An academic study of about one million Android apps reveals that most apps contain third-party tracking code.
News apps and apps targeted at children seem to be the worst of all in terms of the number of tracking trackers contained in them. 
The research was carried out by the University of Oxford by a team of academics who surveyed 959.426 Android apps from the official Google Play Store. The researchers analyzed the applications and domains that were alerted by their code.
From the early stages of research, researchers observed that almost all applications were using tracking trackers and decided that research should not identify the percentage of applications that used tracking code but the percentage of trackers used by each application.
So they found that the average number of trackers per application was 10 and that 90,4% of the applications included at least one Tracker. 17,9% of applications contained more than 20.
They also found that 13 apps had more than 30 trackers, but after a careful analysis of each application, they concluded that the specific applications offered various types of services in “all-in-one” packages. This way they loaded all trackers from all services together.
The usual suspects
Oxford researchers found that the vast majority of trackers belong to large parent companies, either directly or through intermediaries.
Τα πιο διαδεδομένα ονόματα στη σκηνή της κινητής παρακολούθησης είναι φυσικά η Alphabet (η μητρική εταιρεία της Google), το Facebook (42,55 τοις εκατό), το Twitter (33,88 τοις εκατό), η Verizon (26,27 τοις εκατό), η Microsoft (22,75 τοις εκατό) και η Amazon (17,91 percent).
The researchers categorized 49 Play Store app classes into eight larger types, which were easier to analyze.
According to their reclassification, news apps and family-related apps (usually directed to children) averaged most trackers, with an average of seven per application.
"Given the higher level of protection set by child marketing law, it appears that application detection is not working or that regulators should be more interested in limiting it," the Oxford team said.
View the survey (PDF).
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