Journal article
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
Actions
Authors
- 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
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Binns et al
- Copyright date:
- 2018
- Notes:
-
Copyright © 2018 Copyright the Authors. Publication rights licensed to Association
for Computing Machinery.
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