Permission vs. App Limiters: Profiling Smartphone Users to Understand Differing Strategies for Mobile Privacy Management

Stuck in the Permissions With You: Developer & End-User Perspectives on App Permissions & Their Privacy Ramifications

“…While there has been research on how to present permission requests to end-users (e.g., [72,99]), we are unaware of specific studies that have explored ways to help end-users find and then remove unused or unnecessary permissions. Although some end-user participants were aware of permission settings and tried to change these settings (e.g., 28.68% of Android participants, N=380 [4]), our findings suggest that more work is needed ( §4.4). Future research should consider informing end-users and developers of unused or unnecessary permissions periodically-one starting point could be using recommendation tools to periodically nudge and remind end-users and developers of permissions requested by apps, as inspired by Liu et al [49].…”

“…We recruited 309 3 enduser participants using Prolific [63], a typical crowdsourcing platform for recruiting participants for empirical privacy studies [20]. We decided to recruit participants residing in the U.K. because (1) privacy is a cultural and contextual topic, and people's interpretation of what privacy means can vary based on where they are located [14,69,70,97]; 4 (2) Prolific offers representative samples only for two countries, the U.S. and the U.K. [64]; (3) we had limited resources and budget; and (4) a simple translation from English into other languages could have caused different interpretations of our questions. To avoid this, we would have needed to perform a validated translation, instead of a simple translation, for consistency (as stated in [70]), requiring additional resources.…”

“…Prolific's minimum size of a representative sample of the U.K. is 300 [64] 4. We did not consider this for our interview study with developers because our sample was small, and our developer participants developed apps for end-users across the globe and not necessarily for end-users in the developers' home countries.…”

Legal Obligation and Ethical Best Practice: Towards Meaningful Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants

“…But the complexity of connected devices makes effectively communicating relevant information a difficult task; research into the efficacy of smartphone permissions on platforms like Android and iOS has historically shown problems with attention and understanding [14]. Users also have more nuanced responses than just declining permissions-such as choosing different apps or minimising app installations-and these choices can be traced back to more fundamental attitudes and intentions [3].…”

“…At the time of writing the European Commission recognises equivalent regulations in Andorra, Argentina, Canada, Faroe Islands, Guernsey, Israel, Isle of Man, Japan, Jersey, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Uruguay as providing adequate protection to allow data flows without additional safeguards. 3…”