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by samt 2721 days ago
Where do you get that IDFA is unique to the publisher?
1 comments

Apologies, I'm conflating two slightly different things there.

There's the identifierForVendor [0] which is unique to the publisher. This is pretty safe to use however you see fit (within reason).

Then there's the advertisingIdentifier [1], which is not unique, but can easily be permanently zeroed out by the user. Apple also have some fairly stringent rules about how it can be used [2], not to mention further rules about not identifying people surreptitiously [3]:

> 5.1.2 Data Use and Sharing

> (iii) Apps should not attempt to surreptitiously build a user profile based on collected data and may not attempt, facilitate, or encourage others to identify anonymous users or reconstruct user profiles based on data collected from Apple-provided APIs or any data that you say has been collected in an “anonymized,” “aggregated,” or otherwise non-identifiable way.

They ask you to explicitly confirm that you're following the advertising identifier rules in particular every single time you submit to the App Store.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidevice/162...

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidenti...

[2] https://support.appsflyer.com/hc/en-us/articles/207032086-Ap...

[3] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#dat...

Cannot these restrictions be lifted if you write that the user agrees to sharing all of their data for any purposes somewhere between the lines of a 20-page Privacy Policy?
I imagine Apple has the final word on how to define the word surreptitiously. I would like to think Apple could interpret somewhere in 20 page privacy policy is surreptitious.