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Many studies have demonstrated that mobile applications are common means to collect massive amounts of personal data. This goes unnoticed by most users, who are also unaware that many different organizations are receiving this data, even from multiple apps in parallel. This paper assesses different techniques to identify the organizations that are...
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Context 1
... which is an insecure practice. Also, personal data flows were not identified in 176 apps. Fig. 1 shows the number of connections sending personal data to the top-20 destination SLDs. As expected, most of these domains serve analytics, marketing or monitoring purposes. We further applied our method to identify the companies receiving personal data (Fig. 2). Overall, we were able to find them in 77.42% (76,878) of the personal data flows, representing 68.92% (692) unique destination domains. The top 6 companies to which most apps send personal data provide analytics and marketing services. The list is leaded by Google, receiving data from 646 apps. We have leveraged the Crunchbase 5 ...
Context 2
... have leveraged the Crunchbase 5 database to further understand which corporations are beneath these companies, showing the parent company and all the subsidiaries that collect personal data. Fig. 3 shows how some of them collect data from different subsidiaries, being the aggregated data higher than expected as for Fig 2. The example of AppLovin is quite representative, as it receives personal data through AppLovin (monetization tools), but also Adjust (developers' support) and MoPub (advertisement). The result is a whole ecosystem of companies collecting data that situate the corporation on our top-3. ...
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