Even innocent-looking mobile apps are routinely infested with tracking programs.

Evidence

Two themes stand out in the research report: ubiquity and intensification. First, there is hardly an innocent app; if it’s not tracking you now, it may be doing so in the next week or month: “There is an entire industry based upon these trackers, and apps identified as ‘clean’ today may contain trackers that have not yet been identified. Tracker code may also be added by developers to new versions of apps in the future.” Second is that even the most innocent-seeming applications such as weather, flashlights, ride sharing, and dating apps are “infested” with dozens of tracking programs that rely on increasingly bizarre, aggressive, and illegible tactics to collect massive amounts of behavioral surplus ultimately directed at ad targeting. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 430

Categorization

• DEFINE: “Ubiquity and intensification” functions as a compact two-axis definition of the tracking trend Zuboff’s dispossession cycle relies on.
• XREF: connects to: Most Android apps quietly connect to tracking and ad servers without user knowledge. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2014; A single app accessed profiles of tens of millions without consent — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 872

Broader Connections

• Most Android apps quietly connect to tracking and ad servers without user knowledge. #corroborates (0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2014
• A single app accessed profiles of tens of millions without consent #exemplifies (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 872