Apple Has Started Rejecting Apps That Access UDIDs Amid Privacy Concerns

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/24/apple-udids/

by dwynings • 14 years ago

59 58 14 years ago

epistasis• 14 years ago

This is a very good thing. The tech industry has taken privacy far too lightly, and it has the potential to be a really big deal. If a random person off the street knew what Facebook and ad networks knew about them in terms of income, product usage, et al, they'd most likely be extremely creeped out. This needs to be nipped in the bud before it has the potential to affect the entire industry.

jballanc2• 14 years ago

I'm sorry, but this solution is very much cart before the horse. I think many people have woken up in a world where most of the "free" stuff they enjoy on a daily basis necessarily requires the ability to identify them on an individual basis. I fear people will either have to learn to live with tracking and profiling as a part of everyday life, or they will have to get comfortable with the idea of paying for more of the stuff they use.

Rejecting apps for accessing UDIDs does nothing to solve the underlying problem...

palish• 14 years ago

Ok.

I choose "pay more for the stuff I use".

dhbanes• 14 years ago

Good. Now the goal is to get people (in the aggregate) to do so.

wtn• 14 years ago

They want you to use iCloud to identify people. Makes more sense anyhow, since UDID's are hardware-dependent.

throwaway64• 14 years ago

please stop spreading this false dichotomy, advertising existed before every move you made was tracked, and it was quite profitable. There is zero reason that such invasive bullshit is a requirement, period.

jballanc2• 14 years ago

Advertising has always been targeted, but lately consumers have been making it more and more difficult for advertisers to do so. Compare the number of magazines, television shows, radio stations, or highway routes to the number of websites or apps available today. When most of your target demographic reads the same 5 magazines or watches the same couple dozen television shows, targeting is easy. Now that everyone has the ability to, essentially, plot their own course through consumable media and entertainment, targeting must follow suit.

superuser22• 14 years ago

Before every move you made was tracked, there were only a handful of companies that could deliver ads to people: a few TV stations, a few radio stations, and one local paper. The Yellow Pages. Maybe some billboards.

More competition and greater accountability (you can't really measure conversion rates for TV ads) means advertising services have to be more effective. Showing people ads for things they actually want is the best way to go about that.

Facebook et al do not owe you ANYTHING. The anti-tracking crowd seems to feel it's entitled to services while providing nothing of value in exchange. That's not how the market works. Your attention alone isn't worth much if a website can't show you ads you're likely to act on.

I don't like it either, which is why I run AdBlock and pay for things that are valuable to me - NYTimes, New Yorker, local paper, and phone (nothing sensitive on GMail so I don't care). As the saying goes, you're not the customer, you're the product.

physcab• 14 years ago

Are you on Facebook? Because the kind of information that you can gather about someone from a UDID pales in comparison to the kinds of information Facebook has about you. Privacy on the web was dead a long time ago...

tomjen33• 14 years ago

So Zynga goes banckrupt? Let me see where I put that timy violin...

Xuzz2• 14 years ago

Sadly, this all could have been avoided with one simple change four years ago: rather than having the UDID match the specific device, have it be hash of the app's "keychain identifier" (usually set at the company level, enabling cross-product identification) and the real UDID. Then, it doesn't matter if an app finds out the UDID it can access: it's specific to that app or company anyway, and can't be abused as it currently is.

But as the UDID was implemented poorly (and immediately overused for everything, including from server-side account keying, which Apple can't just break), they have to essentially remove it now.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

So, are you saying that now, we >can't< use the hash(UDID+keychain_id)?

EDIT: On 2nd thought, isn't hash(UDID+keychain_id) almost as bad as just squirting UDID over the network anyhow?

Xuzz2• 14 years ago

I'm talking about Apple, not about developers. If Apple had returned SHA1(KeychainID + UDID) instead of just UDID when the SDK was released, then apps would never have seen the "real" UDID, and we wouldn't have this issue now. However, since Apple did not do that and they can't change the UDID now (for a variety of reasons, including various abuses of it by developers), it's too late for them to fix it now with such a simple change.

pagekalisedown• 14 years ago

If you want to switch to using MAC addresses, look up getifaddrs().

saurik2• 14 years ago

The fact that this seems to be entirely legitimate entirely undermines the point of removing the UDID.

irons• 14 years ago

"The point" is to make Congress stop yelling at Apple. Forcing developers to jury-rig something other than a system API gives them an out, rhetorically.

uuilly• 14 years ago

Yikes. We have a version awaiting review that migrates us off udids. We need the udid for one last login before they get an oauth token. Perhaps we will get lucky and apple won't test a migration bc fresh installs don't use it. This really sucks, we were following the rules and they changed the schedule.

SquareWheel2• 14 years ago

That's unfortunate, I hope things work out for you.

To other developers, this is an inherent risk of working under somebody else's rules. Open platforms like the web are in constant flux, but won't reject you for political/monetary reasons.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

To other developers, this is an inherent risk of working under somebody else's rules.

