Related papers: Not Your Average App: A Large-scale Privacy Analys…
Today, much of our sensitive information is stored inside mobile applications (apps), such as the browsing histories and chatting logs. To safeguard these privacy files, modern mobile systems, notably Android and iOS, use sandboxes to…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
Security of Android devices is now paramount, given their wide adoption among consumers. As researchers develop tools for statically or dynamically detecting suspicious apps, malware writers regularly update their attack mechanisms to hide…
Browser extensions are third party programs, tightly integrated to browsers, where they execute with elevated privileges in order to provide users with additional functionalities. Unlike web applications, extensions are not subject to the…
While web agents gained popularity by automating web interactions, their requirement for interface access introduces significant privacy risks that are understudied, particularly from users' perspective. Through a formative study (N=15), we…
Data protection law, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), usually requires a privacy policy before data can be collected from individuals. We analysed 15,145 privacy policies from 26,910 mobile apps in May 2019 (about…
The difficulty of large scale monitoring of app markets affects our understanding of their dynamics. This is particularly true for dimensions such as app update frequency, control and pricing, the impact of developer actions on app…
Never before has any OS been so popular as Android. Existing mobile phones are not simply devices for making phone calls and receiving SMS messages, but powerful communication and entertainment platforms for web surfing, social networking,…
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…
Digital lending applications, commonly referred to as loan apps, have become a primary channel for microcredit in emerging markets. However, many of these apps demand excessive permissions and misuse sensitive user data for coercive…
As a key supplement to privacy policies that are known to be lengthy and difficult to read, Apple has launched the app privacy labels, which purportedly help users more easily understand an app's privacy practices. However, false and…
Many existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions on mobile devices rely on an extensive collection of sensitive data, raising privacy concerns and often requiring storage for both context and model improvement. Apple's Private Cloud…
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…
Despite recent widespread deployment of differential privacy, relatively little is known about what users think of differential privacy. In this work, we seek to explore users' privacy expectations related to differential privacy.…
The prevalent engagement with mobile apps underscores the importance of understanding their data practices. Transparency plays a crucial role in this context, ensuring users to be informed and give consent before any data access occurs.…
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…
Browsers and their users can be tracked even in the absence of a persistent IP address or cookie. Unique and hence identifying pieces of information, making up what is known as a fingerprint, can be collected from browsers by a visited…
GenAI smartphones, which natively embed generative AI at the system level, are transforming mobile interactions by automating a wide range of tasks and executing UI actions on behalf of users. Their superior capabilities rely on continuous…
With the continuous growth in the usage of Android apps, ensuring their security has become critically important. An increasing number of malicious apps adopt anti-analysis techniques to evade security measures. Although some research has…
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…