Investigating User Privacy in Android Ad Libraries

Ryan Stevens, Clint Gibler, Jon Crussell, Jeremy Erickson, and Hao Chen

The popularity of smartphones has unleashed a huge number of mobile
applications.  Advertising is a crucial pillar behind mobile
applications, especially ad-supported free applications.  Android, the
most popular mobile platform, has an open architecture where
developers can choose among many advertisers and application markets.
Despite the importance of mobile advertising, the interaction between
advertisers, application developers, and application markets has not
been studied.  For example, what are the differences between
advertisers?  How do applications use them differently?  How do
advertising libraries behave differently?  How do advertisers
distribute across different application markets?  We take the first
step in studying the landscape of mobile advertising.  We present data
to illustrate the ecosystem consisting of advertisers, application
developers, and application markets.  The data allows us to gain
insight in how to improve the current mobile advertising
infrastructure and to detect and prevent abuse.