Yes, but the alternative might be something like a cesspool of everybody squirting out their UDID either in plaintext or using encryption with an easily findable key in the app -- resulting in lots of counterfeiting of UDIDs and potentially lots of bad things enabled by that.

calloc• 14 years ago

If you do have issues maybe you can use that justification in an attempt to get it passed anyway.

stock_toaster• 14 years ago

I hear it is only a percentage of apps being rejected so far (some percentage of the approval team being told to check/reject apps using UDID calls). So, you might make it through anyway.

jeremyflores• 14 years ago

A nifty replacement category: https://github.com/gekitz/UIDevice-with-UniqueIdentifier-for.... It generates a different token than the UDID, so you will have to migrate users.

goronbjorn• 14 years ago

Does this mean anything for companies that do device management? It seems like most enterprise apps are logging some kind of device id.

aritraghosh007• 14 years ago

This company AppsFire is coming up with an alternative standard http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/01/appsfire-announces-open-sou...

kingnothing• 14 years ago

Everything I've seen about push notifications relies on the device id. How do you do push without having the udid?

mpakes• 14 years ago

Push notifications use a device token that is separate from the UDID. An app can only get access to the device token if the user enables push notifications for that app.

SeoxyS• 14 years ago

This has one major implication: killing ad networks. Or, more specifically, killing ad targeting and CPA.

Advertising is not going away. Let's face it, people are just not willing to pay when it comes to the type of games that are popular on the iPhone. That's in large part a result of the race-to-the-bottom environment Apple created with App Store. Advertising is what makes this economy work.

Whether it's ultimately a good thing or not to kill advertising is a debate I'm not going into (tho, I'd personally err on the side of it being a good thing long term). But, good ad targeting and CPA has the effect of improving the ad experience for everybody: making more money, and seeing more relevant ads.

Admittedly, I'm biased since I'm part of a mobile advertising startup, but I think Apple fucked up here. Having a way to uniquely identify a device across apps is very important. I'd suggest creating a unique identifier on device installation, and formatting the device would reset a new identifier. I know for a fact that if we were to play by Apple's rules, and this goes through, we're going to be very hurt by this change.

demallien• 14 years ago

This has one major implication: killing ad networks. Or, more specifically, killing ad targeting and CPA.

I for one won't be shedding any tears - as a woman that spends a lot of time on tech (and hence nominally male) websites, I am decidedly over getting ads for dating sites telling me how I'll be able to hook up with young women with no complexes...

Another classic - I hang out on some atheist sites, so of course I'm vitally interested in some Christian alpha course or what not - after all, I spend time on sites talking about religion, don't I?

The model is flawed. I find that so called targeted ads are almost entirely out of phase with my interests, almost comically so. That being the case, I'd rather not be giving unknown people the ability to more easily monitor my online behaviour.

gyardley3• 14 years ago

This is completely backwards - you're complaining about untargeted ads, based only on the rough context of the page you're on.

Properly-targeted ads would know you're a) female and b) an atheist and show appropriate advertising if any was available.

Removing the UDID does nothing to prevent the type of ads you're complaining about - they work off of context, and context is always available to the ad server - but it does prevent ad targeting from getting better.

tomjen33• 14 years ago

People pay for apps in the appstore. They just don't pay as much as you may want them to.

mike-cardwell• 14 years ago

Mobile or web advertising does not rely on the ability to track users across apps or across websites. Mobile and web advertising would still exist and would still be almost as profitable without that capability.

The loss of privacy for everyone which occurs when organisations can arbitrarily track people across sites or apps at will, is too high a cost considering the tiny benefits for both the users and the advertisers.

sylvinus• 14 years ago

I'm not 100% sure they already do, but will Apple continue using UDIDs in iAds? Because if they do that would grant them an incredible competitive advantage against all other ad networks...

msh• 14 years ago

But you still need the uuid for push messages, so how are they handling that?

cmelbye• 14 years ago

Push notifications do not use UDID, they use a different device token.

nullflux• 14 years ago

This seems to me to be something that should have been issued as an OS-level patch.

Apple could prevent a lot of these issues by using an application-specific UDID generated by the device. Hash the UDID with a random salt generated from entropy on the device, and use it only for that app install. Developers then couldn't track you from install to install, or across their application ecosystems. Privacy issue averted.

Any existing calls that hundreds of thousands of applications make to currently get the UDID just return this application-specific one instead.

Jyaif• 14 years ago

They can't patch the OS because some applications rely on the UDID being constant. For example, some games check if the scores/progress are real by storing a hash of the scores and the UDID. This allows the dev to check that the scores/progress file wasn't downloaded from internet.

Changing the UDID would make the application think that the scores were tampered with.

gmac• 14 years ago

But they could change the kind of UDID returned to apps installed after the OS update. That seems like a reasonable compromise?

rbarooah• 14 years ago

As pointed out in the article, they warned us about this more than 6 months ago.

Changing up the timetable isn't great, but there's not much reason for people to be 'scrambling' to figure out what to do.

Revisor• 14 years ago

How does the ability to get the UDID combine with the (recently leaked) silent ability to access and upload the whole contact directory on iOS?

ludflu• 14 years ago

i hope they dont kill TestFlight

bri3d• 14 years ago

TestFlight uses a device enrollment challenge to get your device identifier, not native code. There's no native code in TestFlight - that's why it's not in the App Store and hence can't get rejected. It's just a clever use of Apple's remote provisioning capabilities (originally designed for enterprise customers).

So this change both can't and won't kill TestFlight - the only way Apple could kill TestFlight would be to change the way their enterprise provisioning and OTA installation process works, which they have no incentive to do as the process requires very explicit user permission, isn't being probed by lawmakers, and makes them that much more attractive to enterprises.

Sujan• 14 years ago

Are there any other sources on this?

This Techcrunch article sounds a lot like hearsay to me, especially the part about the review teams.

Apple Has Started Rejecting Apps That Access UDIDs Amid Privacy Concerns

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