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Researchers Detect Android Apps That Connect to User Tracking and Ad Sites
An anonymous reader writes: A group of European researchers has developed software that tracks the URLs to which cellphone apps connect. After downloading 2,000+ free apps from Google Play, they indexed all the sites those apps connected to, and compared them to a list of known advertising and user tracking sites. "In total, the apps connect to a mind-boggling 250,000 different URLs across almost 2,000 top level domains. And while most attempt to connect to just a handful of ad and tracking sites, some are much more prolific. Vigneri and co give as an example "Music Volume Eq," an app designed to control volume, a task that does not require a connection to any external urls. And yet the app makes many connections. 'We find the app Music Volume EQ connects to almost 2,000 distinct URLs,' they say. [Another major offender] is an app called Eurosport Player which connects to 810 different user tracking sites." The researchers plan to publish their software for users to try out on Google Play soon.
This argument is very easy to understand, so it's a great starting point.
The first targets for a campaign for free software apps should be educational institutions and public services.
GNU.org has a good list of proprietary software packages with spyware:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
Doesn't Android allow the user to set permissions?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
As Heinlein famously put it in his The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (and he was just echoing the sentiment), There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch -- or in this case, a free app.
If they're not charging you, then you (or your time, your attention, or your information) are the product they're charging somebody else for. Or as Heinlein would have put it, even at a charitable soup kitchen you're going to have to listen to a sermon.
I don't think cost explains or excuses this phenomenon. There is always a motive for doing anything but traditionally much of it was side projects, hobbies, getting famous, filling resumes, PR and making money off pay version upgrades... the primary goal was never making money by fucking people over until the rise of the app store.
There must be countless hundreds of unique pieces of "free" software I use all the time on my desktop.. none of it is engaged in this bullshit.
The culprit in my view are perverted market pressures brought about by existence of app stores.
There is no useful quality filter.. You don't go to Walmart and walk out with a "free" or $3 PS4 title. When everything is free people who want to publish real software get fucked over by everyone expecting free or $1.50 while their product appears as just another piece of flotsam in a vast ocean of mostly useless crap.
Couple this with undeserved global exposure all apps automatically get regardless of whether they deserve it or not and feedback loops that make profiting from advertising and spying networks easy for app vendors and you get the current cesspool of mediocrity and hostility.