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The dominant privacy framework of the information age relies on notions of “notice and consent.” That is, service providers will disclose, often through privacy policies, their data collection practices, and users can then consent to their terms. However, it is unlikely that most users comprehend these disclosures, which is due in no small part to ambiguous, deceptive, and misleading statements. By comparing actual collection and sharing practices to disclosures in privacy policies, we demonstrate the scope of the problem. Through analysis of 68,051 apps from the Google Play Store, their corresponding privacy policies, and observed data transmissions, we investigated the potential misrepresentations of apps in the Designed For Families (DFF) program, inconsistencies in disclosures regarding third-party data sharing, as well as contradictory disclosures about secure data transmissions. We find that of the 8,030 DFF apps (i.e., apps directed at children), 9.1% claim that their apps are not directed at children, while 30.6% claim to have no knowledge that the received data comes from children. In addition, we observe that 10.5% of 68,051 apps share personal identifiers with third-party service providers, yet do not declare any in their privacy policies, and only 22.2% of the apps explicitly name third parties. This ultimately makes it not only difficult, but in most cases impossible, for users to establish where their personal data is being processed. Furthermore, we find that 9,424 apps do not use TLS when transmitting personal identifiers, yet 28.4% of these apps claim to take measures to secure data transfer. Ultimately, these divergences between disclosures and actual app behaviors illustrate the ridiculousness of the notice and consent framework.
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I Don't Know Why You Need My Data: A Case Study of Popular Social Media Privacy Policies
Data privacy, a critical human right, is gaining importance as new technologies are developed, and the old ones evolve. In mobile platforms such as Android, data privacy regulations require developers to communicate data access requests using privacy policy statements (PPS). This case study cross-examines the PPS in popular social media (SM) apps---Facebook and Twitter---for features of language ambiguity, sensitive data requests, and whether the statements tally with the data requests made in the Manifest file. Subsequently, we conduct a comparative analysis between the PPS of these two apps to examine trends that may constitute a threat to user data privacy.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1850054
- PAR ID:
- 10353978
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM CODASPY 2022
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 340 to 342
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3508398.3519359
