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.

View More Papers

Understanding the Growth and Security Considerations of ECS

Athanasios Kountouras (Georgia Institute of Technology), Panagiotis Kintis (Georgia Institute of Technology), Athanasios Avgetidis (Georgia Institute of Technology), Thomas Papastergiou (Georgia Institute of Technology), Charles Lever (Georgia Institute of Technology), Michalis Polychronakis (Stony Brook University), Manos Antonakakis (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Read More

SerialDetector: Principled and Practical Exploration of Object Injection Vulnerabilities...

Mikhail Shcherbakov (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Musard Balliu (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

Read More

Awakening the Web's Sleeper Agents: Misusing Service Workers for...

Soroush Karami (University of Illinois at Chicago), Panagiotis Ilia (University of Illinois at Chicago), Jason Polakis (University of Illinois at Chicago)

Read More

Obfuscated Access and Search Patterns in Searchable Encryption

Zhiwei Shang (University of Waterloo), Simon Oya (University of Waterloo), Andreas Peter (University of Twente), Florian Kerschbaum (University of Waterloo)

Read More