Privacy Risks of Sensitive User Data Exposure in Mobile Ecosystems.

ANDOW, BENJAMIN ERIC. Privacy Risks of Sensitive User Data Exposure in Mobile Ecosystems.(Under the direction of Dr. William Enck).Mobile applications frequently collect and share a wide-range of privacy-sensitive user data. Such data is an extremely valuable commodity for legitimate business purposes, but also for nefarious and illicit purposes. Therefore, identifying the privacy risks of exposing privacy-sensitive user data to applications has been a topic of great research interest over the past decade. However, prior works in this domain are plagued with significant limitations that result in incomplete or imprecise approximations of the privacy risks. These limitations are mainly due to an incomplete characterization of the types of data that applications request and the context-insensitivity of their privacy policy analysis techniques, or lack thereof.