老澳门开奖结果

Today, a group known as Antisec released a collection of one million UDIDs鈥攕erial numbers associated with Apple mobile devices, such as iPhones and iPads鈥攚hich they claim came from a trove of 12 million UDIDs pilfered from an FBI agent鈥檚 laptop.

The FBI has denying that an agency device was compromised or that 鈥渢he FBI either sought or obtained the information.鈥� Clearly, there are a lot of open questions, and few solid facts relating to this alleged breach.

Regardless of the specifics of this particular incident, it is time to heed the long by about the existence and use of persistent, unique device identifiers such as Apple UDIDs.

Way back in 1999, Intel unintentionally created a after it included unique, persistent IDs in its Pentium III processors. After consumer groups complained to the Federal Trade Commission, Intel , and subsequently disabled the unique ID in the chips. At the time of the Intel controversy, Deirdre Mulligan, then a staff counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology that 鈥渢he [Intel Processor ID] has the potential to become the personal identifier for everyone on the Internet."

Fast forward a decade, and Mulligan鈥檚 concerns have come true鈥攋ust with a different consumer electronic company.

The unique IDs that Apple bakes into iOS mobile devices, such as iPhones and iPads, have long been the subject of criticism by privacy experts. In contrast to the cookies used to track consumers on the web, which can be deleted (at least by those consumers tech-savvy enough to navigate to obscure browser settings), UDIDs cannot be deleted or removed. As long as the consumer uses a particular iPhone, the UDID will stay the same. Unsurprisingly, advertising companies embraced the UDID as a way to effectively track and target users of mobile Apps.

Thankfully, Apple to UDIDs by mobile app developers (and the advertising networks they partner with). This is a good start, but it does not address all of the privacy concerns. For example, prior knowledge of a device鈥檚 UDID for government agencies that wish to infect a particular surveillance target鈥檚 iOS device with the tool.

Consumers can delete the cookies in their web browsers and modify the unique manufacturer-set 鈥淢AC address鈥� assigned to their laptop鈥檚 WiFi card. Yet no similar privacy controls exist that let them erase their Apple UDID.

Unique, unchangeable UDIDs are not necessary for the functioning of a smartphone. Although Apple鈥檚 customer can never escape their UDID, Google鈥檚 Android operating system (which is equivalent to Apple鈥檚 UDID) when a user performs a factory reset of their device. Google could, and should make this easier to do (without requiring that users destroy all of the other data on their devices), but this at least demonstrates that there are alternatives to unalterable UDIDs.

It is time for Apple to deliver real privacy controls to consumers, by letting them reset their UDID at will.