Related papers: Not Your Average App: A Large-scale Privacy Analys…
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…
Android is the most popular operating system with billions of active devices. Unfortunately, its popularity and openness makes it attractive for unwanted apps, i.e., malware and potentially unwanted programs (PUP). In Android, app…
While privacy perceptions and behaviors have been investigated in Western societies, little is known about these issues in non-Western societies. To bridge this gap, we interviewed 30 Google personal account holders in Saudi Arabia about…
Android apps collecting data from users must comply with legal frameworks to ensure data protection. This requirement has become even more important since the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the European…
We conduct a large-scale measurement of developers' insecure practices leading to mini-app to super-app authentication bypass, among which hard-coding developer secrets for such authentication is a major contributor. We also analyze the…
Nowadays, privacy has become a very serious issue with smart and mobile platforms. Users tend to allow intrusive apps access much sensible information without really knowing the potential threats. To solve this issue several solutions (e.g.…
App markets have evolved into highly competitive and dynamic environments for developers. While the traditional app life cycle involves incremental updates for feature enhancements and issue resolution, some apps deviate from this norm by…
Although there are over 1,600,000 third-party Android apps in the Google Play Store, little has been conclusively shown about how their individual (and collective) permission usage has evolved over time. Recently, Android 6 overhauled the…
The web browser is one of the major channels to access the Internet on mobile devices. Based on the smartphone usage logs from millions of real-world Android users, it is interesting to find that about 38% users have more than one browser…
Smartphone manufacturer provided default features (e.g., default location services, iCloud, Google Assistant, ad tracking) enhance the usability and extend the functionality of these devices. Prior studies have highlighted smartphone…
The apps installed on a smartphone can reveal much information about a user, such as their medical conditions, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. Additionally, the presence or absence of particular apps on a smartphone can inform an…
The advent of MiniApps, operating within larger SuperApps, has revolutionized user experiences by offering a wide range of services without the need for individual app downloads. However, this convenience has raised significant privacy…
Privacy in apps is a topic of widespread interest because many apps collect and share large amounts of highly sensitive information. In response, China introduced a range of new data protection laws over recent years, notably the Personal…
The ubiquity of mobile applications has increased dramatically in recent years, opening up new opportunities for cyber attackers and heightening security concerns in the mobile ecosystem. As a result, researchers and practitioners have…
Targeted advertising has transformed the marketing landscape for a wide variety of businesses, by creating new opportunities for advertisers to reach prospective customers by delivering personalised ads, using an infrastructure of a number…
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…
We evaluate the power of simple networks side-channels to violate user privacy on Android devices. Specifically, we show that, using blackbox network metadata alone (i.e., traffic statistics such as transmission time and size of packets) it…
Voice Assistants (VA) such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are quickly and seamlessly integrating into people's daily lives. The increased reliance on VA services raises privacy concerns such as the leakage of private conversations and…
Context: As mobile applications (Apps) widely spread over our society and life, various personal information is constantly demanded by Apps in exchange for more intelligent and customized functionality. An increasing number of users are…
Existing research typically treats privacy policies as flat, uniform text, extracting information without regard for the document's logical hierarchy. Disregard for structural cues of section headings designed to guide the reader, often…