AdAway adds Airpush detector, Addons Detector detects more

Spamming and spying

Ad banners are not only annoying, they're an attack on your privacy too. Adsense, AdMob, and all the other banner farms out there track your online behaviour across apps and sites in as much detail as technically possible. You wouldn't accept your tv tracking you 1984-style, so why would you accept it from your phone?

Some apps even insist on running ads on your phone when you're not running the apps themselves. Their dirty trick: they use shady companies like Airpush and LeadBolt who abuse the new possibilities that mobile phones bring. Unfortunately there are plenty more similar spamvertisers out there.

Advertisers like Airpush and LeadBolt spam your Android notification bar with ads. They pop up often, even when you're not running the apps that brought them. Worse yet, many apps never tell you that they come with Airpush or LeadBolt spamware built in. They just keep you guessing. Plenty of people have panicked because they thought their phone was infected by a virus. You can't blame them, because ad scams like Airpush and LeadBolt behave like a virus.

Countermeasures

Time to stand up and defend yourself. If you receive ads in your notification bar and you don't know which app sneaked them in, there are ways to find out.

My favourite banner blocker AdAway got updated and has a new button in the menu. It's called "Scan for Adware" and that's what it does. Run the scan and it will list the apps on your phone that have malicious advertising built in. Tap the app name and AdAware takes you straight to the uninstall screen so you can get rid of the ad-infested junkware.

You should definitely keep a copy of AdAway to block banners, but there's a more thorough way to scan for adware. Addons Detector by denper scans your apps for privacy violations. Banner ads with tracking code, status bar spam like Airpush and LeadBolt, licensing schemes that keep phoning home long after you've paid for your apps, user stats grabbers that analyse your app usage without asking your permission, and more.

Use AdAway, Addons Detector, LBE Privacy Guard or PDroid, and DroidWall to keep your phone clean and make your private data stay private.

• AdAway (alternative download links, no longer in Play Store)
• Addons Detector