INTRODUCTION

Two critical items impacting mobile use are privacy and a positive user experience. The mobile app market is built on trust. Questionable mobile advertising practices, such as apps employing deceptive adware practices, negatively impact the end user’s perception of both privacy and the user experience. Doing things like capturing personal information such as email addresses, device IDs, IMEIs, etc. without properly notifying users and modifying phone settings and desktops without consent, is annoying and unacceptable for mobile users. While the majority of mobile ads are not malicious, they are undesirable for most.

Zscaler regularly analyses applications in the Google Play store to profile apps and identify those presenting security and privacy risks. By studying this data, they have come up with some interesting statistics concerning the prevalence of ‘adware’ in apps permitted into the Google Play store. They have tracked the top 300 applications in each category and have found around 1,845 applications which are flagged by one or more AV vendors as  including adware. This is a big number.

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