[Freedombox-discuss] UUID tracked

[Ben Mendis]

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What's at issue, in these cases, is not that Apple devices have unique
device identifiers, but that the browser is intentionally sending that
information over the wire to remote websites and advertisers. The UDID
by itself is fairly harmless. It doesn't send itself. It's the browser
(which is software) which is transmitting it. Fix the browser, and it
won't matter if the UDID exists on the system or not.

Best regards,
Ben the Pyrate

On Thu, 28 Jun 2012, freebirds at hushmail.com wrote:

> Opera stated: “Imagine if advertisers or websites had the serial
> number of your computer after every time you visited, and you
> couldn’t turn that off,” said Scott Swanson, head of the Opera team
> that developed App-Tribute, in a phone interview with TPM. “The
> fact that this [UDID] has been available to advertisers and
> developers in the first place has never sat well with me.”
>
> Swanson said that potentially, because the UDID stays constant,
> “companies could collect and share information about a user, and
> that could be an invasion of privacy.”
> http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/04/as-apple-stops-apps-
> from-using-phone-ids-opera-offers-solution.php
>
> "Sparrowvsrevolution writes "In the wake of news that the iPhone
> app Path uploads users' entire contact lists without permission,
> Forbes dug up a study from a group of researchers at the University
> of California at Santa Barbara and the International Security
> Systems Lab that aimed to analyze how and where iPhone apps
> transmit users' private data. Not only did the researchers find
> that one in five of the free apps in Apple's app store upload
> private data back to the apps' creators that could potentially
> identify users and allow profiles to be built of their activities;
> they also discovered that programs in Cydia, the most popular
> platform for unauthorized apps that run only on 'jailbroken'
> iPhones, tend to leak private data far less frequently than Apple's
> approved apps. The researchers ran their analysis on 1,407 free
> apps (PDF) on the two platforms. Of those tested apps, 21 percent
> of official App Store apps uploaded the user's Unique Device
> Identifier, for instance, compared with only four percent of
> unauthorized apps."
> http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/02/15/0036242/unauthorized-ios-
> apps-leak-private-data-less-than-approved-ones
>
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