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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,…
Mobile gaming applications (apps) have become increasingly pervasive, including a growing number of games designed for children. Despite their popularity, these apps often integrate complex analytics, advertising, and attribution…
The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and many options for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data, with privacy policies often failing to reveal the types of…
The privacy of personal information has received significant attention in mobile software. Although previous researchers have designed some methods to identify the conflict between app behavior and privacy policies, little is known about…
Privacy labels -- standardized, compact representations of data collection and data use practices -- are often presented as a solution to the shortcomings of privacy policies. Apple introduced mandatory privacy labels for apps in its App…
Virtual Reality (VR) has gained increasing traction among various domains in recent years, with major companies such as Meta, Pico, and Microsoft launching their application stores to support third-party developers in releasing their…
The Android ecosystem is vulnerable to issues such as app repackaging, counterfeiting, and piracy, threatening both developers and users. To mitigate these risks, developers often employ code obfuscation techniques. However, while effective…
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to ensure that all personal data processing activities are fair and transparent for the European Union (EU) citizens, regardless of whether these are carried out within the EU or anywhere…
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…
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…
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…
Although there are over 1,600,000 third-party Android apps in the Google Play Store, little has been conclusively shown about how their individual (and collective) permission usage has evolved over time. Recently, Android 6 overhauled the…
The proliferation of mobile applications and the subsequent sharing of personal data with service and application providers have given rise to substantial privacy concerns. Application marketplaces have introduced mechanisms to conform to…
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…
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…
Third-party security apps are an integral part of the Android app ecosystem. Many users install them as an extra layer of protection for their devices. There are hundreds of such security apps, both free and paid in Google Play Store and…
Ample research has demonstrated that compliance with data protection principles remains limited on the web and mobile. For example, almost none of the apps on the Google Play Store fulfil the minimum requirements regarding consent under EU…
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,…
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…
A "privacy behavior" in software is an action where the software uses personal information for a service or a feature, such as a website using location to provide content relevant to a user. Programmers are required by regulations or…