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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,…
Large-scale collection of human behavioral data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behavior captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in very large datasets…
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…
Mobile privacy and security can be a collaborative process where individuals seek advice and help from their trusted communities. To support such collective privacy and security management, we developed a mobile app for Community Oversight…
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…
Third party apps that work on top of personal cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox, require access to the user's data in order to provide some functionality. Through detailed analysis of a hundred popular Google Drive apps from…
Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, there has been increased interest in the use of digital contact tracing as a means of stopping chains of viral transmission, provoking alarm from privacy advocates. Concerning the…
Tablet computers are becoming ubiquitously available at home or school for young children to complement education or entertainment. However, parents of children aged 6-11 often believe that children are too young to face or comprehend…
We study whether phone-use agents respect privacy while completing benign mobile tasks. This question has remained hard to answer because privacy-compliant behavior is not operationalized for phone-use agents, and ordinary apps do not…
The competing nature of the app market motivates us to shift our focus on apps that provide similar functionalities and directly compete with each other (i.e., peer apps). In this work, we study the ratings and the review text of 100…
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly important. These devices are often resource-limited, hindering rigorous enforcement of security policies. Assessing the vulnerability of IoT devices is an important problem, but…
"App stores" are online software stores where end users may browse, purchase, download, and install software applications. By far, the best known app stores are associated with mobile platforms, such as Google Play for Android and Apple's…
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…
Location sharing applications are becoming increasingly common. These applications allow users to share their own locations and view contacts' current locations on a map. Location applications are commonly used by friends and family members…
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to ensure that all personal data processing activities are fair and transparent for the European Union (EU) citizens, regardless of whether these are carried out within the EU or anywhere…
With the development of foundation AI technologies, task-executable voice assistants (VAs) have become more popular, enhancing user convenience and expanding device functionality. Android task-executable VAs are applications that are…
The widespread adoption of telehealth systems has led to a significant increase in the use of healthcare apps among older adults, but this rapid growth has also heightened concerns about the privacy of their health information. While HIPAA…
Google has mandated developers to use Data Safety Sections (DSS) to increase transparency in data collection and sharing practices. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of Google's Data Safety Section (DSS) using both…
Due to the amount of data that smartphone applications can potentially access, platforms enforce permission systems that allow users to regulate how applications access protected resources. If users are asked to make security decisions too…
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…