The changes in iOS 5 beta 6 must have been pretty small because we haven’t seen a rush of news href="http://www.everythingicafe.com/apple-releases-ios-5-beta-6/2011/08/19/">out of the release — but one thing that did pop up is that Apple has href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/apple-ios-5-phasing-out-udid/">killed access to the UDID. The UDID is a string of numbers associated with each handset that developers have used to track ad impressions, usage and the like. Last year saw href="http://www.everythingicafe.com/apple-sued-over-apps-sharing-user-details-to-advertisers/2010/12/28/">privacy concerns raised about the practice, and in the release nots of iOS 5 beta 6, one of the changes reads:
Deprecated in iOS 5.0
uniqueIdentifier/> An alphanumeric string unique to each device based on various hardware details. (read-only) (Deprecated in iOS 5.0. Instead, create a unique identifier specific to your app.)
People who run ad and gaming networks often use this number as a way of tracking how users interact with their programs, what they’ve done, achievements they’ve unlocked and similar. Apple now requires that they create their own unique identifier system.
Gruber posits that href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/08/19/ios-udid">this is a privacy protection move, which seems to make the most sense out of anything we’ve heard. This is a shift to make the OS look more privacy conscious in the wake of a number of issues (like that whole GPS tracking thing).
I’d also recommend reading the comments in the TechCrunch article linked above for a look at what developers make of the change.
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