Related papers: Not Your Average App: A Large-scale Privacy Analys…
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…
In today's mobile application marketplace, the ability of consumers to make informed choices regarding their privacy is extremely limited. Consumers largely rely on privacy policies and app permission mechanisms, but these do an inadequate…
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…
Nowadays, all major web browsers have a private browsing mode. However, the mode's benefits and limitations are not particularly understood. Through the use of survey studies, prior work has found that most users are either unaware of…
Mobile apps are predominantly integrated with cloud services to benefit from enhanced functionalities. Adopting authentication using secrets such as API keys is crucial to ensure secure mobile-cloud interactions. However, developers often…
Context: Post-release user feedback plays an integral role in improving software quality and informing new features. Given its growing importance, feedback concerning security enhancements is particularly noteworthy. In considering the…
The Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), developed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe, provides a de facto standard for requesting, recording, and managing user consent from European end-users. This framework has…
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…
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…
In recent years, there has been rapid growth in mobile devices such as smartphones, and a number of applications are developed specifically for the smartphone market. In particular, there are many applications that are ``free'' to the user,…
Many Android applications collect data from users. When they do, they must protect this collected data according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since the European Union rolled out the…
This paper presents a systematic evaluation of the privacy behaviors and attributes of eight recent, popular browser agents. Browser agents are software that automate Web browsing using large language models and ancillary tooling. However,…
Previous work has investigated the particularities of security practices within specific user communities defined based on country of origin, age, prior tech abuse, and economic status. Their results highlight that current security…
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'…
A "privacy behavior" in software is an action where the software uses personal information for a service or a feature, such as a website using location to provide content relevant to a user. Programmers are required by regulations or…
While mobile app evolution has been widely studied, geographical variation in app behavior remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a large-scale study of location-based Android app differentiation, uncovering two important and…
Therapy and life-coaching apps have been rapidly growing in number, flavors, and popularity. However, their users routinely share highly sensitive and personal information, such as traumas, fantasies, desires, relationship difficulties, and…
Android applications are frequently plagiarized or repackaged, and software obfuscation is a recommended protection against these practices. However, there is very little data on the overall rates of app obfuscation, the techniques used, or…
Android-based smart devices are exponentially growing, and due to the ubiquity of the Internet, these devices are globally connected to the different devices/networks. Its popularity, attractive features, and mobility make malware creator…
As the adoption of smart devices continues to permeate all aspects of our lives, user privacy concerns have become more pertinent than ever. Privacy policies outline the data handling practices of these devices. Prior work in the domains of…