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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'…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Konrad Kollnig , Reuben Binns , Pierre Dewitte , Max Van Kleek , Ge Wang , Daniel Omeiza , Helena Webb , Nigel Shadbolt

Mobile apps offer significant benefits, but their privacy protections often remain ineffective and confusing for users. While prior work mainly analyzes app privacy vulnerabilities, few approaches help users understand, set, and enforce…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Tran Thanh Lam Nguyen , Edoardo Di Tullio , Barbara Carminati , Elena Ferrari

Language model (LM) agents that act on users' behalf for personal tasks (e.g., replying emails) can boost productivity, but are also susceptible to unintended privacy leakage risks. We present the first study on people's capacity to oversee…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zhiping Zhang , Bingcan Guo , Tianshi Li

In today's mobile application marketplace, the ability of consumers to make informed choices regarding their privacy is extremely limited. Consumers largely rely on privacy policies and app permission mechanisms, but these do an inadequate…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2015-01-05 Steven C. Isley

As technology and technology companies have grown in power, ubiquity, and societal influence, some companies -- and notably some mobile apps -- have come to be perceived as privacy threats. Prior work has considered how various factors…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Jenny Tang , Hannah Shoemaker , Leah Teffera , Eleanor Birrell , Ada Lerner

Personalized AI agents rely on access to a user's digital footprint, which often includes sensitive data from private emails, chats and purchase histories. Yet this access creates a fundamental societal and privacy risk: systems lacking…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Srija Mukhopadhyay , Sathwik Reddy , Shruthi Muthukumar , Jisun An , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru

The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and customization for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data purportedly to improve their service, while presenting app users…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Feiyang Tang , Bjarte M. Østvold

Large language model (LLM)-based mobile agents are increasingly popular due to their capability to interact directly with mobile phone Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) and their potential to autonomously manage daily tasks. Despite their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Luyuan Wang , Yongyu Deng , Yiwei Zha , Guodong Mao , Qinmin Wang , Tianchen Min , Wei Chen , Shoufa Chen

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…

Privacy policies are intended to inform users about how software systems collect and handle data, yet they often remain vague or incomplete. This paper presents an empirical study of patterns in log-related statements within privacy…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Zhiyuan Chen , Love Jayesh Ahir , Ahmad Suleiman , Kundi Yao , Yiming Tang , Weiyi Shang , Daqing Hou

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-10-14 Debjyoti Mukherjee , Alireza Ahmadi , Maryam Vahdat Pour , Joel Reardon

Privacy, security, and accessibility, like ethical concerns in mobile applications (a.k.a. apps), commonly subsumed under non-functional requirements, are generally reported by users through app reviews available in app stores. However,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Aakash Sorathiya , Gouri Ginde

Mobile Health (mHealth) applications have become a crucial part of health monitoring and management. However, the proliferation of these applications has also raised concerns over the privacy and security of Personally Identifiable…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Thomas Cory , Wolf Rieder , Thu-My Huynh

Privacy preservation is a crucial component of any real-world application. But, in applications relying on machine learning backends, privacy is challenging because models often capture more than what the model was initially trained for,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Mimansa Jaiswal , Emily Mower Provost

Personalized mobile agents that infer user preferences and calibrate proactive assistance hold great promise as everyday digital assistants, yet existing benchmarks fail to capture what this requires. Prior work evaluates preference…

Smartphone agents are increasingly important for helping users control devices efficiently, with (Multimodal) Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approaches emerging as key contenders. Fairly comparing these agents is essential but…

The age of technology has created a huge market for smartphones and Apps usage and a new generation has been created based on knowledge sharing. Now knowledge has been made easily accessible by Apps but; are users even aware of the…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2018-04-19 Akosua Boakyewaa Teye , Ezer Osei Yeboah-Boateng

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,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Amogh Pradeep , Álvaro Feal , Julien Gamba , Ashwin Rao , Martina Lindorfer , Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez , David Choffnes

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…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Vedran Sekara , Enys Mones , Håkan Jonsson

Smartphone GUI agents execute tasks by operating directly on app interfaces, offering a path to broad capability without deep system integration. However, real-world smartphone use is highly personalized: users adopt diverse workflows and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Hongyi Nie , Xunyuan Liu , Yudong Bai , Yaqing Wang , Yang Liu , Quanming Yao , Zhen Wang