In Response to TRUSTe: Mobile Tracking: How it works and why it’s different

In response to TRUSTe: Mobile Tracking: How it works and why it’s different.  The article is a decent summary of the current state of mobile advertising. There are two things that I think are not well addressed in the article or in some ways misguided. First, is the concept of fingerprinting on a mobile device. Those of us involved deeply in this area understand there isn't additional entropy in a mobile print that allows us to differentiate between 2 devices with the exact same OS. In other words, a fingerprint in mobile (beyond cookies and local storage) is at best IP/UA degrading from there significantly because IP is not reliable in most cases often switching intra-session while on mobile networks and not WiFi. The second misconception (or lack of clarity) is regarding privacy and tracking. DNT does not mean to all market players “do not track” and therefore not monitor behavior or collect data. For example, Yahoo recently announced it would purposefully ignore DNT in IE10. Many companies are interpreting it as they please such as, don’t target but collect data as needed, or, do everything as normal and forward along the DNT value to let the down-stream guy handle it or interpret it as he wants. Enabling a “persistent identifier” as claimed at the end of the article as a way of providing “better privacy” is not true. Enabling a “persistent identifier” enables better tracking, less privacy, but for the companies who choose to respect DNT, it is true that it will help with severing non-targeted ads.