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It's a red herring. In addition to the IDFA, Apple has something called the IDFV (identifierForVendor). This ID is unique to a publisher, i.e. if a user has 3 o

by fmajid 6y ago

It's a red herring. In addition to the IDFA, Apple has something called the IDFV (identifierForVendor). This ID is unique to a publisher, i.e. if a user has 3 of your apps installed, all three will share the same IDFV, so you can even do cross-app or cross-selling analytics. What you cannot do by design is use IDFV to build a cross-publisher dossier on users, or target users based on that ID other than on your own apps. Apple hasn't put any restrictions on IDFV, only on IDFA, which was designed, well, for advertising and needs to be reined-in due to abuses in the Wild West everything goes world of the AdTech surveillance-industrial complex. In fact the existing opt-out "Limit Ad Tracking" setting that already implements what will become opt-in with iOS 14.5 does not apply to IDFVs. Back in 2010 Steve Jobs himself had banned analytics altogether when Flurry's VP of Marketing blabbed and disclosed the existence of the then secret iPad: https://venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/apple-flurry-ipad/ https://venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/apple-flurry-ipad/

apike 6y ago
Yes, but – Apple's documentation says that the upcoming opt-in requirement is for more than for IDFA-based tracking. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-use/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-... According to Apple, the opt-in API is also required for other activities, including: > Placing a third-party SDK in your app that combines user data from your app with user data from other developers’ apps to target advertising or measure advertising efficiency, even if you don’t use the SDK for these purposes. For example, using an analytics SDK that repurposes the data it collects from your app to enable targeted advertising in other developers’ apps. So as a developer, you need to ask: even though we don't use IDFA, is this analytics SDK repurposing our data to fingerprint and target our users? Certainly for the default setups of these adtech-backed free analytics SDKs the answer is "presumably yes?". But we don't yet have a clear answer from Apple or the vendors as to what exactly will trigger an App Review rejection here, and what exactly the SDKs do with the data they receive in different circumstances. Hence the uncertainty.
- Spivak 6y ago
  The world where people are just dropping huge opaque blobs of code into their own apps that betray your users privacy, probably, we didn't actually check, is awful. How is the person releasing the app not ultimately responsible for every line of code in it?

by fmajid 6y ago

apike 6y ago

Yes, but – Apple's documentation says that the upcoming opt-in requirement is for more than for IDFA-based tracking. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-use/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-... According to Apple, the opt-in API is also required for other activities, including: > Placing a third-party SDK in your app that combines user data from your app with user data from other developers’ apps to target advertising or measure advertising efficiency, even if you don’t use the SDK for these purposes. For example, using an analytics SDK that repurposes the data it collects from your app to enable targeted advertising in other developers’ apps. So as a developer, you need to ask: even though we don't use IDFA, is this analytics SDK repurposing our data to fingerprint and target our users? Certainly for the default setups of these adtech-backed free analytics SDKs the answer is "presumably yes?". But we don't yet have a clear answer from Apple or the vendors as to what exactly will trigger an App Review rejection here, and what exactly the SDKs do with the data they receive in different circumstances. Hence the uncertainty.

Spivak 6y ago
The world where people are just dropping huge opaque blobs of code into their own apps that betray your users privacy, probably, we didn't actually check, is awful. How is the person releasing the app not ultimately responsible for every line of code in it?