Research

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 of the most important pieces of developing a machine learning tool is figuring out which “features” should be fed to the machine learning algorithms. In this context, features are constrained data sets derived from the whole data set. In our case, the whole data set is terabytes of APKs. [Read More]

F-Droid is a free software community app store that has been working since 2010 to make all forms of tracking and advertising visible to users. It has become the trusted name for privacy in Android, and app developers who sell based on privacy make the extra effort to get their apps included in the F-Droid.org collection. These include Nextcloud, Tor Browser, TAZ.de, and Tutanota. Auditing apps for tracking is labor intensive and error prone, yet ever more in demand. [Read More]