Mobile Observation Ad Toolkit

A data donation app that helps researchers understand mobile advertising

Researchers from the Australian Internet Observatory and ADM+S Centre developed The Mobile Observation Ad Toolkit to explore digital advertising on social media platforms and observe potential harms posed by targeted advertising. The project uses a ‘data donation’ method that involves you and other members of the public donating ads you see on social media into a dataset managed by our research team.

Once you have registered and consented to participate in the research project, the app collects advertisement content that is marketed to you through various apps. This is achieved by a screen-recording process that uses image analysis to filter said advertisements on social media apps. The app does not collect any details about you, or your personal social platform profiles.

Important information regarding the app's usage of the Android Accessibility Services API:

As mentioned, the app works by screen-recording your device screen, using image analysis methods to isolate and collect advertisements seen on social media apps.

Part of the image analysis involves digitally processing the screen recordings that come through the device. As social media apps alone do not constitute the entire viewing experience of a mobile device's usage, it becomes an inconvenience that the app then spends time and computational resources processing screen-recordings that yield no valuable data.

To get around this, Android provides the Accessibility Services API that can help the app get a better idea of when to collect data, and when to discard it.

Consider advertisements posted on social media platforms: the Android Accessibility Services API can be used in this situation to determine that the device is within the relevant apps - it can then relay this information to the screen-recording service, advising it to either retain or discard data that will be processed further down the line.

It is stressed that while this app checks whether you are within said apps, that no data is retained about the explicit app names that you have visited on your device in any of the app's functionality.