The Official Lookout Blog | Lookout Labs Releases Ad Network Detector App to Help You Manage Your Privacy

February 23, 2012

Lookout Labs Releases Ad Network Detector App to Help You Manage Your Privacy

By lookout 15 Comments

There’s been a lot of news and debate about app privacy lately, especially surrounding what types of personal, private information the apps on your phone should be allowed to access. While Congress is working with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL to create Do Not Track technology in most major Web browsers that will inhibit companies from tracking people as they surf the Internet, apps have their own set of information gathering capabilities.

If you’re using Foursquare, a location-based check-in app, it is pretty obvious that the app needs access to your location in order to function. However, sometimes apps access info for reasons that are not so obvious. On Android, you have to accept the permissions of an app before it’s installed on your phone, but at times, it can be difficult to discern what you’ve accepted unless you thoroughly read the terms. We think you should never be surprised about the info an app is accessing, which is why we introduced Privacy Advisor over a year ago, and today we’re excited to announce that Ad Network Detector is available for free in the Android Market.

The Ad Network Detector shows you what information the ad networks within the apps on your phone can access. It’s common for ad networks to collect personally identifiable information for use in advertising campaigns, and much like ads served by email providers or social networks, this practice helps show you more relevant ads. Ad networks are important to the mobile ecosystem; the money an app developer can make from advertising makes it possible to have so many fun, amazing apps for free.

Since last year, we have seen some mobile ad networks adopt increasingly aggressive methods of ad delivery. We’ve been particularly watchful of ad networks that are capable of pushing out-of-app ads to the default Android notification bar, placing generically designed icons on the mobile desktop, and changing browser settings, like bookmarks or homepage. To help users understand if they had one of these ad networks on their phone, a few weeks ago we released a beta app, called Push Ad Detector. When the Push Ad Detector identified one of those six ad networks within an app on your phone, it listed the app that had integrated the ad network and explains what private information the ad network could access.

The Push Ad Detector was so well received that we decided to develop it further. Today we’re re-launching the app as Ad Network Detector, which provides insight into even more ad networks to help you manage what’s happening on your phone. It scans the apps on your Android device for the presence of any of 35 mainstream ad networks, including those that are capable of displaying out-of-app ads. Ad Network Detector puts the information that we’ve gathered about ad networks at your fingertip. This includes description of what types of ads can be displayed, as well as what personal information is collected. With easy access to this information, you’ll be able to decide whether you want to keep the app that has certain ad networks on your phone.

The mobile space is evolving, and we’re collaborating with the wider industry to define a set of ad network standards to ensure that privacy always comes first and that people are never surprised by what’s happening on their phone. Delivering the Ad Network Detector is the first step we’re taking to provide this transparency.

Here’s an alphabetical list of the 35 ad networks that Ad Network Detector identifies: