Privacy review wants us to stop collecting GAID. Will Android attribution still work?
Our privacy review flagged the advertising ID and asked whether we can drop it. Does Android attribution still hold up without it?
Answer from the Linkrunner team
GAID, the Google Advertising ID, is a resettable identifier on Android devices with Google Play Services, Android's counterpart to Apple's IDFA. The ad network records it at click time and the attribution SDK reads it at first open, so a match gives a deterministic attribution. Users can reset it, and if they opt out of ad personalisation it comes back as a string of zeros, so your integration has to handle that state. It is not the only deterministic signal on Android, though: the Google Play Install Referrer, read by the SDK on first open, is another. If you decide to stop collecting GAID, check how your SDK handles it. In Linkrunner you call setDisableAaidCollection before init, and apps that target children can also remove the AD_ID permission from the manifest. Either way, read the GAID asynchronously and handle devices without Google Play Services.
More on this: linkrunner.io/glossary/what-is-gaid