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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

Publication status:
Published
Peer review status:
Peer reviewed

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Publisher copy:
10.1145/3201064.3201089

Authors


More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS Division
Department:
Computer Science
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS Division
Department:
Computer Science
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS Division
Department:
Computer Science
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS Division
Department:
Computer Science
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
Social Sciences Division
Department:
Politics and International Relations
Role:
Author


More from this funder
Funding agency for:
Binns, R
Zhao, J
Kleek, M
Grant:
N02334X/1
EP/R511742/1
N02334X/1
EP/J017728/2


Publisher:
Association for Computing Machinery
Journal:
WebSci '18 Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science More from this journal
Pages:
23-31
Publication date:
2018-05-15
Acceptance date:
2018-03-23
DOI:
ISBN:
9781450355636


Keywords:
Pubs id:
pubs:847404
UUID:
uuid:b981733e-a641-4793-be59-12f2b8099a82
Local pid:
pubs:847404
Source identifiers:
847404
Deposit date:
2018-06-26

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