Chhavideep Singh
Source: PCMag India
Recently, Apple has made a lot of noise in the entire technology industry with its latest app transparency and ad tracking functionality on iPhones with its latest iOS 14.5 update. We have to admit that Apple took the advertisement industry by storm and this small change will probably put many small and medium advertising agencies at risk, negatively impacting their sales and revenue. For the amount of highlight that Apple’s new app transparency features have created, one must think that the iPhone maker is the first company ever to bring up something like this, privacy features that actually benefit users at mass. Well, Android is far ahead of Apple as it introduced the feature back in 2013, surprised?
You must think that this is a joke and Apple is the first smartphone company that actually cares about their user’s privacy but that is not true, Google launched the feature on Android back in 2013 but no one ever knew about this because Google never advertised it, unlike Apple.
Recently, Google has announced to begin an advertising concession on Android, starting in the later months of 2021. The search engine company will roll out a new feature that will bring Android’s years-old ad tracking functionality to the foreground which will make it less likely for app developers and users to bypass it after Apple’s iOS 14.5 launch.
According to sources, Google has always offered its users an option to opt-out of personalised advertisements and the company is not even changing its interface to change the feature, it has always been there on Android devices, somewhere.
In order to check out the feature, grab your Android device, go to System Settings > Google > Ads and voila! The checkbox to opt-out of Ads personalisation is sitting right there.
According to a report by Arstechnica, checking that box will make sure to instruct applications not to use your unique advertisement ID. However, unlike Apple’s direct approach, Android will not instruct the apps- not to use your advertisement ID, instead, whenever the application tries to access it, it will show those apps a ‘string of zeros’. This will not allow the applications to access the Android user’s unique advertising ID, thus, no more personalised ads and no more sharing data.
According to Google, the new ad concession feature will begin to roll out later in 2021 with the latest Android 12 devices and later in 2022, the company is said to expand its functionality to Google Play Services.