Google play Violation of Advertising ID

Unity Engine
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1

So I got an email from google saying

Issue: Violation of Usage of Android Advertising ID policy and section 4.8 of the Developer Distribution Agreement

Google Play requires developers to provide a valid privacy policy when the app requests or handles sensitive user or device information. We’ve identified that your app collects and transmits the Android advertising identifier, which is subject to a privacy policy requirement. If your app collects the Android advertising ID, you must provide a valid privacy policy in both the designated field in the Play Console, and from within the app.

I don’t have ads on my game yet I get this.
Should I just humor them and add a Privacy policy?

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2

I have the same issue

3

Same here

4

We have the same issue, Advertising ID is not used in the game explicitly and the game was just removed from store without any warning before that action.

5

Same. No ads whatsoever in the game and removed.

6

Same here. We don’t use advertising or store personal data, yet it still got removed. I reckon it’s probably still in the exported code somewhere, triggering the scan.

Question is; do we pretend that we do by adding a privacy policy, or is this something that can be fixed otherwise? Would hate to have to add a privacy policy even though we don’t save any data.

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Yeah it seems odd to have to write a privacy policy when I’m not collecting data. I don’t fully understand what unity is doing to trigger this, hopefully they will respond.

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I hear it’s the Android SDK that report crash data with user info. There’s a app setting somewhere but you’d need to recompile. It’s easier/quicker to write up a privacy policy.

I wrote this

Privacy Policy
This app does NOT activily collect user data or id for 3rd party use. Android and Google Play does collect crash data information.

9

Seems to be same issue here too.

Would be really nice to get actual solution to this.

10

same issue here too

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Hi guys, I had same problem with my game https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sekip.rainbowanimals (my least successful game) but still I wanted to fix that. I have 13 games at Google Play Store and problem was in this one.

In my games I am using GoogleAds, GooglePlayServices and Firebase.

So I looked my libs and I figure out that I need play-services in min version 10.0.1 or higher. And for my sure I put this line on code to manifest:

After update is now at Google Play without creating privace policy document.

I hope this will helpful for someone.

Cheers.

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My game Cognizer just got this notification. Again, I have no ads in my game. It’s free with blank donation DLC.

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i can just add a link to the website that just telling

Privacy Policy
This app does NOT activily collect user data or id for 3rd party use. Android and Google Play does collect crash data information.

??

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And do you have some other plugins like Google Play Services, Crashlytics or Unity Analytics in your game?

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Even if you dont use the Advertisement ID on purpose, Check for librarys that do. (for example all AD providers, including unity, all analitycs …etc) So if one of the librarys use the Advertisement ID you must specify it in the privacy policies, on the googel play and in the game itselft

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I’m experiencing the same issue. I’ve gone through all of my code, I don’t use the advertising identifier anywhere, and the only plugins I’m using are TextMesh Pro and uDialog, neither of which seem to (nor should) use the advertising identifier. I also double checked that Unity Analytics and Ads were disabled (I have all Unity services disabled). My guess is that some baked-in code for either Unity analytics or ads is still manipulating the identifier, even though the services are disabled.

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Same issue here. No use of the the advertising identifier directly, nor use of ads, analytics or any assets that would have a plausible reason for using it.

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Could it be Unity Analytics using it?

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It happens to regular Android developers too.

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here the solution How to fix Advertising ID policy violation in Google Play Store really quick? | by Swaroop S | Medium

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