iPhone Apps No Better for Privacy Than Android, Oxford Study Finds

upstart writes:

iPhone apps no better for privacy than Android, Oxford study finds:

"Overall, we find that neither platform is clearly better than the other for privacy across the dimensions we studied," say the academic paper entitled "Are iPhones Really Better for Privacy?" and presented by researchers from the University of Oxford.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because an Irish team earlier this year came to similar conclusions about the privacy of the Android and iOS core operating systems, apps notwithstanding. Meanwhile, an American researcher in 2020 found that the security of iOS apps was roughly equal to that of Android apps.

[...] The researchers analyzed the code, permissions and network traffic of 12,000 randomly selected free apps from each platform that had been updated or released in 2018 or later. Each app was run on a real device, either a first-generation iPhone SE running iOS 14.2 or a Google Nexus 5 running Android 7 Nougat.

They found that nearly all (89%) of the Android apps contained at least one tracking library, which was almost always Google Play Services. The numbers weren't much lower on iOS, where 79% of apps had at least one tracking library, most likely Apple's own SKADNetwork, which tracks which ads a user clicks on.

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