Oct 10, Kathmandu- A survey has concluded that iPhone apps are as intrusive as personal Android apps. "Are iPhones really great for privacy?" Said the academic report.

The report was presented by researchers at Oxford University. "Our analysis suggests that user privacy is protected by the choice of smartphone architecture, and there is no clear basis for either iOS or Android to be a winner," the report said.

Oxford's findings are similar to those of an earlier study by the Irish team on "the core privacy systems of Android and iOS." However, in 2020, a US researcher discovered that the iOS app was roughly similar to the Android app in terms of security.

The study was conducted before the 'privacy level' was mandatory to choose whether or not to track iPhone. Conrad Colling, Reuben Beans, Max van Klik and Nigel Schadbolt, as well as independent researcher Anastasia Shob, have pledged to study the impact of the new revised policy in the future.

But this research does not only focus on tracking but also covers many other issues. IOS and Android are everywhere Tracking: The research team analyzed the codes, permissions and network traffic of 12,000 apps, both public and updated, from Android and iOS in 2018 or later.

Each app was viewed using a real device. Among them were iPhone SE with iOS 14.2 and Google Nexus Five with Android Nougat.

They found that almost all (89 percent) Android apps have at least one tracking library. At least one tracking library was found on 79 percent of iOS apps.

Which tracks which ads a user clicks. Similarly, 62 percent of iOS apps use Google's AdMob ad tracking library, while 54 percent of iOS apps use Google Firebase.

June 58 was found during a study run on the Android app. Similarly, 28 percent of Android apps and 26 percent of iOS apps have Facebook tracker.

Interestingly, 90 percent of the Android apps for tracking and more than 60 percent of the data shared with iOS apps are owned by the tracking company Google. "Not only on Android, but also on iOS, most of the tracking is done by Google, for which the user's approval is not taken anywhere during the device setup process," the research report said.

Most of the tracking companies are in the United States, while about 9.5 percent of iOS and 5 percent of Android apps use Chinese trackers. Similarly, 7.5 percent of iOS apps and 2 percent of Android apps had Indian trackers.

The researchers used a British version of the app. The tracker companies are all out of Europe. It is estimated that such companies are out of the region because they have violated Europe's GDPR policy.