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This paper investigates Android developers' attitudes towards platform-level changes that mitigate device fingerprinting, a technique used to covertly track users. Through a survey of 246 Android developers, the study examines their willingness to adopt a hypothetical Android change that protects users from fingerprinting, even at the cost of increased development effort. The key finding is that a large majority (89%) of developers support such a change, with fingerprinting users being surprisingly more supportive, highlighting an opportunity for collaborative privacy protection between platforms and developers.
Despite the effort required, Android developers overwhelmingly support platform-level changes to combat fingerprinting, suggesting a path to enhanced user privacy through collaborative platform-developer initiatives.
The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic with a case study on mobile fingerprinting that evaluates developers'perceptions of how well platforms protect user privacy and how developers perceive platform privacy interventions. Specifically, we study developers'willingness to make changes to protect users from fingerprinting and how developers consider trade-offs between user privacy and developer effort. We do this via a survey of 246 Android developers, presented with a hypothetical Android change that protects users from fingerprinting at the cost of additional developer effort. We find developers overwhelmingly (89%) support this change, even when they anticipate significant effort, yet prefer the change be optional versus required. Surprisingly, developers who use fingerprinting are six times more likely to support the change, despite being most impacted by it. We also find developers are most concerned about compliance and enforcement. In addition, our results show that while most rank iOS above Android for protecting user privacy, this distinction significantly reduces among developers very familiar with fingerprinting. Thus there is an important opportunity for platforms and developers to collaboratively build privacy protections, and we present actionable ways platforms can facilitate this.
Google Research