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Third-party applications have become an essential part of today's online ecosystem, enhancing the functionality of popular platforms. However, the intensive data exchange underlying their proliferation has increased concerns about…
Many mobile apps' business model is based on sharing user data with ad networks to deliver personalized ads. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) gives California residents a right to opt out. In two experiments we evaluate to which…
In our data-centric world, most services rely on collecting and using personal data. The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to enhance individuals' control over their data, but its practical impact is not well understood.…
Smartphone technology has drastically improved over the past decade. These improvements have seen the creation of specialized health applications, which offer consumers a range of health-related activities such as tracking and checking…
In the digitized world, smartphones and their apps play an important role. To name just a few examples, some apps offer possibilities for entertainment, others for online banking, and others offer support for two-factor authentication.…
The prevalent engagement with mobile apps underscores the importance of understanding their data practices. Transparency plays a crucial role in this context, ensuring users to be informed and give consent before any data access occurs.…
Background: Governments worldwide are considering data privacy regulations. These laws, e.g. the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), require software developers to meet privacy-related requirements when interacting…
In this work we present definitive evidence, analysis, and (where needed) speculation to answer the questions, (1) Which concrete security measures in mobile devices meaningfully prevent unauthorized access to user data? (2) In what ways…
Mobile apps frequently request excessive data access, raising significant privacy concerns. While regulations like GDPR emphasize data minimization, they provide limited guidance on concretely defining and enforcing necessary data access.…
We study whether phone-use agents respect privacy while completing benign mobile tasks. This question has remained hard to answer because privacy-compliant behavior is not operationalized for phone-use agents, and ordinary apps do not…
Context-aware applications stemming from diverse fields like mobile health, recommender systems, and mobile commerce potentially benefit from knowing aspects of the user's personality. As filling out personality questionnaires is tedious,…
Virtual reality (VR) apps can harvest a wider range of user data than web/mobile apps running on personal computers or smartphones. Existing law and privacy regulations emphasize that VR developers should inform users of what data are…
Large-scale collection of human behavioral data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behavior captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in very large datasets…
Privacy in apps is a topic of widespread interest because many apps collect and share large amounts of highly sensitive information. In response, China introduced a range of new data protection laws over recent years, notably the Personal…
Many apps have basic accessibility issues, like missing labels or low contrast. Automated tools can help app developers catch basic issues, but can be laborious or require writing dedicated tests. We propose a system, motivated by a…
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…
The Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), developed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe, provides a de facto standard for requesting, recording, and managing user consent from European end-users. This framework has…
Zoom serves millions of users daily and allows third-party developers to integrate their apps with the Zoom client and reach those users. So far, these apps' privacy and security aspects, which can access rich audio-visual data (among…
Using the evidence collection and analysis methodology for Android devices proposed by Martini, Do and Choo, we examined and analyzed seven popular Android cloud-based apps. Firstly, we analyzed each app in order to see what information…
Modern privacy regulations provide a strict mandate for data processing entities to implement appropriate technical measures to demonstrate compliance. In practice, determining what measures are indeed "appropriate" is not trivial,…