Improving Mobile Apps Transparency

Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality (2013) 1 5, Number 2, 1–55 Improving Mobile App Selection through Transparency and Better Permission Analysis ∗ † ‡ Ilaria Liccardi , Joseph Pato , and Daniel J. Weitzner Abstract.Our personal information, habits, likes, and dislikes can be all deduced from our mobile devices. Safeguarding mobile privacy is therefore of great concern. Transparency and individual control are bedrock principles of privacy but it has been shown that it is difficult to make informed choices about which mobile apps to use. In order to understand the dynamics of information collection in mobile apps and to demonstrate the value of transparent access to the details of their access permissions, we gathered information about 528,433 apps on Google Play, and analyzed the permissions requested by each app. We developed a quantitative measure of the risk posed by apps by devising a‘sensitivity score’to represent the number of occurrences of permissions that read personal information about users where network communication is possible. We found that 54% of apps do not access any personal data. The remaining 46% collect between 1 and 20 sensitive permissions and have the ability to transmit it outside the phone. The sensitivity of apps differs greatly between free and paid apps as well as between categories and content ratings.