One new article link has been added to our Related News page. SFGate published an article titled Stanford researchers discover ‘alarming’ method for phone tracking, fingerprinting through sensor flaws.

It turns out every accelerometer is predictably imperfect, and slight differences in the readings can be used to produce a fingerprint (see below for a further explanation). Marketers could use the ID the same way they use cookies — the small files that download from websites to desktops — to  identify a particular user, monitor their online actions and target ads accordingly.

It’s a novel approach that raises a new set of privacy concerns: Users couldn’t delete the ID like browser cookies, couldn’t mask it by adjusting app privacy preferences — and wouldn’t even know their device had been tagged.

Source: SFGate