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. We furthermore outline our steps towards a public catalog and census of analytics services, their behavior, their personal data collection processes, and their use across mobile apps.
Techniques relying on static and dynamic analysis fall short in terms of scalability and app coverage @cite_19 --- they rely on Google Play crawlers to obtain the executable and cannot access pre-installed services. In fact, they may generate false positives as the presence of a library in an app's source-code does not necessarily imply that it actually gets invoked at runtime.
@cite_19
2099464953
Mobile networks are the most popular, fastest growing and least understood systems in today’s Internet ecosystem. Despite a large collection of privacy, policy and performance issues in mobile networks, users and researchers are faced with few options to characterize and address them. In this poster we present Meddle, a framework aimed at enhancing transparency in mobile networks and providing a platform that enables users (and researchers) control mobile traffic.