"New Website Highlights Thousands of Android Apps' Data Collection Practices"

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have launched a new website that provides a convenient and easy way for Android users to see how their data is collected and shared. The Android Network Traces (ANT) project maintains a database of more than 14,000 apps, providing comprehensive insight into the apps' data collection and sharing practices. Previously, the research team had created a website that graded the privacy of smartphone apps. However, they continued to receive the same questions regarding the types of data the apps collect, who receives it, and what it is used for. Therefore, Jason Hong, a professor at CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and members of the Human-Computer Interaction: Mobility Privacy Security Lab (CHIMPS), developed MobiPurpose to track network requests made by Android apps and classify data collection purposes. In their paper titled "Why Are They Collecting My Data?: Inferring the Purposes of Network Traffic in Mobile Apps," the authors describe how MobiPurpose parses each traffic request body into key-value pairs and uses supervised learning and text pattern bootstrapping to infer the data type and data collection purpose of each pair. MobiPurpose can predict the data collection purpose with an average accuracy of 84 percent. Using their method, the researchers collected network traces from thousands of apps and grouped them into five data type categories: network, device, general, location, and account. Then they transformed the information into easily readable charts on the ANT website. This article continues to discuss the research and development behind the new website highlighting Android apps' data collection and sharing practices. 

CyLab reports "New Website Highlights Thousands of Android Apps' Data Collection Practices"