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An academic study of nearly one million Android apps reveals that most apps contain third-party tracking code and that "new apps and apps for kids seem to be among the worst in terms of the number of third-party followers that are badociated with them. "
Oxford University's research consisted of a team of academics downloading 959,426 Android applications from the official Google Play Store and badyzing the domains loaded from their code.
Even at the very beginning of the survey, researchers found that almost all applications used a tracking code and that the job would not indicate the percentage of applications loaded with tracking code, but the number of followers used by each application. in general.
They found that the median number of trackers per application was 10 and that 90.4% of applications included at least one tracker, while 17.9% had more than 20 trackers.
They also found that 13 applications included more than 30 trackers, but after a manual scan of each, they concluded that the applications bundled different types of services into "all-in" application packs. a ", which loaded all trackers of aggregated services, as well.
Oxford researchers also found – like many previous studies on the subject – that the vast majority of followers were owned by a few large parent companies, either directly or through intermediaries.
Alphabet (parent company of Google) (used in 88.4% of applications), Facebook (42.55%), Twitter (33.88%), Verizon (26.27%), Microsoft (22.75%), are the most used names on the mobile tracking scene. and Amazon (17.91%), according to their findings.
Researchers noted that 90% of all applications contained at least one tracker owned by a US-based company, creating a jurisdictional mess for application owners in countries with stringent copyright protection laws. privacy, like the EU countries. .
Binns et al.
The researchers also reorganized the 49 categories of Play Store apps into eight larger genres that are easier to follow and badyze.
According to their new categorization, new applications and family-based applications (typically for children) had the highest number of followers on average, with a median of seven per application.
"Given the relatively high level of legal protection of child profiling for marketing, it seems that monitoring is particularly prevalent in the very context in which regulators are most concerned about coercing it," he concluded. the Oxford team.
Their findings were not the only ones to alert about the advertising and tracking code loaded into kids apps. Just days after the publication of the Oxford study, a similar article published by the University of Michigan found that advertising in early childhood applications was much more prevalent than previously thought.
The Michigan study badyzed a much smaller sample of just 135 apps for kids, but found that 95% of them contained at least one form of advertising.
The study in Michigan has prompted more than 20 child advocacy groups to send a letter to the US Federal Trade Commission on not only the large number of children's apps that include advertising, but also the quality of these advertisements, which sometimes were not intended for children, difficult to close or prompted young children to make purchases in the game. The full 11-page letter is available here.
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