Related papers: Understanding Worldwide Private Information Collec…
The proliferation of mobile applications and the subsequent sharing of personal data with service and application providers have given rise to substantial privacy concerns. Application marketplaces have introduced mechanisms to conform to…
The wide adoption of mobile devices and social media platforms have dramatically increased the collection and sharing of personal information. More and more frequently, users are called to take decisions concerning the disclosure of their…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…
Prior works have shown that the list of apps installed by a user reveal a lot about user interests and behavior. These works rely on the semantics of the installed apps and show that various user traits could be learnt automatically using…
In recent years we have witnessed a shift towards personalized, context-based applications and services for mobile device users. A key component of many of these services is the ability to infer the current location and predict the future…
When smartphones, applications (a.k.a, apps), and app stores have been widely adopted by the billions, an interesting debate emerges: whether and to what extent do device models influence the behaviors of their users? The answer to this…
Third-party tracking allows companies to collect users' behavioural data and track their activity across digital devices. This can put deep insights into users' private lives into the hands of strangers, and often happens without users'…
The prevalence of smart mobile devices has promoted the popularity of mobile applications (a.k.a. apps). Supporting mobility has become a promising trend in software engineering research. This article presents an empirical study of…
Recent industrial and academic research has focused on data-driven analytics with smartphones by collecting user interaction, context, and device systems data through Application Programming interfaces (APIs) and sensors. The Android OS…
Third-party Software Development Kits (SDKs) are widely adopted in Android app development, to effortlessly accelerate development pipelines and enhance app functionality. However, this convenience raises substantial concerns about…
E-commerce mobile applications are central to global financial transactions, making their security and privacy crucial. In this study, we analyze 92 top-grossing Android e-commerce apps (58 U.S.-based and 34 international) using MobSF,…
As the adoption of smart devices continues to permeate all aspects of our lives, user privacy concerns have become more pertinent than ever. Privacy policies outline the data handling practices of these devices. Prior work in the domains of…
Smartphone apps usually have access to sensitive user data such as contacts, geo-location, and account credentials and they might share such data to external entities through the Internet or with other apps. Confidentiality of user data…
Third-party tracking, the collection and sharing of behavioural data about individuals, is a significant and ubiquitous privacy threat in mobile apps. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in 2018 to protect…
Nowadays, privacy has become a very serious issue with smart and mobile platforms. Users tend to allow intrusive apps access much sensible information without really knowing the potential threats. To solve this issue several solutions (e.g.…
A growing concern with advertisement libraries on Android is their ability to exfiltrate personal information from their host applications. While previous work has looked at the libraries' abilities to measure private information on their…
As social networking takes to the mobile world, smartphone apps provide users with ever-changing ways to interact with each other. Over the past couple of years, an increasing number of apps have entered the market offering end-to-end…
Although there are over 1,600,000 third-party Android apps in the Google Play Store, little has been conclusively shown about how their individual (and collective) permission usage has evolved over time. Recently, Android 6 overhauled the…
Several ICT studies give anecdotal evidences showing privacy to be an area of concern that can influence adoption of technology in the developing world. However, in-depth understanding of end users' privacy attitudes and awareness is…
Android's permission system is designed to balance usability with informed consent, yet two legacy mechanisms still undermine that balance in Android 16: (i) permission groups that silently auto-grant new permissions within a group after a…