Understanding Worldwide Private Information Collection on Android
Yun Shen, Pierre-Antoine Vervier, Gianluca Stringhini

TL;DR
This study analyzes private information collection on Android devices, revealing extensive data sharing with third parties, regional differences in data types collected, and implications for data regulation and privacy policies.
Contribution
It provides the largest empirical analysis of Android private information flows, highlighting regional variations and the scale of data sharing across millions of devices.
Findings
87.2% of devices send private info to at least five domains
Different regions collect different types of private data
US and China dominate private information collection
Abstract
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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Malware Detection Techniques · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Spam and Phishing Detection
