Are Mobile Advertisements in Compliance with App's Age Group?

Zhao，Yanjie1; Liu，Tianming2; Wang，Haoyu3; Liu，Yepang4; Grundy，John2; Li，Li1

10.1145/3543507.3583534

2023-04-30

ACM Web Conference 2023 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2023

3132-3141

As smartphones and mobile apps permeate every aspect of people's lives, children are accessing mobile devices at an increasingly younger age. The inescapable exposure of advertisements in mobile apps to children has grown alarmingly. Mobile advertisements are placed by advertisers and subsequently distributed by ad SDKs, under the rare control of app developers and app markets' content ratings. Indeed, content that is objectionable and harmful to children's mental health has been reported to appear in advertising, such as pornography. However, few studies have yet concentrated on automatically and comprehensively identifying such kid-unsuitable mobile advertising. In this paper, we first characterize the regulations for mobile ads relating to children. We then propose our novel automated dynamic analysis framework, named AdRambler, that attempts to collect ad content throughout the lifespan of mobile ads and identify their inappropriateness for child app users. Using AdRambler, we conduct a large-scale (25,000 mobile apps) empirical investigation and reveal the non-incidental presence of inappropriate ads in apps with child-included target audiences. We collected 11,270 ad views and identified 1,289 ad violations (from 775 apps) of child user regulations, with roughly half of the app promotions not in compliance with host apps' content ratings. Our finding indicates that even certified ad SDKs could still propagate inappropriate advertisements. We further delve into the question of accountability for the presence of inappropriate advertising and provide concrete suggestions for all stakeholders to take action for the benefit of children.

Android app Malvertising Mobile advertising

其他

英语

EI

20232014104402

Android (operating system)

Computer Software, Data Handling and Applications:723 ; Marketing:911.4

2-s2.0-85159368245

Scopus

1.School of Software,Beihang University,China
2.Faculty of Information Technology,Monash University,Australia
3.Huazhong University of Science and Technology,China
4.Southern University of Science and Technology,China

Zhao，Yanjie,Liu，Tianming,Wang，Haoyu,et al. Are Mobile Advertisements in Compliance with App's Age Group?[C],2023:3132-3141.