Tracking the Trackers: Towards Understanding the Mobile Advertising and Tracking Ecosystem

Understand

Third-party services form an integral part of the mobile ecosystem: they allow app developers to add features such as performance analytics and social network integration, and to monetize their apps by enabling user tracking and targeted ad delivery.

• At present users, researchers, and regulators all have at best limited understanding of this third-party ecosystem.
• In this paper we seek to shrink this gap.
• Using data from users of our ICSI Haystack app we gain a rich view of the mobile ecosystem: we identify and characterize domains associated with mobile advertising and user tracking, thereby taking an important step towards greater transparency.