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Can smartphone users turn off tracking service settings?
conference contribution
posted on 2013-01-01, 00:00 authored by Veelasha Moonsamy, Lynn BattenLynn Batten, M ShoreTracking services play a fundamental role in the smartphone ecosystem. While their primary purpose is to provide a smartphone user with the ability to regulate the extent of sharing private information with external parties, these services can also be misused by advertisers in order to boost revenues. In this paper, we investigate tracking services on the Android and iOS smartphone platforms. We present a simple and effective way to monitor traffic generated by tracking services to and from the smartphone and external servers. To evaluate our work, we dynamically execute a set of Android and iOS applications, collected from their respective official markets. Our empirical results indicate that even if the user disables or limits tracking services on the smartphone, applications can by-pass those settings and, consequently, leak private information to external parties. On the other hand, when testing the location 'on' setting, we notice that generally location is not tracked.
History
Event
Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia. Conference (11th : 2013 : Vienna, Austria)Pagination
455 - 463Publisher
Association for Computing MachineryLocation
Vienna, AustriaPlace of publication
[Vienna, Austria]Start date
2013-12-02End date
2013-12-04ISBN-13
9781450321068Language
engPublication classification
E1 Full written paper - refereed; E Conference publicationCopyright notice
2013, Association for Computing MachineryEditor/Contributor(s)
R Mayrhofer, L Chen, M Steinbauer, G Kotsis, I KhalilTitle of proceedings
MoMM 2013 : Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & MultimediaUsage metrics
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