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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by stretch611 on Sunday November 26 2017, @11:29PM
More ad hoc and P2P will help censorship on the surface, but make tracking worse. And the better tracking gets the worse censorship can be without being able to remove tracking.
As for being based in Europe, that only helps lip service. I'll admit, companies are probably worse in the US due to lax laws and enforcement actions, but it is naive to think businesses in Europe are always honest and comply with the law. (Think Volkswagon)
Whats to stop a European company from setting up a server in a hosted environment here in the US? Then if they get caught they just say they only track US citizens not Europeans. This will be even easier to do and harder to find out with more ad hoc and P2P.
Businesses are out there and they want your data; if not for themselves, to sell to someone else. It doesn't matter which country. Many don't care if it is legal or not. Even if caught, chances are that fines will be a slap on the wrist compared to the profit they make. The real small companies can just pack up shop and set up a new business before they can be held accountable.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P