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We present an analysis of 12 million instances of privacy-relevant reviews publicly visible on the Google Play Store that span a 10 year period. By leveraging state of the art NLP techniques, we examine what users have been writing about…
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…
In today's digitized world, software systems must support users in understanding both how to interact with a system and why certain behaviors occur. This study investigates whether explanation needs, classified from user reviews, can be…
Software applications are designed to assist users in conducting a wide range of tasks or interactions. They have become prevalent and play an integral part in people's lives in this digital era. To use those software applications, users…
Contact tracing is a very powerful method to implement and enforce social distancing to avoid spreading of infectious diseases. The traditional approach of contact tracing is time consuming, manpower intensive, dangerous and prone to error…
Users interacting with large language models (LLMs) under their real identifiers often unknowingly risk disclosing private information. Automatically notifying users whether their queries leak privacy and which phrases leak what private…
Programmers of cryptographic applications written in C need to avoid common mistakes such as sending private data over public channels, modifying trusted data with untrusted functions, or improperly ordering protocol steps. These secrecy,…
It is common practice for researchers to join public WhatsApp chats and scrape their contents for analysis. However, research shows collecting data this way contradicts user expectations and preferences, even if the data is effectively…
Current smartphone operating systems regulate application permissions by prompting users on an ask-on-first-use basis. Prior research has shown that this method is ineffective because it fails to account for context: the circumstances under…
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…
Contact tracing apps have become one of the main approaches to control and slow down the spread of COVID-19 and ease up lockdown measures. While these apps can be very effective in stopping the transmission chain and saving lives, their…
The exponential growth of mobile devices has raised concerns about sensitive data leakage. In this paper, we make the first attempt to identify suspicious location-related HTTP transmission flows from the user's perspective, by answering…
The principle of data minimization aims to reduce the amount of data collected, processed or retained to minimize the potential for misuse, unauthorized access, or data breaches. Rooted in privacy-by-design principles, data minimization has…
Policy compliance detection is the task of ensuring that a scenario conforms to a policy (e.g. a claim is valid according to government rules or a post in an online platform conforms to community guidelines). This task has been previously…
Users need to configure default apps when they first start using their devices. The privacy configurations of the default apps do not always match what users think they have initially enabled. We first systematically evaluated the privacy…
Android applications collecting data from users must protect it according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since in 2018 the European Union rolled out the General Data Protection…
An increasing number of mental health services are offered through mobile systems, a paradigm called mHealth. Although there is an unprecedented growth in the adoption of mHealth systems, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about…
Applications (apps) of the Digital Sharing Economy (DSE), such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit, have become a main enabler of economic growth and shared prosperity in modern-day societies. However, the complex exchange of goods, services,…
Privacy policies are lengthy and complex, leading to user neglect. While contextual privacy policies (CPPs) present information at the point of risk, they may lack engagement and disrupt tasks. We propose Conflect, an interactive CPP for…
Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications may…