Related papers: PrivacyAssist: A User-Centric Agent Framework for …
Due to the amount of data that smartphone applications can potentially access, platforms enforce permission systems that allow users to regulate how applications access protected resources. If users are asked to make security decisions too…
The Android platform introduces the runtime permission model in version 6.0. The new model greatly improves data privacy and user experience, but brings new challenges for app developers. First, it allows users to freely revoke granted…
LLM app (tool) ecosystems are rapidly evolving to support sophisticated use cases that often require extensive user data collection. Given that LLM apps are developed by third parties and anecdotal evidence indicating inconsistent…
Android is designed with a number of built-in security features such as app sandboxing and permission-based access controls. Android supports multiple communication methods for apps to cooperate. This creates a security risk of app…
Android utilizes a security mechanism that requires apps to request permission for accessing sensitive user data, e.g., contacts and SMSs, or certain system features, e.g., camera and Internet access. However, Android apps tend to be…
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…
Apple introduced privacy labels in Dec. 2020 as a way for developers to report the privacy behaviors of their apps. While Apple does not validate labels, they also require developers to provide a privacy policy, which offers an important…
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…
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…
Human values are an important aspect of life and should be supported in ubiquitous technologies such as mobile applications (apps). There has been a lot of focus on fixing certain kinds of violation of human values, especially privacy,…
Mini-app is an emerging form of mobile application that combines web technology with native capabilities. Its features, e.g., no need to download and no installation, have made it popular rapidly. However, privacy issues that violate the…
Prior works have shown that the list of apps installed by a user reveal a lot about user interests and behavior. These works rely on the semantics of the installed apps and show that various user traits could be learnt automatically using…
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…
Since the introduction of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), software developers increasingly have to make privacy-related decisions during system design and…
As data privacy continues to be a crucial human-right concern as recognized by the UN, regulatory agencies have demanded developers obtain user permission before accessing user-sensitive data. Mainly through the use of privacy policies…
Most users agree to online privacy policies without reading or understanding them, even though these documents govern how personal data is collected, shared, and monetized. Privacy policies are typically long, legally complex, and difficult…
Android and Facebook provide third-party applications with access to users' private data and the ability to perform potentially sensitive operations (e.g., post to a user's wall or place phone calls). As a security measure, these platforms…
The Android unrestricted application market, being of open source nature, has made it a popular platform for third-party applications reaching millions of smart devices in the world. This tremendous increase in applications with an…
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,…
Mobile apps often embed authentication secrets, such as API keys, tokens, and client IDs, to integrate with cloud services. However, developers often hardcode these credentials into Android apps, exposing them to extraction through reverse…