Related papers: Before and after China's new Data Laws: Privacy in…
Android apps can hold secret strings of themselves such as cloud service credentials or encryption keys. Leakage of such secret strings can induce unprecedented consequences like monetary losses or leakage of user private information. In…
For the past 20 years, China has increasingly restricted the access of minors to online games using addiction prevention systems (APSes). At the same time, and through different means, i.e., the Great Firewall of China (GFW), it also…
In this paper we present the first population-level, city-scale analysis of application usage on smartphones. Using deep packet inspection at the network operator level, we obtained a geo-tagged dataset with more than 6 million unique…
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…
Today's mobile devices sense, collect, and store huge amounts of personal information, which users share with family and friends through a wide range of applications. Once users give applications access to their data, they must implicitly…
Smartphones contain a trove of sensitive personal data including our location, who we talk to, our habits, and our interests. Smartphone users trade access to this data by permitting apps to use it, and in return obtain functionality…
Software systems are ubiquitous, and their use is ingrained in our everyday lives. They enable us to get in touch with people quickly and easily, support us in gathering information, and help us perform our daily tasks. In return, we…
Tablet computers are widely used by young children. A report in 2016 shows that children aged 5 to 15 years are spending more time online than watching TV. A 2017 update of the same report shows that parents are becoming more concerned…
People's privacy sentiments influence changes in legislation as well as technology design and use. While single-point-in-time investigations of privacy sentiment offer useful insight, study of people's privacy sentiments over time is also…
Modern distributed applications in healthcare, supply chain, and the Internet of Things handle a large amount of data in a diverse application setting with multiple stakeholders. Such applications leverage advanced artificial intelligence…
Data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the US affect how software may handle the personal data of its users. Prior literature…
The industry for children's apps is thriving at the cost of children's privacy: these apps routinely disclose children's data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to…
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…
Today's smartphones are equipped with a large number of powerful value-added sensors and features such as a low power Bluetooth sensor, powerful embedded sensors such as the digital compass, accelerometer, GPS sensors, Wi-Fi capabilities,…
While the literature on permissions from the end-user perspective is rich, there is a lack of empirical research on why developers request permissions, their conceptualization of permissions, and how their perspectives compare with…
The new information and communication technology providers collect increasing amounts of personal data, a lot of which is user generated. Unless use policies are privacy-friendly, this leaves users vulnerable to privacy risks such as…
The rapid rise of IoT and Big Data has facilitated copious data driven applications to enhance our quality of life. However, the omnipresent and all-encompassing nature of the data collection can generate privacy concerns. Hence, there is a…
This work is inspired by the outbreak of COVID-19, and some of the challenges we have observed with gathering data about the disease. To this end, we aim to help collect data about citizens and the disease without risking the privacy of…
As data privacy continues to be a crucial human-right concern as recognized by the UN, regulatory agencies have demanded developers obtain user permission before accessing user-sensitive data. Mainly through the use of privacy policies…
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…