It is with great honour that I’ve been informed that my paper ‘A Fait Accompli? An Empirical Study into the Absence of Consent to Third-Party Tracking in Android Apps’ was awarded this year’s Student Paper Award of the FPF Privacy Papers for Policymakers.
With this award, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) recognises leading privacy research and analytical work that is relevant to policymakers in the United States Congress, at US federal agencies, and data protection authorities internationally.
The paper itself was written as part of my ongoing PhD at the Computer Science Department of the University of Oxford and analyses the presence (or rather absence) of consent mechanisms in mobile apps.
The paper provides quantitative insights into tracking without consent, a legal analysis of the conditions around consent to tracking under EU + UK law, and an analysis of the guidance provided by tracking companies (which is often poorly maintained and hard to understand).
Overall, we observed that more than 70% shared data with at least one tracking companies right at the first app start (before consent was given), while less than 10% of apps actually asked for any form of consent (not necessarily fulfilling the high bar for consent under the GDPR).