Related papers: Are iPhones Really Better for Privacy? Comparative…
The digital age has brought a world of opportunity to children. Connectivity can be a game-changer for some of the world's most marginalized children. However, while legislatures around the world have enacted regulations to protect…
Privacy labels -- standardized, compact representations of data collection and data use practices -- are often presented as a solution to the shortcomings of privacy policies. Apple introduced mandatory privacy labels for apps in its App…
Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored…
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…
Application markets provide a communication channel between app developers and their end-users in form of app reviews, which allow users to provide feedback about the apps. Although security and privacy in mobile apps are one of the biggest…
Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with…
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…
The industry for children's apps is thriving at the cost of children's privacy: these apps routinely disclose children's data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to…
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…
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…
The Google Play marketplace has introduced the Data Safety section to improve transparency regarding how mobile applications (apps) collect, share, and protect user data. This mechanism requires developers to disclose privacy and…
The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic…
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,…
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'…
Privacy policies are long, complex documents that end-users seldom read. Privacy labels aim to ameliorate these issues by providing succinct summaries of salient data practices. In December 2020, Apple began requiring that app developers…
Mobile phones enable the collection of a wealth of private information, from unique identifiers (e.g., email addresses), to a user's location, to their text messages. This information can be harvested by apps and sent to third parties,…
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…
With the requirements and emphases on privacy transparency placed by regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, the Google Play Store requires Android developers to more responsibly communicate their apps' privacy practices to potential users by…
Smartphones, the devices we carry everywhere with us, are being heavily tracked and have undoubtedly become a major threat to our privacy. As "tracking the trackers" has become a necessity, various static and dynamic analysis tools have…
Tracking is a highly privacy-invasive data collection practice that has been ubiquitous in mobile apps for many years due to its role in supporting advertising-based revenue models. In response, Apple introduced two significant changes with…