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Towards Improving Privacy Awareness Regarding Apps’ Permissions

Authors:
Nurul Momen
Marta Piekarska

Keywords: Mobile Operating Systems; Mobile Phone Privacy; Control and Management of Privacy

Abstract:
Empirical studies show that the flow of personal information through mobile apps made devices vulnerable in terms of privacy. Cumbersome and inconvenient representation of privacy notice encourages the user to ignore it and disclose sensitive private information unintentionally. Hence, summarized permissions are presented on mobile devices and users tend to overlook them as well. Rigid structure for using a service and inherited behavior from desktop applications to accept everything are the reasons behind compelling the user to proceed without paying any attention. Complex permission based structure is also a major impediment for consumers that makes it difficult to perceive appropriate consequences of their decisions. We argue that as privacy strongly depends on individual perception, the key to educate and empower users is to providing them with transparency of what is happening on their smartphones. In consequence we suggest a convenient, transparent and proactive approach to help in understanding and deciding upon privacy implications of apps. We propose a scale that has scalability within itself. We implement this method within a tool, named Aware, that presents the summary of what applications are installed on a smartphone, which resources they access, and what are the reasons for that. Moreover, the tool is capable of nudging the user when certain sensitive data is accessed.

Pages: 18 to 23

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: March 19, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3956

ISBN: 978-1-61208-537-1

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from March 19, 2017 to March 23, 2017