Velti (NASDAQ: VELT), the leading global provider of mobile marketing
and advertising technology, today announced the Open Device
Identification Number (“ODIN”)
Working Group, a consortium focused on developing an alternative secure
anonymous device identifier for the mobile advertising industry.
Several of the world’s top mobile thought leaders have joined Velti to
form the ODIN Working Group, including Jumptap, RadiumOne, mdotm,
StrikeAd, Smaato, Adfonic and SAY Media.
“By creating industry standards and best practices through ODIN, leaders
in the mobile advertising industry will have a better foundation for
providing consumers with targeted and relevant content in a safe and
secure manner,” said Krishna Subramanian, Chief Marketing Officer of
Velti.
The ODIN Working Group has been working to provide a solution to Apple’s
signal of deprecating the use of UDIDs and creating an industry standard
for mobile device identification. The current ODIN solution creates an
ID derived from the MAC address and is obfuscated to protect user
privacy. ODIN is intended to be a number designed to uniquely identify
users’ mobile devices in a convenient, interoperable manner, and the
goal for ODIN is to be anonymous, consistent and secure:
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Anonymous: A device’s ODIN would not encode any additional
information beyond differentiating it from other ODINs. SHA-1
(secure hash algorithm) would be used so that it is ‘computationally
impossible’ for the original ODIN to be traced back to the hashed
ODIN, meaning it cannot be reversed to connect targeting or
installation information to a particular user.
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Consistent: ODIN would provide a standardized format for
identifying devices regardless of software platform. Thus iOS,
Android, Windows Phone, and future devices would all use the same
format.
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Secure: The ODIN specification considers device identifiers to
be personal information and details precautions in its transport
accordingly. Additionally, even if the identifier were to be captured
no personally identifiable information would be revealed beyond a
unique number.
“Our company fully supports the development of ODIN as a device
identification method to run Cost-Per Install campaigns,” said Sourabh
Niyogi, CEO of MdotM, a leading mobile Demand Side Platform.