Steven Roosa is a Partner in Holland &
Knight's
New York office
(Note: Lab Tuesday is when we take an important topic that
we have seen in our internal privacy testing lab and discuss it at
length. When we have specific illustrations, they are always taken
from non-client sources, with the name of the relevant commercial
party left off--we are not looking to throw anyone under the bus
here, but rather improve practices and awareness.)
Recently, the mobile platforms have played an important role in
improving end-user privacy. Along these lines, Apple, in or around
iOS version 6.0, created a new, unique identifier that could be
used in place of the UDID and MAC address for advertising and
certain other purposes. This new identifier is Apple's
Identifier for Advertising, also referred to as the
"IDFA" or "IFA." The IDFA, unlike the UDID and
MAC address, has an important privacy feature insofar as it can be
reset by the end-user. In later versions of iOS, the UDID
