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Comment by chipperyman573 | Hacker News Reader

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

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Swap "tech" with "ad" and you're in good shape.

As a denizen of statistics and technology, fooey with non-anonymized identifier bits outside of bug reports. We have ways of making data speak. We genuinely rarely care the specific record identifier.

I think there’s subtle distinction, when they say “tech” it means web based human exploitation TECHniques aka “Ad”, and when they say “engineers” without specifying which(civil, mechanical, electronics etc) it implies social script engineering. I think the idea is if you think it means technology and software engineering respectively then they’d declare it a problem with your naivety thus quote-unquote your own fault.

Much as I love the cynical view (genuinely!) I abhor Orwellianism and associated doublespeak

There's no reason they can't do both especially considering privacy-conscious people and those adverse to advertising are the very people advertisers would pay a lot of money to reach.

They've shown a reluctance to do that with adblockers that work by blacklisting IPs, an easier fix.

> privacy-conscious people and those adverse to advertising are the very people advertisers would pay a lot of money to reach.

Why? Not trying to be snarky, just genuinely curious, I'd expect that those people would generally be less susceptible to advertising.

My theory with this is that someone privacy-conscious, ad-adverse and those who block ads signal both that their time is too valuable to be wasted by advertising and they have the skills to install technical countermeasures against them. This correlates favourably with developers and similar positions that typically have higher than average salaries (thus more purchasing power) and the possibility of influencing purchasing decisions at their company for enterprise products.

People who avoid ads aren't even considered a target audience. They exercise too much critical thinking for advertisers who want to grab people by the feels and get them to buy their product for a dopamine rush.

This isn't true for publishers. They want everyone to see ads so they can get paid.

Thanks for the added perspective, you're definitely correct. Measuring penetration is a big deal for price setting ad space. Even still, it doesn't seem to push Google to include their Ad ID system in AOSP instead of the Play Store. They could have forced ROM developers to go digging for the API to remove it.

> They could have forced ROM developers to go digging for the API to remove it.

They'd probably become a big target for regulators then.

advertisers would use a hardware fingerprint probably

I'd be surprised if they didn't.

Do I understand your comment correctly? If you turn this off, you vanish into the crowd? Or are you saying you become that much more unique?

Close, this means that if you reset it on a regular basis advertisers will see you as a new person each time because so few people do it that they don't invest resources into handing it.

From trying to teach the masses to empower them to "fuck you, got mine".

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