JANUS · Mapping Back-End Internet Connectivities

The use of apps has become very widespread, as we regularly interact with a huge variety of commercial, public, not-for-profit services through them, and yet we mostly do not understand what happens in the background. Who are our apps communicating with? How do they personalise their services? Where is our data going? What background services support them? Understanding the back-end connectivity of apps means being able to see which third-party services they connect to, who these services are, where they are located, and how this ecosystem evolves through time –increasingly important information to support digital governance in the public and non-profit sector. Existing approaches to study these hidden data flows are disjointed, ad-hoc, and often focused on specific events. There is no single tool that is simple to use, that provides customisable solutions and that creates pathways to explore contextual information to interpret the results. To address this gap, we have created a research software that maps, visualizes and audits the back-end connectivity of apps. To meet the societal challenge of creating tools to support oversight of tech companies by the public and non-profit sector, we propose to develop the software to allow individuals and organisations without specialized technical skills to (1) understand which third-party services apps connect to and how this connectivity has evolved through time; (2) find who the real entities are behind apps; (3) to examine how compliant apps are with localization and privacy rules across time; and (4) to evaluate how apps compare to each other and identify common links across different groups of apps. In the year of this project, we'll focus on validating our ideas, redesigning the software in a more robust and modular way, and creating a community of practice of academics, NGOs and regulators around it that will ensure its sustainability and continuous development to integrate technological advancements.