AppCensus was founded by thought leaders in the privacy, security and networking domains, including Serge Egelman, Nathan Good, and Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez of the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California at Berkeley, Joel Reardon from the University of Calgary, and team members from Amazon, Pinterest and Smyte (now Twitter).

AppCencus are based in San Francisco and provide privacy protection products, as well as privacy-analysis-as-a-service, at scale.

AppCensus allows:

- Enterprises to monitor and regulate the privacy behaviors of mobile apps on their networks.

- App developers to detect app privacy issues before releasing those apps and becoming liable for them.

- Regulators to detect bad actors and gather evidence against them.

- Compliance organizations to confirm that app behaviors comply with disclosures and applicable regulations.

- Consumers to learn about the privacy practices of the apps that they use.