Privacy services for mobile devices

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that privacy on mobile devices is not properly ensured. Due to a heavy increase of smartphones in the market, in addition to a variety of third-party applications, a demand for improved solutions concerning privacy has arisen. Our objective is to extend users' ability to control applications' access to resources at run-time. We investigate whether such a solution is adequate or not, in order to properly maintain privacy. We propose a design that provides a higher degree of control by allowing users to set preferences that determines what personal information to share. Previous efforts only give users a binary choice on whether to fake personal information or not. We offer a more flexible solution that allows users to set preferences with a higher degree of granularity. We implement selected parts from our design, in order to evaluate whether this solution serves as a utility or not. Further evaluation is a necessity in order to fully accept or reject the idea. However, our initial results are promising.