Related papers: Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem
China is currently the country with the largest number of Android smartphone users. We use a combination of static and dynamic code analysis techniques to study the data transmitted by the preinstalled system apps on Android smartphones…
With smartphone technologies enhanced way of interacting with the world around us, it has also been paving the way for easier access to our private and personal information. This has been amplified by the existence of numerous embedded…
As privacy features in Android operating system improve, privacy-invasive apps may gradually shift their focus to non-standard and covert channels for leaking private user/device information. Such leaks also remain largely undetected by…
Online tracking has become of increasing concern in recent years, however our understanding of its extent to date has been limited to snapshots from web crawls. Previous at-tempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, have been done using…
Growth in technology has resulted in the large-scale collection and processing of Personally Identifiable Information by organizations that run digital services such as websites, which led to the emergence of new legislation to regulate PII…
This study explores the widespread perception that personal data, such as email addresses, may be shared or sold without informed user consent, investigating whether these concerns are reflected in actual practices of popular online…
The current state-of-the-art in user mobility research has extensively relied on open-source mobility traces captured from pedestrian and vehicular activity through a variety of communication technologies as users engage in a wide-range of…
Object and person tracking networks powered by Bluetooth and mobile devices have become increasingly popular for purposes of public safety and individual concerns. This essay examines popular commercial tracking networks and their campaigns…
With millions of apps that can be downloaded from official or third-party market, Android has become one of the most popular mobile platforms today. These apps help people in all kinds of ways and thus have access to lots of user's data…
The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the development of smartphone applications to assist disease management. Many "corona apps" require widespread adoption to be effective, which has sparked public debates about the privacy, security, and…
Location sharing applications are becoming increasingly common. These applications allow users to share their own locations and view contacts' current locations on a map. Location applications are commonly used by friends and family members…
Browser fingerprinting is a growing technique for identifying and tracking users online without traditional methods like cookies. This paper gives an overview by examining the various fingerprinting techniques and analyzes the entropy and…
Within the thriving mobile app ecosystem ecosystem, a subset of apps provides illicit services such as gambling and pornography to pursue economic gains, collectively referred to as "underground economy apps". While previous studies have…
The recently introduced General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires that when obtaining information online that could be used to identify individuals, their consents must be obtained. Among other things, this affects many common…
Contact tracing apps have become one of the main approaches to control and slow down the spread of COVID-19 and ease up lockdown measures. While these apps can be very effective in stopping the transmission chain and saving lives, their…
Online privacy has become increasingly important in recent years. While third-party cookies have been widely used for years, they have also been criticized for their potential impact on user privacy. They can be used by advertisers to track…
Despite having growing awareness and concerns about privacy, technology users are often insufficiently informed of the data practices of various digital products to protect themselves. Privacy policies and privacy labels, as two…
Tablet computers are widely used by young children. A report in 2016 shows that children aged 5 to 15 years are spending more time online than watching TV. A 2017 update of the same report shows that parents are becoming more concerned…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
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…