[HN Gopher] An Analysis of Privacy on the App Store
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       An Analysis of Privacy on the App Store
        
       Author : wallflower
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2021-01-05 00:56 UTC (22 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (hugotunius.se)
 (TXT) w3m dump (hugotunius.se)
        
       | definitelyhuman wrote:
       | No surprise who the top collector is (Free & FB) but I am
       | surprised the whole Gaming category was omitted. Lots of trackers
       | and tracking in games, especially ad supported
        
         | K0nserv wrote:
         | Hey, author here. Good point, I did look at it some initially
         | but because it's now separate from the rest of the categories
         | on the App Store I must've glossed over it in the end. I'll
         | make sure to include it in the follow up post that I am
         | planning.
         | 
         | EDIT: You we're spot on. I added the Games(Free) data and it
         | dethroned Shopping(Free) as the worst chart with a mean number
         | of data types collect of ~13.7 vs ~11.9. There's also only a
         | single game(out of 169 with data) that doesn't collect any data
         | in Games(Free). In third party tracking Games(Free) stands out
         | even more with a mean of ~6.1 and median of 6, the closest
         | other chart is News(Free) with a mean of ~2.7 and median of 3.
         | "Scrabble(r) GO - New Word Game" is the 13th worse app in the
         | data set(in terms of data linked to the users) after Facebook's
         | apps and LinkedIn. There are also several games in the top 20
         | third party trackers
        
       | blunte wrote:
       | The more we learn about Facebook, the worse the story gets. To
       | consider what people get out of Facebook vs what it gets out of
       | them... I actually cannot come up with a suitable analogy.
       | 
       | Are Facebook engineers willfully ignorant, or do they not care?
       | At least we hear about a measurable percent of Googlers caring
       | about the bad things G does.
       | 
       | I'm not suggesting Facebook engineers are bad, but I do wonder
       | how they feel about what their great efforts ultimately result
       | in.
        
       | yalogin wrote:
       | My theory is that every casual game is just a cover to collect
       | data. Its actually worse in App stores outside of the US and
       | Europe.
        
         | K0nserv wrote:
         | You might be on to something(see my edit here
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25651884)
        
         | BryantD wrote:
         | Insofar as they're tied into the online advertising markets,
         | yes. You need to collect the data for good ad revenue, and in-
         | app purchases don't typically pay the bills on their own, so
         | there's an incentive to collect data. Since the actual
         | collection tends to be via libraries, it's relatively easy to
         | ignore what your app is actually doing.
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-05 23:01 UTC)