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I am trying to understand the new "Limit ad tracking" feature in iOS. I have to implement a couple of ad sdks into my app. Within these sdks I need to pass certain information like current user location, name, gender, a unique user id etc to deploy targeted apps.

From the documentation, it is stated that

To get the advertising identifier:

  • Get a reference to the shared instance of this class using the sharedManager method.

  • Check whether advertising tracking is limited using the advertisingTrackingEnabled property.

    If the user has limited ad tracking, use the advertising identifier only for the following purposes: frequency capping, conversion events, estimating the number of unique users, security and fraud detection, and debugging.

  • Get the advertising identifier using the advertisingIdentifier property.

Since there is nothing more specific mentioned about location information, name, gender etc with regards to ads. My question is for ios 6+ do I need to check if the user has enabled "Limit ad tracking" and only then pass these parameters?

Jefferson
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1 Answers1

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The AdSupport API should be used to indicate to the app if it should or should not do ad tracking. It's up to you as the app developer to decide what you would track about the user: it might be behavioral information (what they are doing with the app) or personally identifiable information (who they are, name or email or whatever) or general demographics (where they are, male/female etc.)

Whatever information you use to provide advertising to the user, you should (or must, depending on country and laws) disclose what your app does in a privacy policy. I'm not a lawyer, so you should be sure to get actual legal advice about privacy and your app.

From a technical perspective, you'll want to do something like:

ASIdentifierManager *adIdentManager = [ASIdentifierManager sharedManager];
if (adIdentManager.advertisingTrackingEnabled) {
    // do ad tracking/targeting stuff
} else {
    // throw away any tracking info you may have saved before
}

at app startup/resume.

Presumably, the big advertising company SDKs you might choose to include in your app would take this into account, but it's worth asking.

billo
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