Skip to main content

Many Android Apps Secretly Track Users.

More than three in four Android apps contain at least one third-party "tracker," according to a new analysis of hundreds of apps.

The study by French research organization Exodus Privacy and Yale University's Privacy Lab analyzed the mobile apps for the signatures of 25 known trackers, which use various techniques to glean personal information about users to better target them for advertisements and services.

Among the apps found to be using some sort of tracking plugin were some of the most popular apps on the Google Play Store, including Tinder, Spotify, Uber and OKCupid. All four apps use a service owned by Google, called Crashlytics, that primarily tracks app crash reports, but can also provide the ability to "get insight into your users, what they're doing, and inject live social content to delight them."

Other less widely-used trackers can go much further. One cited by Yale is FidZup, a French tracking provider with technology that can "detect the presence of mobile phones and therefore their owners" using ultrasonic tones. FidZup says it no-longer uses that technology, however, since tracking users through simple wifi networks works just as well.

The Yale researchers said: "FidZup's practices closely resemble those of Teemo (formerly known as Databerries), the tracker company that was embroiled in scandal earlier this year for studying the geolocation of 10 million French citizens, and SafeGraph, who ‘collected 17tn location markers for 10m smartphones during [Thanksgiving] last year'. Both of these trackers have been profiled by Privacy Lab and can be identified by Exodus scans."

Yale Privacy Lab is using its research to call on developers, as well as Google, "for increased transparency into privacy and security practice as it relates to these trackers."

The researchers added: "Android users, and users of all app stores, deserve a trusted chain of software development, distribution, and installation that does not include unknown or masked third-party code.

"Scholars, privacy advocates and security researchers should be alarmed by the data, and can provide further analysis now that these findings and the Exodus platform have been made public."

Although Yale didn't examine iOS apps, the company warns that the situation may be no better on Apple's App Store. "Many of the same companies distributing Google Play apps also distribute apps via Apple, and tracker companies openly advertise Software Development Kits (SDKs) compatible with multiple platforms," said the researchers. "Thus, advertising trackers may be concurrently packaged for Android and iOS, as well as more obscure mobile platforms."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dangerous sex Positions For Men

The most common cause of pénile injury is found among the variety of potentially dangerous positions used for séxual intercourse. The most popular is the ‘woman-on-top’. This type of position can result in an impact between the pénis against the female pelvis or perineum that can easily traumatize the pénile cylinders. A pénis becomes érect when the lining of the cylinder within it is engorged with blood.  A pénis fracture can occur when there is trauma to the eréct pénis, resulting in a rupture of the cylinder lining. This very painful injury is often accompanied by an abrupt, distressing cracking noise that is immediately followed by dark bruising of the pénis due to blood escaping the cylinder. In ten to 30% of pénis fractures, the urethra is damaged and blood may be visible at the urinary opening. Given these signs, an injury should be relatively simple to diagnose, right? You would be surprised, even with the unsettling sounds of a fracture occurring, many men...
Post a Comment
Read more

AWS Battles Rivals: Advertising Campaign

Amazon Web Services has defeated IBM in a competition for lucrative federal contracts, threatened Microsoft's core businesses, and reshaped corporate technology. In the last few months, the pioneering cloud-computing unit of the online retail giant has taken a page from the playbook of some of its more traditional competitors: It started advertising. Ads have been splashed across billboards and in airport terminals, television spots and web videos, featuring a whiteboard full of sketches of software architecture and appeals to invent something using Amazon's collection of rented computing services. The advertising campaign, which bears the "Build On" tagline, represents a milestone in AWS' march from technology upstart to one of the major players in business software, technologists and marketers say. For many years, AWS didn't advertise, partly because it didn't have to. The service held a wide lead over the competition, and word-of-mouth was enough to...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's real and cool, no scam involve.

Beat Bad Breath naturally!   Breathing nauseating odor from mouth makes isolate you from the goodies of societies. It is a state when you are not wanted to utter even a single word or breathe publicly. Bad breath is a result of many a factor such as dentures, cavities, throat infection, alcohol, smoking, lung infection, anything from food to poor oral hygiene. Thanks to some the natural home remedies that prove immensely helpful in getting rid of bad breathe. Following are some helpful tips to overcome bad breath. 1. The first and foremost thing to be bear in mind is dont forget to brush your teeth after every meal. 2. Sweeten your breath by chewing up a few cardamom seeds. The aromatic flavor in cardamom freshens up your breath. 3. Often drink one glass of lemon juice with little salt and sugar. 4. Chew up some leaves of Parsley for fresh breath. 5. Tea made from Fenugreek (methi) seeds also helps relieve of bad odor and bad breath. 6. Before going to bed, rinse your mouth ...
Post a Comment
Read more