Almost 9 in 10 Android Apps Are Able To Share Data With Google, Says Study (ft.com)

A peer-reviewed study [PDF] of almost one million Android apps has revealed how data from smartphones are harvested and shared, with nearly 90 percent of apps set up to transfer information back to Google. From a report: Researchers at Oxford university analysed approximately a third of the apps available in Google's Play Store in 2017 and found that the median app could transfer data to 10 third parties, with one in five apps able to share data with more than 20. This year has seen unprecedented scrutiny over how websites use the data they collect from their users, but little attention has so far been paid to the sprawling and fast-growing world of smartphone apps. Reuben Binns, the computer scientist who led the project, said that because most apps have now moved to a "freemium" model, where they make revenues from advertising rather than sales, data sharing has spiralled out of control.

Users, regulators and sometimes even the app developers and advertisers are unaware of the extent to which data flow from smartphones to digital advertising groups, data brokers and intermediaries that buy, sell and blend information, he said. "This industry was growing already on the webâ...âwhen smartphones came along, that was a new opportunity," he said. "It feels like this legitimate business model has gone completely out of control and created a kind of chaotic industry that is not understood by the people who are most affected by it."

Comments

Peak App

[PincushionMan]

So what you are saying is, "Now is not the time to get into app development", right?

No shit.

[viperidaenz]

90% of Android apps use Google's free usage monitoring service and/or ad framework?

You don't say.

Re:No shit.

[viperidaenz]

Do you know what kind of data they're talking about?
The study used static analysis to search for hostnames in APK files. They matched the host names to those of known tracking companies.
The string "google.com" was found in 87.52% of apps. Of those, Google API's were 67.51 and Google's ad services (DoubleClick) were down at 60.85%.
Facebook was at 42.54%

That's the extent of it. They did no analysis of data and couldn't differentiate between advertising and analytics.

Another issue is
that without dynamic network traffic analysis of all apps, including
successful man-in-the-middle proxying and ability to interpret the
data payloads, we cannot confirm precisely what data is sent to each
tracker. Finally, different trackers serve different purposes; some
facilitate targeted advertising, while others are used for analytics.
Without further fine-grained distinctions between such purposes,
the figures presented here do not represent the full nuance and
variety of third party tracking and its impacts.

Google business model

[sinij]

Free mobile phone OS written by biggest data collection and aggregation company is prone to and open to abusive unrestricted data collection. News at 11.

almost 9 out of 10

[mschoolbus]

So really... 8/10 apps are able to send data to Google?