Related papers: Understanding Worldwide Private Information Collec…
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…
Never before has any OS been so popular as Android. Existing mobile phones are not simply devices for making phone calls and receiving SMS messages, but powerful communication and entertainment platforms for web surfing, social networking,…
Therapy and life-coaching apps have been rapidly growing in number, flavors, and popularity. However, their users routinely share highly sensitive and personal information, such as traumas, fantasies, desires, relationship difficulties, and…
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…
The proper use of Android app permissions is crucial to the success and security of these apps. Users must agree to permission requests when installing or running their apps. Despite official Android platform documentation on proper…
This paper presents a measurement study of information leakage and SSL vulnerabilities in popular Android apps. We perform static and dynamic analysis on 100 apps, downloaded at least 10M times, that request full network access. Our…
In today's mobile application marketplace, the ability of consumers to make informed choices regarding their privacy is extremely limited. Consumers largely rely on privacy policies and app permission mechanisms, but these do an inadequate…
Many studies have exposed the massive collection of personal data in the digital ecosystem through, for instance, websites, mobile apps, or smart devices. This fact goes unnoticed by most users, who are also unaware that the collectors are…
In the context of a myriad of mobile apps which collect personally identifiable information (PII) and a prospective market place of personal data, we investigate a user-centric monetary valuation of mobile PII. During a 6-week long user…
With the development of Internet technology, the issue of privacy leakage has attracted more and more attention from the public. In our daily life, mobile phone applications and identity documents that we use may bring the risk of privacy…
Smartphones hold important private information, yet users routinely expose this information to questionable applications written by developers they know nothing about. Users may be tempted to think of smartphones as old-style dumb phones,…
Android is the most widely deployed end-user focused operating system. With its growing set of use cases encompassing communication, navigation, media consumption, entertainment, finance, health, and access to sensors, actuators, cameras,…
An increasing number of mental health services are offered through mobile systems, a paradigm called mHealth. Although there is an unprecedented growth in the adoption of mHealth systems, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about…
The recent decade has witnessed phenomenal growth in communication technology. Development of user-friendly software platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp etc. have facilitated ease of communication and thereby people have started freely…
Today's smartphones are equipped with a large number of powerful value-added sensors and features such as a low power Bluetooth sensor, powerful embedded sensors such as the digital compass, accelerometer, GPS sensors, Wi-Fi capabilities,…
While mobile app evolution has been widely studied, geographical variation in app behavior remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a large-scale study of location-based Android app differentiation, uncovering two important and…
Contact tracing has historically been used to retard the spread of infectious diseases, but if it is exercised by hand in large-scale, it is known to be a resource-intensive and quite deficient process. Nowadays, digital contact tracing has…
Due to the convenience of access-on-demand to information and business solutions, mobile apps have become an important asset in the digital world. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, app developers have joined the response effort in…
The difficulty of large scale monitoring of app markets affects our understanding of their dynamics. This is particularly true for dimensions such as app update frequency, control and pricing, the impact of developer actions on app…
Android applications collecting data from users must protect it according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since the European Union rolled out the General Data Protection Regulation…