After Over-Privileged Permissions: Using Technology and Design to Create Legal Compliance

Consumers in the mobile ecosystem can putatively protect their privacy with the use of application permissions. However, this requires the mobile device owners to understand permissions and their privacy implications. Yet, few consumers appreciate the nature of permissions within the mobile ecosystem, often failing to appreciate the privacy permissions that are altered when updating an app. Even more concerning is the lack of understanding of the wide use of third-party libraries, most which are installed with automatic permissions, that is permissions that must be granted to allow the application to function appropriately. Unsurprisingly, many of these third-party permissions violate consumers’ privacy expectations and thereby, become “over-privileged” to the user. Consequently, an obscurity of privacy expectations between what is practiced by the private sector and what is deemed appropriate by the public sector is exhibited. Despite the growing attention given to privacy in the mobile ecosystem, legal literature has largely ignored the implications of mobile permissions. This article seeks to address this omission by analyzing the impacts of mobile permissions and the privacy harms experienced by consumers of mobile applications. The authors call for the review of industry self-regulation and the overreliance upon simple notice and consent. Instead, the authors set out a plan for greater attention to be paid to socio-technical solutions, focusing on better privacy protections and technology embedded within the automatic permission-based application ecosystem

Encouraging Privacy-Aware Smartphone App Installation: Finding out what the Technically-Adept Do

Smartphone apps can harvest very personal details from the phone with ease. This is a particular privacy concern. Unthinking installation of untrustworthy apps constitutes risky behaviour. This could be due to poor awareness or a lack of knowhow: knowledge of how to go about protecting privacy. It seems that Smartphone owners proceed with installation, ignoring any misgivings they might have, and thereby irretrievably sacrifice their privacy

Designing and Implementing a Distributed Social Network Service for Mobile Devices

The paper presents a new paradigm for building social network services. The proposed plat-form is called eXtensible Social Network. As it uses the XMPP protocol for authentication and communication, it allows users from different service providers interact with each other, without having to change their accounts. Moreover, the platform provides means for users to authenticate and interact with each other while temporary disconnected from the Internet. Moreover, the platform is specially designed for mobile devices, running on their restrictive operating systems and taking advantage of the systems optimizations.Social Network, Mobile Devices, Service, XMPP, iOS, Android, Distributed, Plat-form

Why do People Adopt, or Reject, Smartphone Security Tools?

A large variety of security tools exist for Smartphones, to help their owners to secure the phones and prevent unauthorised others from accessing their data and services. These range from screen locks to antivirus software to password managers. Yet many Smartphone owners do not use these tools despite their being free and easy to use. We were interested in exploring this apparent anomaly. A number of researchers have applied existing models of behaviour from other disciplines to try to understand these kinds of behaviours in a security context, and a great deal of research has examined adoption of screen locking mechanisms. We review the proposed models and consider how they might fail to describe adoption behaviours. We then present the Integrated Model of Behaviour Prediction (IMBP), a richer model than the ones tested thus far. We consider the kinds of factors that could be incorporated into this model in order to understand Smartphone owner adoption, or rejection, of security tools. The model seems promising, based on existing literature, and we plan to test its efficacy in future studies