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

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.