Tracking the Trackers

Scanning apps, off the record

September 28, 2022

Smart phones have brought us so many wonderful capabilities. They let people around the world access vast realms of information. They let app …

The Search for Ethical Apps: Let's start with governments

September 1, 2022

Governments across the world are moving services to mobile apps. The vast majority of these apps are only available in the Google Play store or in the …

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 …

On the classification of tracking

May 20, 2020

This position paper tries to outline a framework for defining trackers in smart phones and lists mechanisms for identifying them. It hopes to serve as …

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 …

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 …