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> Credential sharing only works between apps registered to the same developer. That's right, but it does allow persisting an id through reinstalls of the same
by anon9001 6y ago
> Credential sharing only works between apps registered to the same developer.
That's right, but it does allow persisting an id through reinstalls of the same app, and sharing that id between apps of the same developer.
> So no, this does not allow an tracking ID usable by all apps.
It effectively does though. For example, imagine a mobile game company with 10 games. With this technique, you can track that user across app re-installs in each of those games.
Now imagine another game company doing the same trick. If both companies send up their independent tracking IDs to a central server along with any other info they can get about the user (email, screen name, IP, whatever), then you can strongly correlate users across multiple tracking IDs. The user has no way to reset these IDs even if they delete and reinstall the apps using them.
- lilyball 6y agoApple tried removing the keychain persisting in an iOS beta a while back and there was a big outcry from developers as it broke their ability to detect and ban users across app reinstalls. Apple reverted that and responded by adding a new feature where developers could permanently track 2 boolean values for a device (per app) but I don’t know who has bothered to switch to that mechanism.