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Does this App Really Need My Location?: Context-Aware Privacy Management for Smartphones

Published: 11 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The enormous popularity of smartphones, their rich sensing capabilities, and the data they have about their users have lead to millions of apps being developed and used. However, these capabilities have also led to numerous privacy concerns. Platform manufacturers, as well as researchers, have proposed numerous ways of mitigating these concerns, primarily by providing fine-grained visibility and privacy controls to the user on a per-app basis. In this paper, we show that this per-app permission approach is suboptimal for many apps, primarily because most data accesses occur due to a small set of popular third-party libraries which are common across multiple apps. To address this problem, we present the design and implementation of ProtectMyPrivacy (PmP) for Android, which can detect critical contextual information at runtime when privacy-sensitive data accesses occur. In particular, PmP infers the purpose of the data access, i.e. whether the data access is by a third-party library or by the app itself for its functionality. Based on crowdsourced data, we show that there are in fact a set of 30 libraries which are responsible for more than half of private data accesses. Controlling sensitive data accessed by these libraries can therefore be an effective mechanism for managing their privacy. We deployed our PmP app to 1,321 real users, showing that the number of privacy decisions that users have to make are significantly reduced. In addition, we show that our users are better protected against data leakage when using our new library-based blocking mechanism as compared to the traditional app-level permission mechanisms.

Supplementary Material

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Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, Does this App Really Need My Location? Context-Aware Privacy Management for Smartphones

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      cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
      Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 1, Issue 3
      September 2017
      2023 pages
      EISSN:2474-9567
      DOI:10.1145/3139486
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 11 September 2017
      Accepted: 01 July 2017
      Received: 01 May 2017
      Published in IMWUT Volume 1, Issue 3

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      Author Tags

      1. Android
      2. Permissions Model
      3. Privacy
      4. Purpose
      5. Third Party Libraries

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