Related papers: PrivSTRUCT: Untangling Data Purpose Compliance of …
End-users seldom read verbose privacy policies, leading app stores like Google Play to mandate simplified data safety declarations as a user-friendly alternative. However, these self-declared disclosures often contradict the full privacy…
The Google Play marketplace has introduced the Data Safety section to improve transparency regarding how mobile applications (apps) collect, share, and protect user data. This mechanism requires developers to disclose privacy and…
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…
Current legal frameworks enforce that Android developers accurately report the data their apps collect. However, large codebases can make this reporting challenging. This paper employs an empirical approach to understand developers'…
With the increasing popularity of mobile devices and the wide adoption of mobile Apps, an increasing concern of privacy issues is raised. Privacy policy is identified as a proper medium to indicate the legal terms, such as GDPR, and to bind…
Mobile apps are predominantly integrated with cloud services to benefit from enhanced functionalities. Adopting authentication using secrets such as API keys is crucial to ensure secure mobile-cloud interactions. However, developers often…
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…
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 applications are frequently plagiarized or repackaged, and software obfuscation is a recommended protection against these practices. However, there is very little data on the overall rates of app obfuscation, the techniques used, or…
Many Android applications collect data from users. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires vendors to faithfully disclose which data their apps collect. This task is complicated because many apps use…
Third-party Software Development Kits (SDKs) are widely adopted in Android app development, to effortlessly accelerate development pipelines and enhance app functionality. However, this convenience raises substantial concerns about…
Mobile applications are required to give privacy notices to users when they collect or share personal information. Creating consistent and concise privacy notices can be a challenging task for developers. Previous work has attempted to help…
String obfuscation is an established technique used by proprietary, closed-source applications to protect intellectual property. Furthermore, it is also frequently used to hide spyware or malware in applications. In both cases, the…
Mobile applications are required to give privacy notices to the users when they collect or share personal information. Creating consistent and concise privacy notices can be a challenging task for developers. Previous work has attempted to…
Lengthy and legally phrased privacy policies impede users' understanding of how mobile applications collect and process personal data. Prior work proposed Contextual Privacy Policies (CPPs) for mobile apps to display shorter policy snippets…
With the requirements and emphases on privacy transparency placed by regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, the Google Play Store requires Android developers to more responsibly communicate their apps' privacy practices to potential users by…
As privacy features in Android operating system improve, privacy-invasive apps may gradually shift their focus to non-standard and covert channels for leaking private user/device information. Such leaks also remain largely undetected by…
Third party apps that work on top of personal cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox, require access to the user's data in order to provide some functionality. Through detailed analysis of a hundred popular Google Drive apps from…
Mobile application developers are required to disclose how they collect, use, and share user data in compliance with privacy regulations. To support transparency, major app marketplaces have introduced standardized disclosure mechanisms. In…
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…