News

New insights into clean analytics

March 2, 2021

There is a giant problem with the “collect it all” status quo that pervades on the Internet, this has been clear for a long time. Tracking …

Usability: the wonderful, powerful idea that betrayed us

February 18, 2021

Usability triggered a revolution in computing, taking arcane number crunching machines and making them essential tools in so many human endeavors, …

Clean Insights: February 2021 Update on Privacy-Preserving Measurement

February 10, 2021

Greetings, all. I hope this finds you healthy and well, finding ways to enjoy the season (whichever it may be). While everyday still provides new …

New Data Sources: API Key Identifiers and BroadcastReceiver Declarations

December 15, 2020

A central focus of the Tracking the Trackers project has been to find simple ways to detect whether a given Android APK app file contains code which …

εxodus ETIP: The Canonical Database for Tracking Trackers

December 11, 2020

There is a new story to add to the list of horrors of Surveillance Capitalism: the United States’ Military is purchasing tracking and location …

Distribution in Depth: Mirrors as a Source of Resiliency

December 7, 2020

There are many ways to get the apps and media, even when the Internet is expensive, slow, blocked, or even completely unavailable. Censorshop …

Free Software Tooling for Android Feature Extraction

May 6, 2020

As part of the Tracking the Trackers project, we are inspecting thousands of Android apps to see what kinds of tracking we can find. We are looking at …

"Features" for Finding Trackers

April 28, 2020

One key component of the Tracking the Trackers project is building a machine learning (ML) tool to aide humans to find tracking in Android apps. One …

Figuring Out Crowdsourced Translation of Websites

April 23, 2020

Crowdsourced translation platforms like Weblate, Transifex, Crowdin, etc. have proven to be a hugely productive way to actively translate apps and …

The Promise and Hazards of COVID Contact Tracing Apps

April 9, 2020

There has been increasing interest in the possibilities of tracking people who are infected with Coronavirus using all of the various methods that …