Why is it important to manage the AdNetworks of an application?
There are dozens of AdNetworks but not all of them are equally honest.
Even among the honest ones some may be aggressively configured. What do
we mean by “honest”? Easy: Respecting users’ privacy. All the AdNetworks
send information on users’ activity, so they may perform their functions.
However, the line demarcating such activity report and the tracking or
invasion of users’ privacy is very thin. And this depends on the AdNetwork
itself, but also on how the developer configured it. For instance, a developer
may include an AdNetwork in their application. This AdNetwork might collect
more information than it should in terms of respect for privacy, or even the
application might include permissions that the developer (and the app itself)
don’t actually need for working. But it is also possible that the developer
configures the SDK to include ads too often, or to invade users’ privacy.
Why is it important to manage the AdNetworks of an application?
Antivirus engines usually detect some applications as malicious just
by including a given SDK, this is the case of AirPush.
What can users do to stay protected?
It’s not easy to know what AdNetworks are used by an app and when still less before installing it.
Knowing its potential behavior is not simple either (if it will display a lot of ads,
collect too much information…) before it is too late. MAD answers all these questions
by dissecting information from the app and providing information to the users, so that
they may finally decide if they wish to download it or not. How can they decide it?
A ranking on all the AdNetworks is provided, assessing their behavior on two levels:
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Analysis of those Apps including each AdNetwork: For every app including a given
AdNetwork an analysis is performed on all the relevant aspects allowing to measure
the “quality”, and even the danger, of such applications (number of detections per
antivirus, known vulnerabilities, number of permissions, download average rating,
average number of days that apps with the same AdNetwork stay on the market…).
By using this data, macrodata for all those apps making up an AdNetwork are triggered.
In real time, it allows to evaluate how developers commonly use it, users’ reviews,
Google Play, antiviruses… An aggregated overall view based on dozens of apps sharing
the same AdNetwork.
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Analysis on App Intrusiveness. This involves how the AdNetwork has been individually
configured in a given app, or if user’s privacy is at risk by installing the app.