Apple To Introduce Newer, More Private Way to Track Your iPhone

Meanwhile, in OTHER Apple news…the company has never exactly been acclaimed for its ability to respect privacy, but the recent mess over Unique Device Identification, or UDIDs, has been a black mark even for them. Essentially, advertisers and app developers were tying names to UDIDs and sending them across the Internet in plain text as part of their ongoing attempts to entice you to buy whatever crap they’re selling.

So, Apple has decided some things are too evil even for it, and is changing things so your tastes can be collected without them being tied to your name:

Developers and marketers have made use of the UDID in order to target their services to specific users, but Apple began warning developers to avoid using it with the release of iOS 5.0 in October of 2011. In March, the company began rejecting apps that still used it. The WSJ has virtually no details on what the new system will be like, but wrote, “One of the people briefed said that the new anonymous identifier is likely to rely on a sequence of numbers that isn’t tied to a specific device.”

In other words, soon there will be an entirely new way to invade your privacy advertisers can abuse! Hooray? (And let’s not forget about the integration of Facebook in iOS 6!)

(Image courtesy Patrick Haney on Flickr)

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