Uncovering Relationships between Android Developers, User Privacy, and Developer Willingness to Reduce Fingerprinting Risks

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 30 Mar 2026] Uncovering Relationships between Android Developers, User Privacy, and Developer Willingness to Reduce Fingerprinting Risks Alex Berke, Güliz Seray Tuncay, Michael Specter, Mihai Christodorescu The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic with a case study on mobile fingerprinting that evaluates developers' perceptions of how well platforms protect user privacy and how developers perceive platform privacy interventions. Specifically, we study developers' willingness to make changes to protect users from fingerprinting and how developers consider trade-offs between user privacy and developer effort. We do this via a survey of 246 Android developers, presented with a hypothetical Android change that protects users from fingerprinting at the cost of additional developer effort. We find developers overwhelmingly (89%) support this change, even when they anticipate significant effort, yet prefer the change be optional versus required. Surprisingly, developers who use fingerprinting are six times more likely to support the change, despite being most impacted by it. We also find developers are most concerned about compliance and enforcement. In addition, our results show that while most rank iOS above Android for protecting user privacy, this distinction significantly reduces among developers very familiar with fingerprinting. Thus there is an important opportunity for platforms and developers to collaboratively build privacy protections, and we present actionable ways platforms can facilitate this. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) Cite as: arXiv:2603.29063 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.29063v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.29063 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Mihai Christodorescu [view email] [v1] Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:01:09 UTC (2,756 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.HC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)