Related papers: Understanding Worldwide Private Information Collec…
Smartphone users install numerous mobile apps that require access to different information from their devices. Much of this information is very sensitive, and users often struggle to manage these accesses due to their lack of tech expertise…
With the increasing popularity of mobile devices and the wide adoption of mobile Apps, an increasing concern of privacy issues is raised. Privacy policy is identified as a proper medium to indicate the legal terms, such as GDPR, and to bind…
With over 3 billion users globally, mobile instant messaging apps have become indispensable for both personal and professional communication. Besides plain messaging, many services implement additional features such as delivery and read…
Pandemic and epidemic diseases such as CoVID-19, SARS-CoV2, and Ebola have spread to multiple countries and infected thousands of people. Such diseases spread mainly through person-to-person contacts. Health care authorities recommend…
In recent years, the amount of information collected about human beings has increased dramatically. This development has been partially driven by individuals posting and storing data about themselves and friends using online social networks…
We expose a new security leak for smartphone users, which allows to stole user personal data by accessing the mobile operator user page when auto-login is employed. We show how any "apparently" genuine app can steal these data from some…
Mobile phones are now widely adopted by most of the world population. Each time a call is made (or an SMS sent), a Call Detail Record (CDR) is generated by the telecom companies for billing purpose. These metadata provide information on…
Parental control applications, software tools designed to manage and monitor children's online activities, serve as essential safeguards for parents in the digital age. However, their usage has sparked concerns about security and privacy…
Recent work has shown that cell phone mobility data has the unique potential to create accurate models for human mobility and consequently the spread of infected diseases. While prior studies have exclusively relied on a mobile network…
Contact tracing apps are powerful software tools that can help control the spread of COVID-19. In this article, we evaluated 53 COVID-19 contact tracing apps found on the Google Play Store in terms of their usage, rating, access permission,…
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted countries around the world to introduce smartphone apps to support disease control efforts. Their purposes range from digital contact tracing to quarantine enforcement to vaccination passports, and their…
Due to Android's open source feature and low barriers to entry for developers, millions of developers and third-party organizations have been attracted into the Android ecosystem. However, over 90 percent of mobile malware are found…
User tracking is critical in the mobile ecosystem, which relies on device identifiers to build clear user profiles. In earlier ages, Android allowed easy access to non-resettable device identifiers like device serial numbers and IMEI by…
Web communication has become an indispensable characteristic of mobile apps. However, it is not clear what data the apps transmit, to whom, and what consequences such transmissions have. We analyzed the web communications found in mobile…
While privacy perceptions and behaviors have been investigated in Western societies, little is known about these issues in non-Western societies. To bridge this gap, we interviewed 30 Google personal account holders in Saudi Arabia about…
Numerous studies demonstrated that browser fingerprinting is detrimental to users' security and privacy. However, little is known about the effects of browser fingerprinting on Android hybrid apps -- where a stripped-down Chromium browser…
In this paper, we investigate Saudi parents' privacy concerns regarding their children's smart device applications (apps). To this end, we conducted a survey and analysed 119 responses. Our results show that Saudi parents expressed a high…
Mobile applications, mobile apps for short, have proven their usefulness in enhancing service provisioning across a multitude of domains that range from smart healthcare, to mobile commerce, and areas of context sensitive computing. In…
The movement to mobile computing solutions provides flexibility to different users whether it is a business user, a student, or even providing entertainment to children and adults of all ages. Due to these emerging technologies mobile users…
We study the temporal dynamics of potentially harmful apps (PHAs) on Android by leveraging 8.8M daily on-device detections collected among 11.7M customers of a popular mobile security product between 2019 and 2020. We show that the current…