URL, block that and they will use cookies, block those and by that point everyone will be miserable because most of the web is broken and they can't buy shit from Amazon any more.

      The fundamental problem is that users want content for free, but they don't want to be tracked which is how a lot of that content is funded. Apple and Google are trying to balance those desires by keeping the tracking to a "reasonable" level.

      --
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  2. Re:Now go after Microsoft by Red_Forman · · Score: 2

    And then go after Google and Facebook, and watch them laugh at your demands.

  3. Re:Or take matters into you own hands... by Red_Forman · · Score: 3, Funny

    Advertisers are the problem, so you want to get rid of Apple.

    You're a dumbass.

  4. 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

    1. Re:Seems pointless by garcia · · Score: 2

      I work in the industry building customer-level cross-device marketing attribution models. This is a complete non-factor for most companies, just like ITP changes, it is a mere annoyance more than anything.

      We are able to get 100% match to customers through digital only interactions and >60% match across any number of devices to customers who interact with digital channels but only buy through brick and mortar, without any crazy shit/third parties/etc.

      So, while this is a great soundbite, it's ultimately not doing much but bring more attention to the public about how their data are being used to target them to buy more.

  5. Re:Or take matters into you own hands... by Penguinisto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... 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?

    --
    Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  6. Or... by Nkwe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We could just not save advertiser IDs at all.

  7. Re:Or take matters into you own hands... by FictionPimp · · Score: 2

    I'm happy to, but first can you show me a android phone that I can buy with all the google integrations removed? I consider google a bigger threat than apple to my privacy and I do not want to use any service related to them.

  8. Would you prefer a paywall? by tepples · · Score: 2

    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.

  9. Apple isn't going to bother by sjbe · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. 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...

    --
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  11. iPhone owners spend more by tepples · · Score: 2

    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.

  12. Re:Now go after Microsoft by KiloByte · · Score: 2

    Microsoft at least does IDKFA -- with apple, the K are entirely Apple's, not shared for you. (Hint: you're doomed. A cookie (of the non-tracking kind) to anyone who gets the reference.)

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  13. Re:Now go after Microsoft by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

    Who does IDDQD then?