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With the popularity of mobile devices, mobile applications have become an essential part of people's lives. To provide secure mobile application download channels for users, various modern app markets are maintained by different companies.…
This paper investigates changes over time in the behavior of Android ad libraries. Taking a sample of 100,000 apps, we extract and classify the ad libraries. By considering the release dates of the applications that use a specific ad…
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…
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…
Android-based smart devices are exponentially growing, and due to the ubiquity of the Internet, these devices are globally connected to the different devices/networks. Its popularity, attractive features, and mobility make malware creator…
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…
Many Android applications embed webpages via WebView components and execute JavaScript code within Android. Hybrid applications leverage dedicated APIs to load a resource and render it in a WebView. Furthermore, Android objects can be…
Prior spending shutoff experiments in search advertising have found that paid ads cannibalize organic traffic. But it is unclear whether the same is true for other high volume advertising channels like mobile display advertising. We…
Among populations with limited literacy in emerging digital markets, the adoption of mobile phones, combined with comprehension barriers and poor cybersecurity hygiene, has created hidden privacy risks. This paper examines how informed…
The Android ecosystem faces a notable challenge known as fragmentation, which denotes the extensive diversity within the system. This issue is mainly related to differences in system versions, device hardware specifications, and…
There are over 1.2 million applications on the Google Play store today with a large number of competing applications for any given use or function. This creates challenges for users in selecting the right application. Moreover, some of the…
Online app search optimization (ASO) platforms that provide bulk installs and fake reviews for paying app developers in order to fraudulently boost their search rank in app stores, were shown to employ diverse and complex strategies that…
Many Android apps analyzers rely, among other techniques, on dynamic analysis to monitor their runtime behavior and detect potential security threats. However, malicious developers use subtle, though efficient, techniques to bypass dynamic…
Android's open-source nature facilitates widespread smartphone accessibility, particularly in price-sensitive markets. System and vendor applications that come pre-installed on budget Android devices frequently operate with elevated…
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…
The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic…
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…
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,…
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…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…