• by Philip Rosenstein , September 23, 2016

Thursday’s release of AppsFlyer’s new anti-fraud product DeviceRank has raised criticism of issues with users’ privacy and the effect it may have on advertisers’ datasets. Much of this commentary has to do with the device-level approach that AppsFlyer has taken in developing DeviceRank.

“Mobile user acquisition fraud is never tied to a particular device,” Andreas Naumann, a fraud specialist with adjust.com, told Real-Time Daily via email. “But the device is tied to a lot of other legitimate activity. Trying to reject or filter individual devices is heavy-handed and will result in swaths of conversions being spuriously rejected as ‘untrusted,’ and significant marketing budgets moved as a result.”

While there may be overarching difficulties with device-level fraud detection approaches, an AppsFlyer spokesperson assured Real-Time Daily that “DeviceRank is highly controlled and only targets verified fraudulent activity, so those running fraudulent traffic may be impacted -- but those that aren’t only stand to benefit.”

Criticism of this type often follows advances in the ad-tech ecosystem, notes the rep. “Similar issues were raised in the past regarding IP filtering and other models. But that ultimately became an industry standard solution.”

Questions about privacy have also been advanced. “The main privacy problem of DeviceRank is that it necessitates the broad profiling of all users,” Naumann explained.

“You can’t decide which devices to profile before you already have. So every single user that happens to enjoy an app with this technology in it will have an AppsFlyer-wide, invisible profile associated permanently to their device, unbeknownst to them, that they are incapable of controlling or inspecting,” continued Naumann.

Nevertheless, AppsFlyer aims to provide value. If there are downsides for advertisers or privacy issues, they will have to be addressed in due time.

“Removing fraudulent devices from data sets is good for networks and great for advertisers, benefiting the entire ecosystem. Both advertisers and networks want these insights, because the overwhelming majority of the industry has no interest in the short-term gains and long-term damage caused by fraud,” concluded the AppsFlyer spokesperson.