Yun Shen (NortonLifeLock Research Group), Pierre-Antoine Vervier (NortonLifeLock Research Group), Gianluca Stringhini (Boston University)

Mobile phones enable the collection of a wealth of private information, from unique identifiers (e.g., email addresses), to a user’s location, to their text messages. This information can be harvested by apps and sent to third parties, which can use it for a variety of purposes. In this paper we perform the largest study of private information collection (PIC) on Android to date. Leveraging an anonymized dataset collected from the customers of a popular mobile security product, we analyze the flows of sensitive information generated by 2.1M unique apps installed by 17.3M users over a period of 21 months between 2018 and 2019. We find that 87.2% of all devices send private information to at least five different domains, and that actors active in different regions (e.g., Asia compared to Europe) are interested in collecting different types of information. The United States (62% of the total) and China (7% of total flows) are the countries that collect most private information. Our findings raise issues regarding data regulation, and would encourage policymakers to further regulate how private information is used by and shared among the companies and how accountability can be truly guaranteed.

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DOVE: A Data-Oblivious Virtual Environment

Hyun Bin Lee (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Tushar M. Jois (Johns Hopkins University), Christopher W. Fletcher (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Carl A. Gunter (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

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POSEIDON: Privacy-Preserving Federated Neural Network Learning

Sinem Sav (EPFL), Apostolos Pyrgelis (EPFL), Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza (EPFL), David Froelicher (EPFL), Jean-Philippe Bossuat (EPFL), Joao Sa Sousa (EPFL), Jean-Pierre Hubaux (EPFL)

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Location Data and COVID-19 Contact Tracing: How Data Privacy...

Callie Monroe, Faiza Tazi, Sanchari Das (university of Denver)

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DNS Privacy Vs : Confronting protocol design trade offs...

Mallory Knodel (Center for Democracy and Technology), Shivan Sahib (Salesforce)

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