Analysis of Longitudinal Changes in Privacy Behavior of Android Applications

TL;DR

This study analyzes a decade of Android app data to understand how privacy behaviors have evolved, revealing improvements over time but also persistent privacy issues linked to third-party libraries.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive longitudinal analysis of privacy trends in Android apps, highlighting the impact of app updates and third-party libraries on privacy practices.

Findings

Privacy behavior has improved over time with app updates.

Third-party libraries contribute significantly to privacy issues.

Many privacy concerns remain unresolved in current Android apps.

Abstract

Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored the APKs for 135,536 of them. In this paper, we examine the trends in how Android apps have changed over time with respect to privacy and look at it from two perspectives: (1) how privacy behavior in apps have changed as they are updated over time, (2) how these changes can be accounted for when comparing third-party libraries and the app's own internals. To study this, we examine the adoption of HTTPS, whether apps scan the device for other installed apps, the use of permissions for privacy-sensitive data, and the use of unique identifiers. We find that privacy-related behavior has improved with time as apps continue to receive updates, and that the third-party libraries used by apps are responsible for more issues with privacy. However, we observe that in the current state of Android apps, there has not been enough of an improvement in terms of privacy and many issues still need to be addressed.