Related papers: On the Unicity of Smartphone Applications
Large-scale collection of human behavioral data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behavior captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in very large datasets…
As mobile app usage continues to rise, so does the generation of extensive user interaction data, which includes actions such as swiping, zooming, or the time spent on a screen. Apps often collect a large amount of this data and claim to…
Contemporary mobile applications (apps) are designed to track, use, and share users' data, often without their consent, which results in potential privacy and transparency issues. To investigate whether mobile apps have always been…
Mobile phones and tablets have become the most widely used computing devices, with a large predominance of the Android platform. As a natural evolution, the development of Android applications has surged and has become a major field of…
Repackaging is a serious threat to the Android ecosystem as it deprives app developers of their benefits, contributes to spreading malware on users' devices, and increases the workload of market maintainers. In the space of six years, the…
The Android ecosystem faces a notable challenge known as fragmentation, which denotes the extensive diversity within the system. This issue is mainly related to differences in system versions, device hardware specifications, and…
Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored…
The apps installed on a smartphone can reveal much information about a user, such as their medical conditions, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. Additionally, the presence or absence of particular apps on a smartphone can inform an…
With the emergence of deep learning techniques, smartphone apps are now embedded on-device AI features for enabling advanced tasks like speech translation, to attract users and increase market competitiveness. A good interaction design is…
The value of mobile apps is traditionally measured by metrics such as the number of downloads, installations, or user ratings. A problem with these measures is that they reflect actual usage at most indirectly. Indeed, analytic companies…
Mobile applications (hereafter, apps) collect a plethora of information regarding the user behavior and his device through third-party analytics libraries. However, the collection and usage of such data raised several privacy concerns,…
The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and many options for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data, with privacy policies often failing to reveal the types of…
Android applications are frequently plagiarized or repackaged, and software obfuscation is a recommended protection against these practices. However, there is very little data on the overall rates of app obfuscation, the techniques used, or…
Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with…
App markets have evolved into highly competitive and dynamic environments for developers. While the traditional app life cycle involves incremental updates for feature enhancements and issue resolution, some apps deviate from this norm by…
We have carefully instrumented a large portion of the population living in a university graduate dormitory by giving participants Android smart phones running our sensing software. In this paper, we propose the novel problem of predicting…
Third-party security apps are an integral part of the Android app ecosystem. Many users install them as an extra layer of protection for their devices. There are hundreds of such security apps, both free and paid in Google Play Store and…
There are over 1.2 million applications on the Google Play store today with a large number of competing applications for any given use or function. This creates challenges for users in selecting the right application. Moreover, some of the…
Fragmentation is a serious problem in the Android ecosystem. This problem is mainly caused by the fast evolution of the system itself and the various customizations independently maintained by different smartphone manufacturers. Many…
Several recent studies have demonstrated that people show large behavioural uniqueness. This has serious privacy implications as most individuals become increasingly re-identifiable in large datasets or can be tracked while they are…