Related papers: Transparency in App Analytics: Analyzing the Colle…
The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and customization for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data purportedly to improve their service, while presenting app users…
As mobile app usage continues to rise, so does the generation of extensive user interaction data, which includes actions such as swiping, zooming, or the time spent on a screen. Apps often collect a large amount of this data and claim to…
Contemporary mobile applications (apps) are designed to track, use, and share users' data, often without their consent, which results in potential privacy and transparency issues. To investigate whether mobile apps have always been…
Many Android applications collect data from users. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires vendors to faithfully disclose which data their apps collect. This task is complicated because many apps use…
Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with…
The Google Play marketplace has introduced the Data Safety section to improve transparency regarding how mobile applications (apps) collect, share, and protect user data. This mechanism requires developers to disclose privacy and…
Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored…
Privacy policies are intended to inform users about how software systems collect and handle data, yet they often remain vague or incomplete. This paper presents an empirical study of patterns in log-related statements within privacy…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
Privacy, security, and accessibility, like ethical concerns in mobile applications (a.k.a. apps), commonly subsumed under non-functional requirements, are generally reported by users through app reviews available in app stores. However,…
Application markets provide a communication channel between app developers and their end-users in form of app reviews, which allow users to provide feedback about the apps. Although security and privacy in mobile apps are one of the biggest…
Recent industrial and academic research has focused on data-driven analytics with smartphones by collecting user interaction, context, and device systems data through Application Programming interfaces (APIs) and sensors. The Android OS…
Mobile applications (hereafter, apps) collect a plethora of information regarding the user behavior and his device through third-party analytics libraries. However, the collection and usage of such data raised several privacy concerns,…
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…
In December of 2020, Apple started to require app developers to self-report privacy label annotations on their apps indicating what data is collected and how it is used.To understand the adoption and shifts in privacy labels in the App…
LLM app (tool) ecosystems are rapidly evolving to support sophisticated use cases that often require extensive user data collection. Given that LLM apps are developed by third parties and anecdotal evidence indicating inconsistent…
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…
A growing concern with advertisement libraries on Android is their ability to exfiltrate personal information from their host applications. While previous work has looked at the libraries' abilities to measure private information on their…
As technology and technology companies have grown in power, ubiquity, and societal influence, some companies -- and notably some mobile apps -- have come to be perceived as privacy threats. Prior work has considered how various factors…
While many studies have looked at privacy properties of the Android and Google Play app ecosystem, comparatively much less is known about iOS and the Apple App Store, the most widely used ecosystem in the US. At the same time, there is…