Towards Privacy for Android Mobile Applications

The widespread adoption of Android phones has accelerated the deployment of android mobile apps. Mobile applications are software programs designed to operate on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. As a result, they will be able to access and use data saved on a device, such as a contact list and data from the device’s different sensors. In Android apps, third-party libraries are commonly used for leveraging functionalities like GPS, analytics, and advertisements. The third-party libraries have access to permissions the same as that of the host apps, these apps can easily become overly powerful and leak users’ personal information without the user’s knowledge. Users consent only to the applications they install, and they have no clue about the number of thirdparty apps integrated, as well as the permissions they access. Apart from this majority of the users lack the competence to discern if an application suits their privacy preferences. Hence, there’s a big difference between what’s perceived, and what’s preferred when it comes to privacy. Our motive is to create an Android application that will improve the user’s privacy. In this project, we perform a survey to collect the privacy preference of the user on one hand and compare it with what they share with the application as well as the hosted third-party apps. Though the permissions shared with the hosting app can be extracted from the user settings, it is not so with third-party apps. By using the Xposed framework to extract the list of third-party applications and the permissions accessed by them. Based on the sensitivity of the accessed API, a score is assigned and the listing is provided to the user. This would help the user in deciding to uninstall any app that accesses the sensitive APIs.