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.

arXiv commentCorrected missing company info (Linkedin owned by Microsoft). Figures for Microsoft and Linkedin re-calculated and added to Table 1

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• I Want My App That Way: Reclaiming Sovereignty Over Personal Devices
• Temporal Limits of Privacy in Human Behavior
• What privacy concerns do parents have about children's mobile apps, and how can they stay SHARP?
• DiffAudit: Auditing Privacy Practices of Online Services for Children and Adolescents
• Joint Optimization of Privacy and Cost of in-App Mobile User Profiling and Targeted Ads
• On-Device User Intent Prediction for Context and Sequence Aware Recommendation
• ROI: A method for identifying organizations receiving personal data
• Understanding Worldwide Private Information Collection on Android
• Tracking in apps' privacy policies