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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: 2) by stretch611 on Sunday November 26 2017, @11:43PM (1 child)

    by stretch611 (6199) on Sunday November 26 2017, @11:43PM (#601879)

    Is there a significant difference between free and paid apps?

    And is there any evidence that apps with a strong privacy policy (like not promising to track) disregard what they state?

    BTW: nice sig :)

    --
    Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by seandiggity on Monday November 27 2017, @12:18AM

    by seandiggity (639) on Monday November 27 2017, @12:18AM (#601890) Homepage

    Is there a significant difference between free and paid apps?

    And is there any evidence that apps with a strong privacy policy (like not promising to track) disregard what they state?

    We haven't scanned any paid apps with Exodus yet, something we'll try to make clear in the future. Exodus uses a CLI client called gplaycli (available in Debian and here https://github.com/matlink/gplaycli [github.com] ) to grab the apps, and you could grab APKs you paid for with a Google Play account, as long as you authenticate correctly with gplaycli. There is plenty to chew on with free apps, but it may be worthwhile to look at high-profile paid apps. As long as we have an APK package (and of course have received it legitimately), it can be analyzed. The devs at Exodus Privacy have really done great work, and are actually putting together video tutorials on how anyone can do this type of analysis manually. So, stay tuned and maybe you can scan some of your paid apps for us :)

    Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer. What is legally considered consent in this area can be very broad, and EULAs are often written specifically to be catch-alls and protect the owners/developers/distributors from litigation. It's quite likely users have "consented" to this type of tracking (data collection, storage, and transmission).

    Where privacy policies are concerned, we've seen them range from "shockingly honest" to "incredibly vague". There are often complex and tedious ways to opt-out of tracking, or some subset of the tracking. In many cases, that doesn't "stick" (users would have to keep opting out, say, upon update or reinstall). In a few cases, the privacy policy basically says "the only way to opt out is to not use our app". We're still at the beginning of this project, and hope to do some serious legal analysis, since we are at Yale Law School after all. For now, we've briefly summarized privacy policies in the 25 profiles we've done: https://github.com/YalePrivacyLab/tracker-profiles/ [github.com]

    If they haven't been coined before, we'd like to call the problems here "opt-missing" and "opt-vague". Of course, we like to look at privacy (or rather, lack of it) as an ecosystem problem, not just a transactional concern.