Comment by miki123211
2 years ago
This is also used heavily for abuse / spam / fraud prevention.
If you detect that a user is abusing your service, the ability to put a permanent cookie on their device is very useful.
This isn't effective against organized crime groups (they can just get Macs / use the web / whatever), but works well against your average troll or internet racist.
Still tracking, but a very different kind of tracking.
The "store 2 bits of information" approach Apple was moving exploring would solve at least a lot of that case. You could effectively store 3 pieces of information: 00 = default state, 01 = used free trial, 10 = banned, 11 = something else the developer wants to store about the iOS profile. You don't need to be able to uniquely identify it to ban it.