Surprised that Google didn't take proper pre-cautions here to not run into this.<p>If there is indeed such an identifier, enabled by default its pretty obvious that its technically possible to track a user. And with all the other data Google has, they also can link to the actual identity pretty easily.
The title should have mentioned the person by name: it's Max Schrems [1].<p>He has a legal background, and has fought a number of high-profile privacy cases in Europe.<p>The day the GDPR came into effect, he filed violations complaints against Facebook and Google in four different jurisdictions. He's a spearhead figure in this regard.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems</a>
For anyone complaining about this: <i></i>the advertising ID is a very good thing for us tech people<i></i><p>Nobody know how to change it or turn it off. That means a lot of developers and advertisers assume it is actually a good way to track users. So if <i>you</i> go in and reset/disable it, you'll be in such a small minority that you'd become an edge case and they'd lose the historical data on you.<p>Obviously this isn't true 100% of the time but if it didn't exist then advertisers would use a hardware fingerprint probably, which is a lot harder to spoof