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Third-party tracking is common on almost all commercially operated websites. Prior work has studied in detail the extent of third-party tracking on the web, detection of third-party trackers, and defending against third-party tracking.…
Third-party networks collect vast amounts of data about users via web sites and mobile applications. Consolidations among tracker companies can significantly increase their individual tracking capabilities, prompting scrutiny by competition…
Apple introduced privacy labels in Dec. 2020 as a way for developers to report the privacy behaviors of their apps. While Apple does not validate labels, they also require developers to provide a privacy policy, which offers an important…
Fairness is one of the socio-technical concerns that must be addressed in software systems. Considering the popularity of mobile software applications (apps) among a wide range of individuals worldwide, mobile apps with unfair behaviors and…
Many smartphone apps transmit personally identifiable information (PII), often without the users knowledge. To address this issue, we present PrivacyProxy, a system that monitors outbound network traffic and generates app-specific…
Cross-device tracking has drawn growing attention from both commercial companies and the general public because of its privacy implications and applications for user profiling, personalized services, etc. One particular, wide-used type of…
Data protection law, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), usually requires a privacy policy before data can be collected from individuals. We analysed 15,145 privacy policies from 26,910 mobile apps in May 2019 (about…
Content delivery networks (CDN) contribute more than 50% of today's Internet traffic. Meta-CDNs, an evolution of centrally controlled CDNs, promise increased flexibility by multihoming content. So far, efforts to understand the…
Users trust IoT apps to control and automate their smart devices. These apps necessarily have access to sensitive data to implement their functionality. However, users lack visibility into how their sensitive data is used (or leaked), and…
Web tracking has been extensively studied over the last decade. To detect tracking, previous studies and user tools rely on filter lists. However, it has been shown that filter lists miss trackers. In this paper, we propose an alternative…
Privacy, security, and accessibility, like ethical concerns in mobile applications (a.k.a. apps), commonly subsumed under non-functional requirements, are generally reported by users through app reviews available in app stores. However,…
While smartphone usage become more and more pervasive, people start also asking to which extent such devices can be maliciously exploited as "tracking devices". The concern is not only related to an adversary taking physical or remote…
Mobile apps are used in a variety of health settings, from apps that help providers, to apps designed for patients, to health and fitness apps designed for the general public. These apps ask the user for, and then collect and leak a wealth…
Contact tracing has been globally adopted in the fight to control the infection rate of COVID-19. Thanks to digital technologies, such as smartphones and wearable devices, contacts of COVID-19 patients can be easily traced and informed…
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…
As a key supplement to privacy policies that are known to be lengthy and difficult to read, Apple has launched the app privacy labels, which purportedly help users more easily understand an app's privacy practices. However, false and…
In December of 2020, Apple started to require app developers to self-report privacy label annotations on their apps indicating what data is collected and how it is used.To understand the adoption and shifts in privacy labels in the App…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
Contact tracing is a very powerful method to implement and enforce social distancing to avoid spreading of infectious diseases. The traditional approach of contact tracing is time consuming, manpower intensive, dangerous and prone to error…
We present an analysis of 12 million instances of privacy-relevant reviews publicly visible on the Google Play Store that span a 10 year period. By leveraging state of the art NLP techniques, we examine what users have been writing about…