Is Your Private Information Logged? An Empirical Study on Android App Logs
Zhiyuan Chen, Soham Sanjay Deo, Poorna Chander Reddy Puttaparthi, Vanessa Nava-Camal, Yiming Tang, Xueling Zhang, Weiyi Shang

TL;DR
This paper empirically analyzes Android app logs to assess privacy leaks, revealing widespread issues and providing insights and recommendations for developers to better protect user privacy.
Contribution
It offers a comprehensive dataset and empirical analysis of privacy leaks in Android logs, highlighting developer concerns and reasons behind leaks.
Findings
Majority of privacy leaks stem from developer unawareness
Five categories of developer concerns identified
Recommendations provided for privacy protection
Abstract
With the rapid growth of mobile apps, users' concerns about their privacy have become increasingly prominent. Android app logs serve as crucial computer resources, aiding developers in debugging and monitoring the status of Android apps, while also containing a wealth of software system information. Previous studies have acknowledged privacy leaks in software logs and Android apps as significant issues without providing a comprehensive view of the privacy leaks in Android app logs. In this study, we build a comprehensive dataset of Android app logs and conduct an empirical study to analyze the status and severity of privacy leaks in Android app logs. Our study comprises three aspects: (1) Understanding real-world developers' concerns regarding privacy issues related to software logs; (2) Studying privacy leaks in the Android app logs; (3) Investigating the characteristics of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Malware Detection Techniques · Security and Verification in Computing · Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
