Mobile Application Privacy Risks : Viber Users’ De-Anonymization Using Public Data

Mobile application developers define the terms of use for the applications they develop, which users may accept or declined during installation. Application developers on the one hand seek to gain access to as many user information as possible, while users on the other hand seem to lack awareness and comprehension of privacy policies. This allows application developers to store an enormous number of personal data, sometimes even irrelevant to the application’s function. It’s also common that users choose not to alter the default settings, even when such an option is provided. In combination, the above conditions jeopardize users’ rights to privacy. In this research, we examined the Viber application to demonstrate how effortless it is to discover the identity of unknown Viber users. We chose a pseudorandom sample of 2000 cellular telephone numbers and examined if we could reveal their personal information. We designed an empirical study that compares the reported behavior with the actual behavior of Viber’s users. The results of this study show that users’ anonymity and privacy is easily deprived and information is exposed to a knowledgeable seeker. We provide guidelines addressed to both mobile application users and developers to increase privacy awareness and prevent privacy violations

Empirical Investigation of Key Factors for SaaS Architecture Dimension

IEEE Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has received significant attention from software providers and users as a software delivery model. Most of the existing companies are transferring their business into a SaaS model. This intensely competitive environment has imposed many challenges for SaaS developers and vendors. SaaS development is a very complex process and SaaS success depends on its architecture design and development. This paper provides a better understanding of SaaS applications architecture phase during the SaaS development process. It focuses mainly on an empirical investigation of key factors of SaaS Architecture phase identified from the systematic literature review. A quantitative survey was developed and conducted to identify key architecture factors for an improved and successful SaaS application. A developed survey was used to test the proposed hypothesis presented in this study. Empirical investigation\u27s results provide evidence that vendors and developers must consider key architecture factors for SaaS development process to stand in the current competitive environment. These key factors include customization, scalability, MTA (Multi-Tenancy Architecture), security, integration, and fault tolerance and recovery management. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of identified key factors of the architecture on SaaS applications success

The application development process: What role does it play in the success of an application for the user developer?

End user development of applications forms a significant part of organisational systems development. This study investigates the role that developing an application plays in the eventual success of the application for the user developer. The results of this study suggest that the process of developing an application not only predisposes an end user developer to be more satisfied with the application than they would be if it were developed by another end user, but also leads them to perform better with it. Thus the results of the study highlight the contribution of the process of application development to application success

Private Regulation by Platform Operators – Implications for Usage Intensity

Platforms operators act as private regulators to increase usage and maximize profits. Their goals depend on the development of the platform: overcoming the chicken-egg problem early on requires attracting platform participants while quality becomes more important later on. Private regulators influence third-party business models, entry barriers, and usage intensity. We analyze how drivers of usage intensity on Facebook’s application platform were affected by a policy change that increased quality incentives for applications. This change led to the number of installations of each application becoming less important, applications in more concentrated sub-markets achieving higher usage, and applications staying attractive for longer

Incentives for Quality over Time – The Case of Facebook Applications

We study the market for applications on Facebook, the dominant platform for social networking and make use of a rule change by Facebook by which high-quality applications were rewarded with further opportunities to engage users. We find that the change led to quality being a more important driver of usage while sheer network size became less important. Further, we find that update frequency helps applications maintain higher usage, while generally usage of Facebook applications declines less rapidly with age