Android: Do I need to respect isLimitAdTrackingEnabled()?

Question

I have an app that I'm working on that will do some very basic user tracking for advertising purposes. While looking around about the new ID for advertising I found an interesting method: http://developer.android.com/reference/com/google/android/gms/ads/identifier/AdvertisingIdClient.Info.html#isLimitAdTrackingEnabled()

The docs for this method are incredibly sparse. How do users enable the limited ad tracking? I can't find anything on my Nexus 4.4 that look like it would set limiting ad tracking.

So my real question is, do I need to respect this boolean, and not track the user if they have this set? I assume so, but I'd really like to know more about it, and the docs aren't helping.

Answer 1

After digging some more. I found a bit more info here: http://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html#ADID

Respecting users' selections. Upon reset, a new advertising identifier must not be connected to a previous advertising identifier or data derived from a previous advertising identifier without the explicit consent of the user. Furthermore, you must abide by a user’s “opt out of interest-based advertising” setting. If a user has enabled this setting, you may not use the advertising identifier for creating user profiles for advertising purposes or for targeting users with interest-based advertising. Allowed activities include contextual advertising, frequency capping, conversion tracking, reporting and security and fraud detection.

That seemed to answer my question pretty clearly. In other words, yes we do need to respect that preference.

Also, In response to this question:

How do users enable the limited ad tracking? I can't find anything on my Nexus 4.4 that look like it would set limiting ad tracking.

The answer, is that it is in the Google Settings app is where users can enable the "Opt out of interest-based ads". This sets the isLimitAdTrackingEnabled() to true.

Answer 2

This "limit ad tracking" means only that you cannot display to user targeted ads based on his previous interests when ads have been displayed to him. But you can continue to display ads, and you can continue to track your user on server side.