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Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

#41

Post by joemazerino »

greglindahl wrote: post #8
izacus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The identifier itself it made to track the user by 3rd party apps, so it's pretty clear why its there :) Apple provides the exact same API - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidenti... although IIRC it manages it better (users can revoke it, but it's on by default). I wonder why Google is singled out here though - if Apple is also mining our data, they should also be on the hook. I wonder if all o…

Apple's identifier can't be turned off; you can manually change it as often as you like, but it involves enough clicks that I bet few people do.

Apple identifiers can't be turned off but they can be 'reset'.

Re: Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

#42

Post by matheusmoreira »

chrisseaton wrote: post #27
ckastner wrote: post #18

The title should have mentioned the person by name: it's Max Schrems [1]. He has a legal background, and has fought a number of high-profile privacy cases in Europe. The day the GDPR came into effect, he filed violations complaints against Facebook and Google in four different jurisdictions. He's a spearhead figure in this regard. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems

> The day the GDPR came into effect, he filed violations complaints against Facebook and Google in four different jurisdictions. When people do this it comes across as malicious harassment rather than a genuine legal complaint for harm caused. Why so many jurisdictions, and why on the very day it came into effect?

> it comes across as malicious harassment rather than a genuine legal complaint

Legal harassment is an issue when individual citizens and small businesses are targeted with frivolous lawsuits clearly intended to burn as much of their time and money as possible.

This is not the case here. Google and Facebook deserve every privacy lawsuit they get. They have the resources to deal with it too.

Re: Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

#43

Post by PeterisP »

JadeNB wrote: post #3
kerng wrote: post #2

Surprised that Google didn't take proper pre-cautions here to not run into this. If there is indeed such an identifier, enabled by default its pretty obvious that its technically possible to track a user. And with all the other data Google has, they also can link to the actual identity pretty easily.

Surely it's easier for Google to ask forgiveness than permission. Why wouldn't they do this if they want to track you, especially if they can muster even a shred of plausible deniability to allow them to keep it in place longer?

It's not easier to ask forgiveness than permission - asking permission is free but having to 'ask forgiveness' under GDPR if you've intentionally not asked permission may involve fines up to 4% of annual global turnover which comes out to something like 6 billion dollars for google.

Re: Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

#44

Post by chipperyman573 »

qlmr wrote: post #19
chipperyman573 wrote: post #7

For anyone complaining about this: the advertising ID is a very good thing for us tech people Nobody know how to change it or turn it off. That means a lot of developers and advertisers assume it is actually a good way to track users. So if you go in and reset/disable it, you'll be in such a small minority that you'd become an edge case and they'd lose the historical data on you. Obviously this isn't true 100% of the…

Do I understand your comment correctly? If you turn this off, you vanish into the crowd? Or are you saying you become that much more unique?

Close, this means that if you reset it on a regular basis advertisers will see you as a new person each time because so few people do it that they don't invest resources into handing it.

Re: Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

#45

Post by m463 »

kerng wrote: post #2

Surprised that Google didn't take proper pre-cautions here to not run into this. If there is indeed such an identifier, enabled by default its pretty obvious that its technically possible to track a user. And with all the other data Google has, they also can link to the actual identity pretty easily.

if you posit that google is an identification service, and they have lots of machine learning experts...

why can't google train a neural net on each person they've gathered data on and track them using a custom model?

Re: Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

#46

Post by JadeNB »

PeterisP wrote: post #43
JadeNB wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it's easier for Google to ask forgiveness than permission. Why wouldn't they do this if they want to track you, especially if they can muster even a shred of plausible deniability to allow them to keep it in place longer?

It's not easier to ask forgiveness than permission - asking permission is free but having to 'ask forgiveness' under GDPR if you've intentionally not asked permission may involve fines up to 4% of annual global turnover which comes out to something like 6 billion dollars for google.

It is easier, at least in the short term, because it gets right away to that tracking sweetness. It might be regretted in the long term, although global companies don't seem to be taking GDPR seriously yet, probably because they don't sufficiently fear the enforcing bodies. (Let's see those consent walls come down first.) In the meantime, who knows how much Google made off the tracking information that they got this way?

Re: Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

#47

Post by Nextgrid »

ivanfon wrote: post #20
Nextgrid wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason they can't do both especially considering privacy-conscious people and those adverse to advertising are the very people advertisers would pay a lot of money to reach.

> privacy-conscious people and those adverse to advertising are the very people advertisers would pay a lot of money to reach. Why? Not trying to be snarky, just genuinely curious, I'd expect that those people would generally be less susceptible to advertising.

My theory with this is that someone privacy-conscious, ad-adverse and those who block ads signal both that their time is too valuable to be wasted by advertising and they have the skills to install technical countermeasures against them. This correlates favourably with developers and similar positions that typically have higher than average salaries (thus more purchasing power) and the possibility of influencing purchasing decisions at their company for enterprise products.

Re: Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

#48

Post by mellow2020 »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #7

For anyone complaining about this: the advertising ID is a very good thing for us tech people Nobody know how to change it or turn it off. That means a lot of developers and advertisers assume it is actually a good way to track users. So if you go in and reset/disable it, you'll be in such a small minority that you'd become an edge case and they'd lose the historical data on you. Obviously this isn't true 100% of the…

From trying to teach the masses to empower them to "fuck you, got mine".

Re: Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

#49

Post by nelaboras »

chrisseaton wrote: post #27
ckastner wrote: post #18

The title should have mentioned the person by name: it's Max Schrems [1]. He has a legal background, and has fought a number of high-profile privacy cases in Europe. The day the GDPR came into effect, he filed violations complaints against Facebook and Google in four different jurisdictions. He's a spearhead figure in this regard. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems

> The day the GDPR came into effect, he filed violations complaints against Facebook and Google in four different jurisdictions. When people do this it comes across as malicious harassment rather than a genuine legal complaint for harm caused. Why so many jurisdictions, and why on the very day it came into effect?

because it wasn't fully clear which jurisdiction would apply.

Re: Stop tracking me: Austrian citizen files complaint over Android Advertising ID

#50

Post by weswpg »

als0 wrote: post #11
gingerlime wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be turned off (although I think under the hood they just send zeros). But it’s on by default. https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/does-apple-care-about-your-... EDIT also https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074

I don't interpret "Limit Ad Tracking" as "off". As another comment mentioned, the only effective mechanism is to reset the identifier periodically. That's not a disable mechanism, though.

> When Limit Ad Tracking is enabled on iOS 10 or later, the Advertising Identifier is replaced with a non-unique value of all zeros to prevent the serving of targeted ads. It is automatically reset to a new random identifier if you disable Limit Ad Tracking.

Shouldn't that be enough?

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