Tracking the Trackers: Towards Understanding the Mobile Advertising and Tracking Ecosystem

By Narseo Vallina-Rodríguez, S. Sundaresan, Abbas Razaghpanah, Rishab Nithyanand, Mark Allman, Christian Peter Kreibich, Phillipa Gill. 2016

71 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Third-party services form an integral part of the mobile ecosystem: they allow app developers to add features such as performance analytics and social network integration, and to monetize their apps by enabling user tracking and targeted ad delivery. At present users, researchers, and regulators all have at best limited understanding of this third-party ecosystem. In this paper we seek to shrink this gap. Using data from users of our ICSI Haystack app we gain a rich view of the mobile ecosystem: we identify and characterize domains associated with mobile advertising and user tracking, thereby taking an important step towards greater transparency. We furthermore outline our steps towards a public catalog and census of analytics services, their behavior, their personal data collection processes, and their use across mobile apps.

Subfields: Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science, Signal Processing

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In Information Systems

  1. Ú. Erlingsson
  2. Ilya Mironov
  3. Ananth Raghunathan
  4. Petros Maniatis
  5. Julien Tinnés
  6. Mitch Rudominer
  7. David Lie

In Sociology and Political Science

  1. Ú. Erlingsson
  2. Ananth Raghunathan
  3. Ilya Mironov
  4. Petros Maniatis
  5. David Lie
  6. Albert Cheu
  7. Yu-Xiang Wang
  8. Jonathan Ullman

In Signal Processing

  1. Ilya Mironov
  2. Ú. Erlingsson
  3. Petros Maniatis
  4. Albert Cheu
  5. Jonathan Ullman

Citations in the corpus