Related papers: Security and Privacy Perceptions of Third-Party Ap…
Android apps are built on APIs that abstract core Android system functionalities. These APIs are officially documented in multiple files distributed with the Android source code or SDK, which we collectively refer to as Android API Lists…
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'…
Zoom serves millions of users daily and allows third-party developers to integrate their apps with the Zoom client and reach those users. So far, these apps' privacy and security aspects, which can access rich audio-visual data (among…
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,…
Android allows apps to communicate with its system services via system service helpers so that these apps can use various functions provided by the system services. Meanwhile, the system services rely on their service helpers to enforce…
As technology and technology companies have grown in power, ubiquity, and societal influence, some companies -- and notably some mobile apps -- have come to be perceived as privacy threats. Prior work has considered how various factors…
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…
The recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have allowed individuals to rely on automated systems for a variety of reasons. Some of these systems are the currently popular voice-enabled systems like Echo by Amazon and Home by…
The number of login options on web sites has increased since the introduction of web single sign-on (SSO) protocols. Web SSO services allow users to grant web sites or relying parties (RPs) access to their personal profile information from…
As mobile app usage continues to rise, so does the generation of extensive user interaction data, which includes actions such as swiping, zooming, or the time spent on a screen. Apps often collect a large amount of this data and claim to…
Mobile applications, particularly those from social media platforms such as WeChat and TikTok, are evolving into "super apps" that offer a wide range of services such as instant messaging and media sharing, e-commerce, e-learning, and…
Current legal frameworks enforce that Android developers accurately report the data their apps collect. However, large codebases can make this reporting challenging. This paper employs an empirical approach to understand developers'…
Perceptions of police trustworthiness are linked to citizens' willingness to cooperate with police. Trust can be fostered by introducing accountability mechanisms, or by increasing a shared police/citizen identity, both which can be…
Many Android applications embed webpages via WebView components and execute JavaScript code within Android. Hybrid applications leverage dedicated APIs to load a resource and render it in a WebView. Furthermore, Android objects can be…
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…
As privacy features in Android operating system improve, privacy-invasive apps may gradually shift their focus to non-standard and covert channels for leaking private user/device information. Such leaks also remain largely undetected by…
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…
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…
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…
Social Coding Platforms (SCPs) like GitHub have become central to modern software engineering thanks to their collaborative and version-control features. Like in mainstream Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, users of SCPs are…