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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OblivSketch: Oblivious Network Measurement as a Cloud Service

Shangqi Lai (Monash University), Xingliang Yuan (Monash University), Joseph K. Liu (Monash University), Xun Yi (RMIT University), Qi Li (Tsinghua University), Dongxi Liu (Data61, CSIRO), Surya Nepal (Data61, CSIRO)

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(Short) WIP: End-to-End Analysis of Adversarial Attacks to Automated...

Hengyi Liang, Ruochen Jiao (Northwestern University), Takami Sato, Junjie Shen, Qi Alfred Chen (UC Irvine), and Qi Zhu (Northwestern University) Best Short Paper Award Winner!

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All the Numbers are US: Large-scale Abuse of Contact...

Christoph Hagen (University of Würzburg), Christian Weinert (TU Darmstadt), Christoph Sendner (University of Würzburg), Alexandra Dmitrienko (University of Würzburg), Thomas Schneider (TU Darmstadt)

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When DNS Goes Dark: Understanding Privacy and Shaping Policy...

Vijay k. Gurbani and Cynthia Hood ( Illinois Institute of Technology), Anita Nikolich (University of Illinois), Henning Schulzrinne (Columbia University) and Radu State (University of Luxembourg)

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