
Apps, Trackers, Privacy, and Regulators: The Mobile Tracking Ecosystem [pdf] - viridiano
http://eprints.networks.imdea.org/1744/1/trackers.pdf
======
shittyadmin
Title should be changed to reflect article.

Little to do with Android, mainly about 3rd party apps.

------
dang
We changed the title from "Any Android manufacturer monitors users without
consent". The site guidelines ask you to " _Please use the original title,
unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't editorialize._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
janekm
I only skimmed the article, but it appears to be about the prevalence of
tracking in third-party services used by app developers, not in the core
distribution, what did I miss?

~~~
Browun
> I only skimmed the article, but it appears to be about the prevalence of
> tracking in third-party services used by app developers, not in the core
> distribution, what did I miss?

I think it's at least partly covered on page 2 under _Uncovering Parent
Companies_ :

> We obtain the parent organizations of these services (after accounting for
> business mergers and acquisitions) and identify the dominant organizations
> in the mobile ATS ecosystem. We find that Alphabet-owned ATSes have presence
> in over 73% of apps in our dataset. This raises questions about Alphabet’s
> monopoly in the mobile ATS ecosystem.

So alongside their conclusion that information is shared freely between
subsidiaries:

> Our privacy policy analysis of the largest organizations revelaed the
> prevalence of intra- and inter- organization sharing of user data.

It would suggest that other large "players", along side Alphabet, could have
much larger collections of user data than cureently understood. That would be
my guess though.

