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Title    iPhone Apps No Better for Privacy Than Android, Oxford Study Finds
Date    Friday October 15 2021, @02:48AM
Author    FatPhil
Topic   
from the what's-this-privacy-concept? dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/10/14/2213202

upstart writes:

iPhone apps no better for privacy than Android, Oxford study finds:

"Overall, we find that neither platform is clearly better than the other for privacy across the dimensions we studied," say the academic paper entitled "Are iPhones Really Better for Privacy?" and presented by researchers from the University of Oxford.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because an Irish team earlier this year came to similar conclusions about the privacy of the Android and iOS core operating systems, apps notwithstanding. Meanwhile, an American researcher in 2020 found that the security of iOS apps was roughly equal to that of Android apps.

[...] The researchers analyzed the code, permissions and network traffic of 12,000 randomly selected free apps from each platform that had been updated or released in 2018 or later. Each app was run on a real device, either a first-generation iPhone SE running iOS 14.2 or a Google Nexus 5 running Android 7 Nougat.

They found that nearly all (89%) of the Android apps contained at least one tracking library, which was almost always Google Play Services. The numbers weren't much lower on iOS, where 79% of apps had at least one tracking library, most likely Apple's own SKADNetwork, which tracks which ads a user clicks on.

However, 62% of iOS apps also ran Google's AdMob ad tracking library, followed by 54% of iOS apps (and 58% of Android apps) running Google Firebase. Facebook trackers were in 28% of Android apps and 26% of iOS ones.

[...] Almost all tracking companies observed were based in the U.S. About 9.5% of iOS apps and 5% of Android ones used Chinese-based trackers; 7.5% of iOS apps and 2% of Android ones used Indian trackers.

Plenty more details in the article itself.

Journal Reference:
Konrad Kollnig, Anastasia Shuba, Reuben Binns, et al. Are iPhones Really Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps, (DOI: http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13722)


Original Submission

Links

  1. "upstart" - https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/
  2. "iPhone apps no better for privacy than Android, Oxford study finds" - https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/news/ios-android-app-privacy-parity
  3. "Are iPhones Really Better for Privacy" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.13722.pdf
  4. "privacy of the Android and iOS core operating systems" - https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/news/android-ios-data-collection
  5. "security of iOS apps was roughly equal to that of Android apps" - https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/news/bad-ios-android-apps-bowne-dc28
  6. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=51841

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printed from SoylentNews, iPhone Apps No Better for Privacy Than Android, Oxford Study Finds on 2024-03-28 15:19:18