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Researchers Identify 44 Trackers in More Than 300 Android Apps (bleepingcomputer.com)
Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: A collaborative effort between the Yale Privacy Lab and Exodus Privacy has shed light on dozens of invasive trackers that are embedded within Android apps and record user activity, sometimes without user consent. The results of this study come to show that the practice of collecting user data via third-party tracking code has become rampant among Android app developers and is now on par with what's happening on most of today's popular websites. The two investigative teams found tracking scripts not only in lesser known Android applications, where one might expect app developers to use such practices to monetize their small userbases, but also inside highly popular apps -- such as Uber, Twitter, Tinder, Soundcloud, or Spotify. The Yale and Exodus investigation resulted in the creation of a dedicated website that now lists all apps using tracking code and a list of trackers, used by these apps. In total, researchers said they identified 44 trackers embedded in over 300 Android apps.
This stuff will NEVER cease until Google themselves stops being the greatest Data Sink of all time, and puts some actual Privacy into Android. ...and we ALL know when that will be.
What we need a law that makes it illegal to track users without explicit consent and whose violation ends the perpetrator (or company) not only with giant fines but jailtime too. And to the question "how can you jail a corporation ?" you can't but you can sure as hell jail the CEO and other executives. You know the ones how give the go ahead to enact such privacy invading policies. How fucking hard can it be ?
Your reverse tracking law is pie in sky and serves no purpose beyond making you feel all warm and fuzzy.
Reverse tracking would be that whenever someone tracks your life, you get the legal right to track them back. So if the CEO of Company X puts a tracker on your Android phone peering into your private life, for example, you'd get the legal right to track that CEO back and peer into HIS private life and habits. If a big data company is collecting data on you, your spouse, your kids, you would have the legal right to collect big data on THAT big data company's activities, including insight into that company's most private activities. Watch how quickly all tracking stops when such a law is passed.
Most CEOs don't have a fucking clue as to how their own products abuse privacy. They're never punished for abusing privacy, which is why they don't give a shit. Even when they do risk punishment or fines, they still weigh it against profit, which is truly all they care about. They continue to abuse privacy because they found out long ago that it's worth it.
And do you know what happens when you try and do a WHOIS lookup on the worlds most popular domains? You get some generic result-by-proxy bullshit, which is exactly what any executive of any corporation would do if a reverse-tracking law were passed. You would never be allowed to track them, you would be allowed to track a sanitized proxy.