Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2602.20222

The TCF doesn't really A(A)ID -- Automatic Privacy Analysis and Legal Compliance of TCF-based Android Applications

Victor Morel·Cristiana Santos·Pontus Carlsson·Joel Ahlinder·Romaric Duvignau
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), developed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe, provides a de facto standard for requesting, recording, and managing user consent from European end-users. This framework has previously been found to infringe European data protection law and has subsequently been regularly updated. Previous research on the TCF focused exclusively on web contexts, with no attention given to its implementation in mobile applications. No work has systematically studied the privacy implications of the TCF on Android apps. To address this gap, we investigate the prevalence of the TCF in popular Android apps from the Google Play Store, and assess whether these apps respect users' consent banner choices. By scraping and downloading 4482 of the most popular Google Play Store apps on an emulated Android device, we automatically determine which apps use the TCF, automatically interact with consent banners, and analyze the apps' traffic in two different stages, passive (post choices) and active (during banner interaction and post choices). We found that 576 (12.85%) of the 4482 downloadable apps in our dataset implemented the TCF, and we identified potential privacy violations within this subset. In 15 (2.6%) of these apps, users' choices are stored only when consent is granted. Users who refuse consent are shown the consent banner again each time they launch the app. Network traffic analysis conducted during the passive stage reveals that 66.2% of the analyzed TCF-based apps share personal data, through the Android Advertising ID (AAID), in the absence of a lawful basis for processing. 55.3% of apps analyzed during the active stage share AAID before users interact with the apps' consent banners, violating the prior consent requirement.

Explore related subjects

cs.CRcs.CY

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Victor Morel, Cristiana Santos, Pontus Carlsson, Joel Ahlinder, Romaric Duvignau. 2026-02-27. The TCF doesn't really A(A)ID -- Automatic Privacy Analysis and Legal Compliance of TCF-based Android Applications. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20222

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Starfish: Rebalancing Multi-Party Off-Chain Payment Channels

Blockchain technology has revolutionized the way transactions are executed, but scalability remains a major challenge. Payment Channel Network (PCN), as a Layer-2 scaling solution, has been proposed to address this issue. However, skewed payments can deplete the balance of one party within a channel, restricting the ability of PCNs to transact through a path and subsequently reducing the transaction success rate. To address this issue, the technology of rebalancing has been proposed. However, existing rebalancing strategies in PCNs are limited in their efficiency and applicability under realistic network topologies. Cycle-based approaches only enable rebalancing among nodes that form cycles, while non-cycle-based approaches incur high on-chain operation costs. In this study, we propose Starfish, a rebalancing approach designed for the locally star-like structures formed by high-degree routing hubs and their incident channels in real-world PCNs. By leveraging a hub-centric structure, Starfish reduces the on-chain overhead of rebalancing from quadratic to linear in the number of channels, achieving high rebalancing efficiency. We formally prove the security of Starfish and conduct comparative experiments against existing rebalancing techniques to demonstrate its effectiveness.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Proof-of-Authorship for Diffusion-based AI Generated Content

Recent advancements in AI-generated content (AIGC) have introduced new challenges in intellectual property protection and the authentication of generated objects. We focus on scenarios in which an author seeks to assert authorship of an object generated using latent diffusion models (LDMs), in the presence of adversaries who attempt to falsely claim authorship of objects they did not create. While proof-of-ownership has been studied in the context of multimedia content through techniques such as time-stamping and watermarking, these approaches face notable limitations. In contrast to traditional content creation sources (e.g., cameras), the LDM generation process offers greater control to the author. Specifically, the random seed used during generation can be deliberately chosen. By binding the seed to the author's identity using cryptographic functions, the author can assert to be the creator of the object. We refer to this stronger guarantee as proof-of-authorship, since only the creator of the object can legitimately claim the object. This contrasts with proof-of-ownership via time-stamping or watermarking, where any entity could potentially claim ownership of an object by being the first to timestamp or embed the watermark. We propose a proof-of-authorship framework involving a probabilistic adjudicator who quantifies the probability that a claim is false. Furthermore, unlike prior approaches, the proposed framework does not involve any secret. We explore various attack scenarios and analyze design choices using Stable Diffusion 2.1 and XL as representative case studies.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Impact Analysis of Speech Representation Learning Models for Acoustic Side-Channel Attack

Acoustic side-channel attacks (ASCA) on keyboards have gained increasing attention, yet impact of speech representation learning models in ASCA remains unexplored. Addressing this, we introduce KEYAC, a dataset designed to analyze representation generalization for ASCA under both standard and VoIP codec settings. On KEYAC, we evaluate six representation learning models under zero-shot and partial fine-tuning settings using fully connected and convolutional networks. Results show that while partial fine-tuning improves performance, models struggle to generalize across VoIP codecs. We hypothesize this limitation stems from inadequate modeling of nonlinear feature interactions in conventional fine-tuning architectures. To address this, we employ Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) for fine-tuning. Empirical results show that KAN-based fine-tuning consistently outperforms the baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art on KEYAC.

cs.CR↗