General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) To provide background on our methodological approach, we then present previous literature on analysing data protection and privacy aspects of apps, in particular third-party tracking. We first introduce the legal background of data protection law, and relate this to third-party tracking. In this section, we review background literature and developments that motivate our study.
#Toptracker app for android code#
We share our code and data from this research at. However, significant change might be imminent, due to recent changes by gatekeeper companies. Our analysis suggests that there has been limited change in the presence of third-party tracking in apps, limited changes in ownership and jurisdiction of tracking companies, and that the concentration of tracking capabilities among a few large gatekeeper companies persists. The aim of these questions is to understand, at a macro-scale, whether the GDPR has thus far had a measurable and material impact on the tracking operations of smartphone data aggregators. RQ3: How has the market concentration in third-party tracking changed?.RQ2: How have the organisations doing the tracking themselves changed, in particular in terms of ownership and jurisdiction of operation?.
Our data was collected when the UK was still bound to EU law-during the transition period of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement.
#Toptracker app for android android#
We compare nearly two million Android apps from the UK app store, from before and after the introduction of the GDPR in 2018, to study how the tracking ecosystem has changed. In this paper, we examine the Android mobile app ecosystem, which remains the largest smartphone app ecosystem. However, limited empirical evidence exists thus far regarding the effect the GDPR has had on the actual act of third-party tracking in smartphone apps. This law seeks to address, among other aspects, the risks posed by the widespread collection of personal data collection in apps, on the web, and in other digital contexts, by imposing specific requirements in the context of personal data processing. To give citizens ‘better control over how personal data is handled by companies and public administrations’ (European Commission, 2018), the EU updated its data protection regime with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), brought into force in 2018. For instance, a hotel booking app might share a user’s searches with a third-party tracker, who in turn combines that data with the same user’s behaviour obtained from other apps, in order to form a fine-grained profile of the user. Unlike first-party tracking, where data is collected by the app developers themselves, such companies engage in ‘third party tracking’ where ‘data regarding a particular user’s activity across multiple distinct contexts’ is retained, used or shared between those contexts (Doty et al. The collection of personal data via mobile apps by companies offering analytics, advertising, and other services, has been identified as a significant and ubiquitous threat to data protection and privacy in recent decades (Binns, Lyngs et al., 2018 Wang et al., 2018 Zimmeck et al., 2019). Before and after GDPR: tracking in mobile apps. Keywords: Personal data, Personal data protection, Mobile apps, Privacy, GDPR, Competition Citation: Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist that have influenced the text. The other authors received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors for this research. Max Van Kleek has been supported by the PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity, which has been funded by the UK EPSRC under grant number EP/S035362/1. Received: JReviewed: NovemPublished: DecemLicence: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany Funding: Konrad Kollnig was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant number EP/R513295/1.
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