Think of these apps as malware,after all they are hostile. In dynamic malware analysis, virtualized and emulated environments are used to run malware samples to

Think of these apps as malware,after all they are hostile. In dynamic malware analysis, virtualized and emulated environments are used to run malware samples to analyze their behavior. It's like a tom and jerry cat and mouse game with the jerry always winning (like the show!). It's trivial to detect virtualized environments , not only that, the samples can afford to be patient and meticulous,and test themselves against existing analysis methods before deployment. That's why real hardware is the best place to study malware. Your disadvantage here is that fingerprinting is a game of accuracy, where the adversary gains accuracy at basically a logarithmic(or geometric?) scale for every additional data point they have about your device, sometimes they only need one data point,such as a shared file system,let me explain: most apps need storage access right? Like you want them to read existing files or write files to be accesses by other apps. App1 writes a file with a random name or random content, app2 through appN in their affiliate network check that location/file for the random value to track your device. The apps in this network all collect various data points about you, let's say one app gets your real name and address (payment and shipping),now all the apps know those two things about you. Now they all know your zipcode and can infer things about you based on that,your last name,etc...and even do background check like lookups to know your past addresses aquaintances, cars you've driven,court cases and so much more. Now let's say one of these apps needs to send you text before it can function(most popular apps these days) , now all of them know your phone,can get a ton of info about you,who else has you as contacts and they can infer even more about if at least one of the people they track has your number as contact and they basically opened up their lives to all apps. You can add all the layers of abstraction you want. Apps need to talk to each other and external sites/services need to reach you at a predictabl address (including physical address and such). And even if what you said was effective, it's incredibly hard to achieve without the user being very cooperative towards their own privacy preservation, and evem then ,like I said above, if anyone you have as contact reaches you using a predictable address, a lot can be constructed about solely based on their choices. My solution is legal. Make it a crime and start throwing people in prison. If someone violates your consent to stalk you or creates public opportunities of business or employment where consenting to stalking is a requirement, make it a felony. And make privacy a core right for peoples of any society that calls itself free. Unlike with malware authors, we can easily find the execs behind stalkerware and we can make them take responsibility (assuming people want liberty and democracy more than political theatrics).