Understanding Users’ Behavior towards Applications Privacy Policies

Abstract

Recently, smartphone usage has increased tremendously, and smartphones are being used as a requirement of daily life, equally by all age groups. Smartphone operating systems such as Android and iOS have made it possible for anyone with development skills to create apps for smartphones. This has enabled smartphone users to download and install applications from stores such as Google Play, App Store, and several other third-party sites. During installation, these applications request resource access permissions from users. The resources include hardware and software like contact, memory, location, managing phone calls, device state, messages, camera, etc. As per Google’s permission policy, it is the responsibility of the user to allow or deny any permissions requested by an app. This leads to serious privacy violation issues when an app gets illegal permission granted by a user (e.g., an app might request for granted map permission and there is no need for map permission in the app, and someone can thereby access your location by this app). This study investigates the behavior of the user when it comes to safeguarding their privacy while installing apps from Google Play. In this research, first, seven different applications with irrelevant permission requests were developed and uploaded to two different Play Store accounts. The apps were live for more than 12 months and data were collected through Play Store analytics as well as the apps’ policy page. The preliminary data analysis shows that only 20% of users showed concern regarding their privacy and security either through interaction with the development team through email exchange or through commenting on the platform and other means accordingly.