Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem

Binns, Reuben; Lyngs, Ulrik; Kleek, Max Van; Zhao, Jun; Libert, Timothy; Shadbolt, Nigel

doi:10.31235/osf.io/u7qmz

Cited by 58 publications

(110 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…In this way, these services are notionally 'visible' from the user's perspective; one can see that data flows to and from those services by virtue of directly interacting with them (see Figure 1). This visibility has been leveraged to explore the use of third-party services in supporting a variety of different kinds of application (Binns et al 2018a(Binns et al , 2018bEnglehardt and Narayanan 2016;Libert 2015;Starov and Nikiforakis 2017).…”

Section: Visibility Over Data Supply Chainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While both of these studies focused on websites, similar work has also explored and analysed the HTTP interactions with third-parties in browser extensions 4 (Starov and Nikiforakis 2017) and Android applications (Binns et al 2018a(Binns et al , 2018b. As with websites, thirdparty domains operated by Google were found to be prevalent, as were domains operated by Amazon and Facebook.…”

Section: Prior Work On Third-party Domain Call-outsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

What lies beneath: transparency in online service supply chains

Cobbe

Norval

Singh

2020

Journal of Cyber Policy

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There is a noticeable trend towards the increased centralisation of Internet-based services. Though much focus is on the dominance of organisations such as Facebook, Google and Netflix, popular consumer-facing services, there has been considerably less discussion regarding the organisations providing the infrastructure that supports online services. This bears consideration, given that many online services rely on a range of platforms and services operated by third-parties. As such, this paper explores issues of consolidation as regards the systems supply chains that underpin and drive online services. Specifically, we note that while there are trends towards the increased centralisation and dominance in the provision of supporting technical infrastructure, the nature of these technical supply chains are relatively hidden. We explore the broader societal implications of this with regards to power and resilience, emphasising the lack of means, legal or technical, for uncovering the nature of the supply chains on which online services rely. Given society's ever-growing reliance on data-driven technology, we argue that more can be done to increase levels of transparency over the supply arrangements of technical infrastructure. This is a necessary precursor to determining what interventions, if any, may be required to deal with issues of consolidation in online infrastructure.

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Section: Visibility Over Data Supply Chainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Prior Work On Third-party Domain Call-outsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What lies beneath: transparency in online service supply chains

Cobbe

Norval

Singh

2020

Journal of Cyber Policy

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“…The authors in [57] collects network traffic using ' ICSI Haystack' app and distinguishes between ad and analytics libraries and for collecting various information. Furthermore, the authors in [58], [59] study the distribution of third-party trackers across web and android apps and their impact on user privacy.…”

Section: Privacy and Mobile Analytics Servicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Privacy-preserving targeted mobile advertising:A Blockchain-based framework for mobile ads

Ullah¹

2020

Preprint

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The targeted advertising is based on preference profiles inferred via relationships among individuals, their monitored responses to previous advertising and temporal activity over the Internet, which has raised critical privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a novel proposal for a Blockchain-based advertising platform that provides: a system for privacy preserving user profiling, privately requesting ads from the advertising system, the billing mechanisms for presented and clicked ads, the advertising system that uploads ads to the cloud according to profiling interests, various types of transactions to enable advertising operations in Blockchain-based network, and the method that allows a cloud system to privately compute the access policies for various resources (such as ads, mobile user profiles). Our main goal is to design a decentralized framework for targeted ads, which enables private delivery of ads to users whose behavioral profiles accurately match the presented ads, defined by the ad system. We implement a POC of our proposed framework i.e. a Bespoke Miner and experimentally evaluate various components of Blockchain-based in-app advertising system, implementing various critical components; such as, evaluating user profiles, implementing access policies, encryption and decryption of users' profiles. We observe that the processing delay for traversing policies of various tree sizes, the encryption/decryption time of user profiling with various key-sizes and user profiles of various interests evaluates to an acceptable amount of processing time as that of the currently implemented ad systems.<br><br>

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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.…”

Section: What Is Privacy Worth?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to the Minitrack on Privacy and Economics

Skouby¹,

Sørensen²,

Khajuria³

2019

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Privacy and Economics are two concepts that needs to be looked simultaneously. The digital service industry has for years built up a business model around collecting, analyzing and selling information from private users. This has included both personal data and behavioral data to enhance and target marketing and secure profits. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this business model is challenged and users are now in principle able to control and manage their personal information themselves. This mini-track discusses the relations between privacy and economics and the challenges to the established business models in the US and Europe.

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Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem

Cited by 58 publications

References 7 publications

What lies beneath: transparency in online service supply chains

What lies beneath: transparency in online service supply chains

Privacy-preserving targeted mobile advertising:A Blockchain-based framework for mobile ads

Introduction to the Minitrack on Privacy and Economics

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