If You Opt Out Of Ad Personalization, Google Will Delete Your Advertising ID

You know that Google pushes ads to you based on analysis of concrete data collected from your account. For this, Google uses a special advertising ID. The data collected from your account serves not only for more relevant ads provision. Google also uses it for analytics and fraud prevention. So when for some reason you turn off ad personalization, Google won’t use your ID for pushing personalized ads. But it doesn’t mean the rest two processes are stopped as well. Thus, at the moment, the ad personalization and analytics and fraud prevention are connected through the collected data only. But this is going to change in the near future.

At the moment, to opt out of personalized ads, you can go to Settings > Google > Ads or Settings > Privacy > Advanced > Ads on your Android device. As said, after these steps, Google will just stop pushing personalized ad recommendations to your device. But Google still will collect data from your advertising ID.

Google May Remove Your Advertising ID

However, if believing in the recent update on the Play Console Help page, Google Play Services is going to delete the advertising ID when you opt out of interest-based advertising. So “starting in late 2021, when a user opts out of interest-based advertising or ads personalization, the advertising identifier will not be available. You will receive a string of zeros in place of the identifier.”

Simply put, all apps on your Android device will see a string of zeroes instead of your advertising ID if you disable personalized ads. Moreover, Google Play Services will push alerts to all those apps that are collecting data. We mean Google will inform them that any existing data can be deleted. A developer, kdrag0n also noticed that “This Google Play services phased rollout will affect apps running on Android 12 devices starting late 2021 and will expand to affect apps running on devices that support Google Play in early 2022.” Also, Google said, in July, they will provide more details. Plus, we will see an alternate solution to support essential use cases such as analytics and fraud prevention.

Though there is still not much information what alternatives Google will bring, one thing is clear – all major tech companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and others are revising their privacy policy. Of course, there is an external pressure on all of these companies. But what we are more interested in is how the user privacy policies change and what effect this will have.