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Tracking the Trackers: Towards Understanding the Mobile Advertising and Tracking Ecosystem
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Tracking the Trackers: Towards Understanding the Mobile Advertising and Tracking Ecosystem

Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Srikanth Sundaresan, Abbas Razaghpanah, Rishab Nithyanand, Mark Allman, Christian Kreibich and Phillipa Gill
ArXiv.org
09/22/2016
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1609.07190
url
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1609.07190View
Preprint (Author's original)This preprint has not been evaluated by subject experts through peer review. Preprints may undergo extensive changes and/or become peer-reviewed journal articles. Open Access

Abstract

Third-party services form an integral part of the mobile ecosystem: they allow app developers to add features such as performance analytics and social network integration, and to monetize their apps by enabling user tracking and targeted ad delivery. At present users, researchers, and regulators all have at best limited understanding of this third-party ecosystem. In this paper we seek to shrink this gap. Using data from users of our ICSI Haystack app we gain a rich view of the mobile ecosystem: we identify and characterize domains associated with mobile advertising and user tracking, thereby taking an important step towards greater transparency. We furthermore outline our steps towards a public catalog and census of analytics services, their behavior, their personal data collection processes, and their use across mobile apps.
Computer Science - Computers and Society

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