I recently came across an article that stated over 50% of Android apps contain mobile trackers. This got me curious about which apps I use contained these mobile trackers.
To find out I installed DuckDuckGo’s mobile app, this contains a feature that analyses where your app traffic is going. I believe this is accomplished by creating a local VPN, then analysing which apps are calling known mobile trackers through the VPN.
Surprisingly Monzo seems to both use the most app tracking services out of any app I have installed and also hammers these tracking services more than any other installed app… making 414 requests in 30 minutes. All I did was open Monzo, then background it.
Nationwide don’t appear to have any trackers in comparison, at last in the time I’ve been running this.
Google, Braze, Adjust and Functional Software.
Google could be for anything Braze seems to be a customer engagement platform Adjust seems to be marketing related
Functional Software I’m not sure of, it might possibly be Sentry from what I’ve found online - which seems to be application performance monitoring
Based on the above I suspect its not to do with savings. I’m sure some are legitimate for development, however giving these companies unique identifiers for example would not be ideal, so it would be nice to know what exactly does get shared.
Monzo’s privacy policy does state shared data is anonymized, so I suspect their not sharing email addresses or GPS coordinates for example. However if they are sharing identifiers for example, then that data could be matched up with data these companies might have obtained about you from else where to build a bigger picture on you.
Maybe not, but you should always assume that it is by default. If they can do it, they probably are doing it. Braze specifically is a customer telemetry platform precisely for collecting that sort of information for marketing purposes. There’d be no reason to be using Braze at all otherwise.
Their App Store privacy label tells you as much that they are doing all of what Braze is known to collect and more.
I use software to filter trackers and such, and many banks use them, both on Android and iOS. Some will not function properly if they’re blocked as well.
Yes, I could not pay my Barclays credit card with a debit card because a tracker was blocked.
I also had issues with Lloyds credit card payments with trackers blocked, some NatWest features also don’t work with some trackers blocked.
