Privacy and Tracking in the Emerging Mobile Applications: A Survey

Technological progress translates into applications that improve our daily lives based on the collection of personal data. However, the intensive collection of this data, combined with the power of the analysis tools increases the risk of violation of users’ privacy. Web and mobile applications must be implemented with care to ensure that user expectations are met in terms of privacy and do not become tracking applications. This paper focuses on the concept of privacy preserving and the problem of tracking by highlighting the impact of tracking on social and psychological expectations. It further explores how users’ privacy could be exposed and how this risk of exposure could be mitigated using several methods and algorithms that ensure privacy.