Uncovering Relationships between Android Developers, User Privacy, and Developer Willingness to Reduce Fingerprinting Risks

TL;DR

This study surveys Android developers to understand their perceptions and willingness to adopt privacy-enhancing changes that reduce fingerprinting, revealing strong support and highlighting opportunities for platform-developer collaboration.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into developer attitudes towards privacy measures and proposes actionable strategies for platform support to improve user privacy protection.

Findings

89% of developers support privacy-enhancing changes despite effort

Fingerprinting users are six times more likely to support changes

Most developers prefer optional privacy features over mandatory ones

Abstract

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.