Many apps eat up user data with invisible ads: Study

27 Jul 2015

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Many of the users' mobile apps might be eating into their data without their even being aware of it, a study said.

Apps of the kind surreptitiously loaded large number of invisible ads that artificially inflated viewer numbers, eating up as much as 2GB of internet data per day on images and videos that were never actually seen, according to the study done by ad fraud-detection firm Forensiq.

The apps could launch battery and bandwidth-intensive operations hidden in the background of the device that lingered even after users exited the app,  Mashable reported.

Nearly 15 per cent of the apps, requested access to settings like preventing the device from sleeping, modifying and deleting memory and tracking user location, which were often unnecessary for the app's functioning.

"We wanted to show the public how blatant and hurtful all this fraud is -- not just to advertisers who pay for ads that no one sees but also people using these apps on these tiny devices that are bandwidth-limited and power-limited," Forensiq's chief scientist Mike Andrews was quoted as saying.

The researchers arrived at this data by tracking the inner workings of ad exchanges, or digital marketplaces that auctioned off the screen space in front of users to advertisers in real time as a page or app loaded.

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