5 ms·
You don't need an IDFA to track someone in the same app. You can generate your own UUID to use. The value of the IDFA comes from coordinating user behavior acr
by mobjack 7y ago
You don't need an IDFA to track someone in the same app. You can generate your own UUID to use.
The value of the IDFA comes from coordinating user behavior across apps.
Targeting ads is one use case, but it is also used in conversion tracking, which is very valuable to advertisers. They can know if ads in one app resulted in people buying things in another app.
Edit: fixed typo
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thenewnewguy 7y agoThe point is that the app can just record the old IDFA, and when the IDFA changes whoever is doing the comparison between two apps knows that the old and new IDFA are one and the same.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y agoA likely-good-enough fix would be for Apple to first make extremely clear that this is not allowed, then catch one ad framework/library provider violating the rule and ban every single app/publisher using it to ensure the rule is actually taken seriously.
- scarface74 7y agoHow do you “catch” them? The ID is sent from the app and not in plaintext.
- afiori 7y agoI imagine with the usual review process
- scarface74 7y agoThe review process can’t tell the contents of the data being sent back.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y agoThrough the usual software analysis methods (reverse engineering, static and dynamic analysis, ...)
- marc3842h 7y agoWhat I think is that if the ID would be reused this would be kinda eliminated? I don't see a reason to not make them reusable.
- jessaustin 7y agoHow many users would care about this distinction you're attempting to draw between "targeting ads" and "conversion tracking"?
- kevinh 7y agoHow many users care about either of those at all?
- jessaustin 7y agoThat's the premise of this thread, that we care about these things.
- mrgreenfur 7y agoGenerating your own UUID is forbidden I thought? What if apple sandboxed it to each app to make it safer/easier?
- tinus_hn 7y agoYou can’t look through device identifiers like the MAC address or the serial to create ids.
- varenc 7y agosince iOS 7 Apple always returns "02:00:00:00:00:00" for the WLAN MAC address for this very reason. Besides the IDFA Apples seem to have tried hard to get rid of the obvious ways for different apps to link activity between their users. Of course if you login or provide an email it becomes easy...and there's plenty of trickier less reliable ways like looking at IP address