Every iPhone contains a unique, software-visible serial number - the UDID

pskl.us

9 points·nephics··8 comments

All networking components have a unique ID also (MAC Addresses), so this feels a bit like scaremongering to me. Developers on any platform can use that relatively safely to presuming individuality, so why's it bothersome that the iPhone has one unqiue ID? (instead of the two MAC addresses (wifi / cellular )

A user can replace the default MAC address which the platform read from the hardware. Is that true for an iPhone UDID?

It's probably the first time in history that the UUID is used by many 3rd party software developers.

yes but some aspects change under mobile radio to IP gateways..

Your mobile SIM card encrypts the unique part of the ID..

The bother some part comes in when a #RD party has access sot that ID ..on most mobile OS platforms the 3rd party developer has very restricted access to that ID..not on iphone

So...if I had somebody else's UDID, what could I do their phone? Scaremongering indeed. yawns

P.S. Being an owner of an app review blog, I give my UDID out frequently.

If you can match the UUID to a real name and make the user use your app/website frequently, you've pretty much everything to track her/him (add geo if you wish).

He/She cannot escape/opt out.

As far as I know each Mac has its own unique serial number (despite from the CPU serial). I wonder how frequent this ID is used in the wild...

ioreg -rd1 -c IOPlatformExpertDevice | awk '/IOPlatformUUID/ { split($0, line, "\""); printf("%s\n", line[4]); }'

thanks to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/933460/unique-hardware-id...

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