Privacy

Usage behaviors of different smartphone apps capture different views of an individual’s life, and are largely independent of each other. However, in the current mobile app ecosystem, a curious party can covertly link and aggregate usage behaviors of the same user across different apps. We refer to this as unregulated aggregation of app usage behaviors. […]

Device tracking is a serious threat to the privacy of users, as it enables spying on their habits and activities. A recent practice embeds ultrasonic beacons in audio and tracks them using the microphone of mobile devices. This side channel allows an adversary to identify a user’s current location, spy on her TV viewing habits

Ad-blocking systems such as Adblock Plus rely on crowdsourcing to build and maintain filter lists, which are the basis for determining which ads to block on web pages. In this work, we seek to advance our understanding of the ad-blocking community as well as the errors and pitfalls of the crowdsourcing process. To do so,