50,328 research outputs found
Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their
behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical
study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and
UK Google Play stores. We find that most apps contain third party tracking, and
the distribution of trackers is long-tailed with several highly dominant
trackers accounting for a large portion of the coverage. The extent of tracking
also differs between categories of apps; in particular, news apps and apps
targeted at children appear to be amongst the worst in terms of the number of
third party trackers associated with them. Third party tracking is also
revealed to be a highly trans-national phenomenon, with many trackers operating
in jurisdictions outside the EU. Based on these findings, we draw out some
significant legal compliance challenges facing the tracking industry.Comment: Corrected missing company info (Linkedin owned by Microsoft). Figures
for Microsoft and Linkedin re-calculated and added to Table
MobiFace: A Novel Dataset for Mobile Face Tracking in the Wild
Face tracking serves as the crucial initial step in mobile applications
trying to analyse target faces over time in mobile settings. However, this
problem has received little attention, mainly due to the scarcity of dedicated
face tracking benchmarks. In this work, we introduce MobiFace, the first
dataset for single face tracking in mobile situations. It consists of 80
unedited live-streaming mobile videos captured by 70 different smartphone users
in fully unconstrained environments. Over bounding boxes are manually
labelled. The videos are carefully selected to cover typical smartphone usage.
The videos are also annotated with 14 attributes, including 6 newly proposed
attributes and 8 commonly seen in object tracking. 36 state-of-the-art
trackers, including facial landmark trackers, generic object trackers and
trackers that we have fine-tuned or improved, are evaluated. The results
suggest that mobile face tracking cannot be solved through existing approaches.
In addition, we show that fine-tuning on the MobiFace training data
significantly boosts the performance of deep learning-based trackers,
suggesting that MobiFace captures the unique characteristics of mobile face
tracking. Our goal is to offer the community a diverse dataset to enable the
design and evaluation of mobile face trackers. The dataset, annotations and the
evaluation server will be on \url{https://mobiface.github.io/}.Comment: To appear on The 14th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face
and Gesture Recognition (FG 2019
Pegging To The Dollar And The Euro
The newly-launched euro is bound to attract some "trackers"- that is, countries that attempt to maintain exchange rate stability against the euro. In this paper, we ask whether the existence of trackers should be a matter of concern for the European Union. To gain some insight, we review the historical experience of the US with respect to dollar trackers. We identify and analyse the countries most likely to track the euro. Although the aggregate size of potential euro-trackers is small relative to the euro zone, we argue that this does not justify an attitude of benign neglect. Rather, we make recommendations for EU policy towards euro-trackers, arguing in favour of some limited and conditional support for stable bilateral exchange rates.
- …