Related papers: Uncovering Relationships between Android Developer…
Many developers and organizations implement apps for Android, the most widely used operating system for mobile devices. Common problems developers face are the various hardware devices, customized Android variants, and frequent updates,…
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…
Smartphones, the devices we carry everywhere with us, are being heavily tracked and have undoubtedly become a major threat to our privacy. As "tracking the trackers" has become a necessity, various static and dynamic analysis tools have…
Contact-tracing apps have potential benefits in helping health authorities to act swiftly to halt the spread of COVID-19. However, their effectiveness is heavily dependent on their installation rate, which may be influenced by people's…
GitHub provides developers with a practical way to distribute source code and collaboratively work on common projects. To enhance account security and privacy, GitHub allows its users to manage access permissions, review audit logs, and…
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…
Vendors in the Android ecosystem typically customize their devices by modifying Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code, adding in-house developed proprietary software, and pre-installing third-party applications. However, research has…
Nowadays smartphones come embedded with multiple motion sensors, such as an accelerometer, a gyroscope and an orientation sensor. With these sensors, apps can gather more information and therefore provide end users with more functionality.…
The Android market is a place where developers offer paid and-or free apps to users. Free apps are interesting to users because they can try them immediately without incurring a monetary cost. However, free apps often have limited features…
Our online lives generate a wealth of behavioral records -'digital footprints'- which are stored and leveraged by technology platforms. This data can be used to create value for users by personalizing services. At the same time, however, it…
In this work, we analyze two large-scale surveys to examine how individuals think about sharing smartphone access with romantic partners as a function of trust in relationships. We find that the majority of couples have access to each…
In the modern, fast-moving world of e-commerce, many Android apps face challenges in providing a simple and secure shopping experience. Many of these apps, often enough, have complicated designs that prevent users from finding what they…
The ability to identify the author responsible for a given software object is critical for many research studies and for enhancing software transparency and accountability. However, as opposed to other application markets like iOS,…
Browsers and their users can be tracked even in the absence of a persistent IP address or cookie. Unique and hence identifying pieces of information, making up what is known as a fingerprint, can be collected from browsers by a visited…
User tracking is critical in the mobile ecosystem, which relies on device identifiers to build clear user profiles. In earlier ages, Android allowed easy access to non-resettable device identifiers like device serial numbers and IMEI by…
While protecting user data is essential, software developers often fail to fulfill privacy requirements. However, the reasons why they struggle with privacy-compliant implementation remain unclear. Is it due to a lack of knowledge, or is it…
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…
Browser fingerprinting is a growing technique for identifying and tracking users online without traditional methods like cookies. This paper gives an overview by examining the various fingerprinting techniques and analyzes the entropy and…
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…
Social Coding Platforms (SCPs) like GitHub have become central to modern software engineering thanks to their collaborative and version-control features. Like in mainstream Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, users of SCPs are…