Google Intros New Privacy Controls For Mobile Consumers
To date Google has not used the mobile handset UDID “device identifier” to target mobile advertising via its AdSense for mobile and AdMob networks. For several reasons that have to do with ad performance, Google has decided to use the device identifier going forward.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been assembling a mobile ads business piece by piece: it introduced click-to-call billing in mobile ads in January 2010, extending its desktop auction machinery onto handsets. With this move it switches on a second lever — targeting itself. Until now the company had left the handset device identifier unused across AdSense for mobile and AdMob; citing ad performance, it now commits to using it going forward.
What makes the announcement notable is its framing: Google pairs expanded identifier-based targeting with new privacy controls for consumers. That dual structure — more precise targeting plus a user-facing management layer — is the template it is betting regulators and users will accept.
First-order effects
- Advertisers on Google's AdMob and AdSense for mobile networks can now buy against the device identifier rather than context alone, which is the stated basis for better ad performance.
- Mobile consumers receive new privacy controls governing whether and how that identifier is applied to them, making an opaque hardware ID a user-manageable setting.
Second-order effects
- Rival mobile ad networks now compete against device-level targeting, pressuring them to match identifier-based precision or concede performance-priced inventory to Google.
- App developers whose inventory runs through AdMob see the value of device-targeted placements rise, tightening Google's pull on the supply side of the mobile ad market it entered via AdMob.
Third-order effects
- If persistent device identifiers become the default targeting key for mobile advertising, the industry's economics come to rest on a signal that users can increasingly see and switch off — a structural tension between targeting precision and consumer control.
- Platform owners like Apple, whose device identifier third-party networks would be reading, face growing questions about who may monetize their hardware's IDs, foreshadowing identifier access becoming a governed privilege rather than an open resource.
The trend: Mobile advertising is shifting from contextual placement toward persistent device-identifier targeting, with platform privacy controls layered on top as the counterweight.