• by kerng on 5/14/2020, 3:36:48 PM

    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.

  • by ckastner on 5/14/2020, 4:56:13 PM

    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

  • by chipperyman573 on 5/14/2020, 4:10:19 PM

    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 time but if it didn't exist then advertisers would use a hardware fingerprint probably, which is a lot harder to spoof