2013/07/23 by Theodore Book, Dan S. Wallach, Book, Theodore +1 · 1 voice
Computer Science · Engineering · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Green IT and Sustainability #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology #cs.CR
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1307.6082
6 pages
arxiv created 2013/07/23 · openalex publication_date 2013/07/23 · arxiv updated 2013/07/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A growing concern with advertisement libraries on Android is their ability to exfiltrate personal information from their host applications. While previous work has looked at the libraries' abilities to measure private information on their own, advertising libraries also include APIs through which a host application can deliberately leak private information about the user. This study considers a corpus of 114,000 apps. We reconstruct the APIs for 103 ad libraries used in the corpus, and study how the privacy leaking APIs from the top 20 ad libraries are used by the applications. Notably, we have found that app popularity correlates with privacy leakage; the marginal increase in advertising revenue, multiplied over a larger user base, seems to incentivize these app vendors to violate their users' privacy.