Does this App Really Need My Location?

The enormous popularity of smartphones, their rich sensing capabilities, and the data they have about their users have lead to millions of apps being developed and used. However, these capabilities have also led to numerous privacy concerns. Platform manufacturers, as well as researchers, have proposed numerous ways of mitigating these concerns, primarily by providing fine-grained visibility and privacy controls to the user on a per-app basis. In this paper, we show that this per-app permission approach is suboptimal for many apps, primarily because most data accesses occur due to a small set of popular third-party libraries which are common across multiple apps. To address this problem, we present the design and implementation of ProtectMyPrivacy (PmP) for Android, which can detect critical contextual information at runtime when privacy-sensitive data accesses occur. In particular, PmP infers the purpose of the data access, i.e. whether the data access is by a third-party library or by the app itself for its functionality. Based on crowdsourced data, we show that there are in fact a set of 30 libraries which are responsible for more than half of private data accesses. Controlling sensitive data accessed by these libraries can therefore be an effective mechanism for managing their privacy. We deployed our PmP app to 1,321 real users, showing that the number of privacy decisions that users have to make are significantly reduced. In addition, we show that our users are better protected against data leakage when using our new library-based blocking mechanism as compared to the traditional app-level permission mechanisms.