Detecting Phantom Data Usage on Smartphones with Analysis of Contextual Information

Abstract

With the wide development of smartphones, mobile data usage has enjoyed rapid growth in recent years. Unfortunately many users are plagued with Phantom Data Usage (PDU), which refers to the unexpected mobile data usage that does not accord with user perception. We investigate about 400 real PDU issues and find the causes of PDU are not only the exceptions of applications, for example, software bugs or malware, but also the user's personalized misuse. Based on the observations that each user preserves specific data usage patterns under particular environmental context, we present PDS, a PDU detection system, which automatically detects whether the current data usage is consumed as expected. Results from our evaluation experiments show that 72% of PDU cases detected by PDS are confirmed by users.

Relevant Affect Factors of Smartphone Mobile Data Traffic

“…Most of the data usage issues are for unknown reasons to users, regarded as Phantom Data Usage (PDU), which refers to the unexpected mobile data usage that does not accord with user's perception [58]. Considering that the smartphone users are often unaware of the factors affecting the amount of generated MDT, the same encounter the problem of prediction of the above mentioned, and accordingly, the selection of appropriate tariff data plan.…”

Secure and Usable User-in-a-Context Continuous Authentication in Smartphones Leveraging Non-Assisted Sensors

“…In terms of the sensorial data at stake, it is remarkable that almost all precedent works [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ] rely upon some external element such as GPS satellites or telephony cell towers. This issue is relevant as the absence of these elements would make their approach to be affected.…”

“…In 2016, Basu et al coined the term user-in-a-context for this research direction [ 7 ]. Indeed, since 2010, a significant amount of works (such as [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ]) have already addressed it. However, most existing proposals make extensive use of assisted sensors, that is, sensorial information that is retrieved by cooperation with an external element (e.g., GPS satellites, cell tower or WiFi router) or magnitude (e.g., magnetism).…”