A Comparative Study of Android Users' Privacy Preferences Under the Runtime Permission Model

Android users recently were given the ability to selectively grant access to sensitive resources of their mobile devices when apps request them at runtime. The Android fine-grained runtime permission model has been gracefully accepted by the majority of users, who also seem to be consistent regarding their privacy and security preferences. In this paper we analyse permission data collected by Android devices that were utilising the runtime permission model. The reconstructed data represent apps’ settings snapshots. We compare behavioural insights extracted from the acquired data with users’ privacy preferences reported in our previous work. In addition, compared with the responses received from another group of mobile device users, users’ privacy settings seem to be affected by the functionality of apps. Furthermore, we advise visual schemata that describe users’ privacy settings and point out a usability issue regarding the installation process of Android apps under the runtime permission model.