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The digital age has brought a world of opportunity to children. Connectivity can be a game-changer for some of the world's most marginalized children. However, while legislatures around the world have enacted regulations to protect…
Android applications collecting data from users must protect it according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since the European Union rolled out the General Data Protection Regulation…
Third-party tracking allows companies to collect users' behavioural data and track their activity across digital devices. This can put deep insights into users' private lives into the hands of strangers, and often happens without users'…
With the emergence of deep learning techniques, smartphone apps are now embedded on-device AI features for enabling advanced tasks like speech translation, to attract users and increase market competitiveness. A good interaction design is…
Mobile apps are used in a variety of health settings, from apps that help providers, to apps designed for patients, to health and fitness apps designed for the general public. These apps ask the user for, and then collect and leak a wealth…
Therapy and life-coaching apps have been rapidly growing in number, flavors, and popularity. However, their users routinely share highly sensitive and personal information, such as traumas, fantasies, desires, relationship difficulties, and…
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…
With the requirements and emphases on privacy transparency placed by regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, the Google Play Store requires Android developers to more responsibly communicate their apps' privacy practices to potential users by…
Mobile phones enable the collection of a wealth of private information, from unique identifiers (e.g., email addresses), to a user's location, to their text messages. This information can be harvested by apps and sent to third parties,…
End-users seldom read verbose privacy policies, leading app stores like Google Play to mandate simplified data safety declarations as a user-friendly alternative. However, these self-declared disclosures often contradict the full privacy…
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…
With the rapid growth of mobile apps, users' concerns about their privacy have become increasingly prominent. Android app logs serve as crucial computer resources, aiding developers in debugging and monitoring the status of Android apps,…
Mobile devices have access to personal, potentially sensitive data, and there is a large number of mobile applications and third-party libraries that transmit this information over the network to remote servers (including app developer…
The fast integration of artificial intelligence into mobile applications has completely changed the digital landscape; however, the impact of this change on user perception of AI features remains poorly understood. This large-scale analysis…
The packaging model of Android apps requires the entire code necessary for the execution of an app to be shipped into one single apk file. Thus, an analysis of Android apps often visits code which is not part of the functionality delivered…
Current legal frameworks enforce that Android developers accurately report the data their apps collect. However, large codebases can make this reporting challenging. This paper employs an empirical approach to understand developers'…
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…
Third-party Software Development Kits (SDKs) are widely adopted in Android app development, to effortlessly accelerate development pipelines and enhance app functionality. However, this convenience raises substantial concerns about…
Apple introduced privacy labels in Dec. 2020 as a way for developers to report the privacy behaviors of their apps. While Apple does not validate labels, they also require developers to provide a privacy policy, which offers an important…