“Novice and professional programmers alike by necessity only focus on a tiny fraction of the code in the final products they create-far less than 1 percent,” says Cynthia Lee, a Stanford computer science lecturer.įor consumers worried about their data, that's both good and bad. Making an app without these tools would be like building a house by first mining clay for bricks or felling lumber for beams.
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These software tools, which are usually licensed for a fee or at no charge, enable developers to run ads in their app, figure out who’s downloading it, and know when it crashes. SDKs and code libraries allow an app-maker to offer basic functions, like a login page or notifications, without having to cook them up anew. Rather than designing every element from scratch, developers spend much of their time assembling bits of code written by other people. Making an app is a lot like putting together a Lego set. Last year, an investigation from Upstream, a mobile security company, found that Elephant Data’s code secretly recruited consumers’ phones into a scheme that jacked up their phone bills and contributed to the tens of billions of dollars digital ad networks lose to fraud every year. Proposals like Elephant's often come from companies trying to collect user data for advertising, which could not be more at odds with Disconnect's mission.Īs it turns out, what Elephant was doing was much worse. It develops apps and research that promote digital privacy-and occasionally collaborates with Consumer Reports on security investigations. Thousands of dollars a month is a tidy sum for a small app company, but Disconnect turned down the offer. All Disconnect had to do was to add a few lines of code into its apps.
A couple of years ago, Disconnect, a small tech company in San Francisco, was approached with an enticing offer: For every 100,000 people who used Disconnect’s apps, a company called Elephant Data promised to pay it $1,000 a month.
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