Design and Implementation of Privacy Impact Assessment for Android Mobile Devices

[Abstract] There are a lot of personal information stored in our smartphones, for instance, contacts, messages, photos, banking credentials and social network access. Therefore, ensuring personal data safety is a critical research and practical issue. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the influence of personal data security and decrease the privacy risks in the Android system. We apply the concept of privacy impact assessment (PIA) to design a system, which identifies permission requirements of apps, detects the potential activities from the logger and analyses the configuration settings. The system provides a user⁃friendly interface for users to get in⁃depth knowledge of the impact of privacy risk, and it could run on Android devices without USB teleport and network connection to avoid other problems. Our research finds that many apps announce numerous unnecessary permissions, and the application installing confirmation dialog does not show all requirement permissions when apps are installed first time.

[Keywords] privacy impact assessment; privacy risk; personal information; Android permission; configuration settings