Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem

Abstract

Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google Play stores. We find that most apps contain third party tracking, and the distribution of trackers is long-tailed with several highly dominant trackers accounting for a large portion of the coverage. The extent of tracking also differs between categories of apps; in particular, news apps and apps targeted at children appear to be amongst the worst in terms of the number of third party trackers associated with them. Third party tracking is also revealed to be a highly trans-national phenomenon, with many trackers operating in jurisdictions outside the EU. Based on these findings, we draw out some significant legal compliance challenges facing the tracking industry. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Economics of security and privacy; Software reverse engineering; • Applied computing → Law; • Networks → Mobile and wireless security;

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“…The general privacy-economics ecosystem between the user data, the service provider and third parties are a rather well-established ecosystem with business models that have existed for years. Over the years, the service providers and third parties have invented rather creative methods to collect user data, often without the knowledge of the user (see for example [10]. A study, [11], estimated the costs of hospitals in Texas to adopt opt-in policies for tracking health records for children in the state.…”