Related papers: Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem
While mobile app evolution has been widely studied, geographical variation in app behavior remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a large-scale study of location-based Android app differentiation, uncovering two important and…
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) represent a critical operational challenge for the online advertising industry, requiring substantial infrastructure investment while promising improved consumer privacy protection. Even when PETs may…
Third-party applications have become an essential part of today's online ecosystem, enhancing the functionality of popular platforms. However, the intensive data exchange underlying their proliferation has increased concerns about…
The proper use of Android app permissions is crucial to the success and security of these apps. Users must agree to permission requests when installing or running their apps. Despite official Android platform documentation on proper…
Recent developments in the mobile app industry have resulted in various types of mobile apps, each targeting a different need and a specific audience. Consequently, users access distinct apps to complete their information need tasks. This…
In today's mobile application marketplace, the ability of consumers to make informed choices regarding their privacy is extremely limited. Consumers largely rely on privacy policies and app permission mechanisms, but these do an inadequate…
FemTech or Female Technology, is an expanding field dedicated to providing affordable and accessible healthcare solutions for women, prominently through Female Health Applications that monitor health and reproductive data. With the leading…
Cookie banners are devices implemented by websites to allow users to manage their privacy settings with respect to the use of cookies. They are part of a user's daily web browsing experience since legislation in Europe requires websites to…
Contemporary self-tracking technologies (STTs), such as smartwatches and smartphone apps, allow people to become self-aware through the datafication of their everyday lives. However, concerns are emerging over the global north/Western…
Contact-tracing apps have potential benefits in helping health authorities to act swiftly to halt the spread of COVID-19. However, their effectiveness is heavily dependent on their installation rate, which may be influenced by people's…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Due to U.S. sanctions and strict internet censorship, Iranian iOS users are barred from accessing the Apple App Store and developer services. In response, despite violating Apple's developer terms, a thriving underground ecosystem of…
An increasing number of mental health services are offered through mobile systems, a paradigm called mHealth. Although there is an unprecedented growth in the adoption of mHealth systems, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about…
Mobile object tracking has an important role in the computer vision applications. In this paper, we use a tracked target-based taxonomy to present the object tracking algorithms. The tracked targets are divided into three categories: points…
Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party…
In recent years, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets) have met an increasing commercial success and have become a fundamental element of the everyday life for billions of people all around the world. Mobile devices are used not…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve utility or be essential for the application to work (e.g., for…
Device fingerprinting is a widely used technique that allows a third party to identify a particular device. Applications of device fingerprinting include authentication, attacker identification, or software license binding. Device…
The ubiquity of mobile applications has increased dramatically in recent years, opening up new opportunities for cyber attackers and heightening security concerns in the mobile ecosystem. As a result, researchers and practitioners have…
Recent developments in online tracking make it harder for individuals to detect and block trackers. Some sites have deployed indirect tracking methods, which attempt to uniquely identify a device by asking the browser to perform a…