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posted by janrinok on Sunday November 26 2017, @07:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the anyone-remember-privacy? dept.

A new Free and Open-Source project called "Exodus" scans Android apps and already has found many advertising trackers:

"Researchers at Yale Privacy Lab and French nonprofit Exodus Privacy have documented the proliferation of tracking software on smartphones, finding that weather, flashlight, rideshare, and dating apps, among others, are infested with dozens of different types of trackers collecting vast amounts of information to better target advertising.

Exodus security researchers identified 44 trackers in more than 300 apps for Google's Android smartphone operating system. The apps, collectively, have been downloaded billions of times. Yale Privacy Lab, within the university's law school, is working to replicate the Exodus findings and has already released reports on 25 of the trackers.

Yale Privacy Lab researchers have only been able to analyze Android apps, but believe many of the trackers also exist on iOS, since companies often distribute for both platforms. To find trackers, the Exodus researchers built a custom auditing platform for Android apps, which searched through the apps for digital "signatures" distilled from known trackers. A signature might be a tell-tale set of keywords or string of bytes found in an app file, or a mathematically-derived "hash" summary of the file itself.

The findings underscore the pervasiveness of tracking despite a permissions system on Android that supposedly puts users in control of their own data. They also highlight how a large and varied set of firms are working to enable tracking."

The statement by Yale Privacy Lab summarizes the situation, and the story has seen coverage by Cory Doctorow and Le Monde. Private search engine Qwant has removed trackers in its app and Protonmail is under fire.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday November 26 2017, @10:12PM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday November 26 2017, @10:12PM (#601856) Journal

    Private search engine Qwant wants you to create an account and sign in, and to protect your search habits, incorporates a Chromium browser into itself.
    One wonders if that was the best choice.

    Many people insist that even a de-googled Chromium browser still has plenty of phone home features under the surface. The code base is just too huge to find them all.
    And even they admit some trackers had snuck into their code.

    It would seem to me that general purpose tools based on browsers are at a distinct disadvantage in keeping trackers out.
    This article isn't even about browsers, but rather, regular run of the mill apps - something Quant is not. Not by a long shot.

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