The proliferation of mobile apps is due in part to the advertising ecosystem which enables developers to earn revenue while providing free apps. Ad-supported apps can be developed rapidly with the availability of ad libraries. However, today?s ad libraries essentially have access to the same resources as the parent app, and this has caused signi?cant privacy concerns. In this paper, we explore ef?cient methods to de-escalate privileges for ad libraries where the resource access privileges for ad libraries can be different from that of the app logic. Our system, PEDAL, contains a novel machine classi?er for detecting ad libraries even in the presence of obfuscated code, and techniques for automatically instrumenting bytecode to effect privilege de-escalation even in the presence of privilege inheritance. We evaluate PEDAL on a large set of apps from the Google Play store and demonstrate that it has a 98% accuracy in detecting ad libraries and imposes less than 1% runtime overhead on apps.

As they compete for developers, mobile app ecosystems have been exposing a growing number of APIs through their software development kits. Many of these APIs involve accessing sensitive functionality and/or user data and require approval by users. Android for instance allows developers to select from over 130 possible permissions. Expecting users to review and possibly adjust settings related to these permissions has proven unrealistic. In this paper, we report on the results of a study analyzing people's privacy preferences when it comes to granting permissions to different mobile apps. Our results suggest that, while people's mobile app privacy preferences are diverse, a relatively small number of profiles can be identified that offer the promise of significantly simplifying the decisions mobile users have to make. Specifically, our results are based on the analysis of settings of 4.8 million smartphone users of a mobile security and privacy platform. The platform relies on a rooted version of Android where users are allowed to choose between "granting", "denying" or "requesting to be dynamically prompted" when it comes to granting 12 different Android permissions to mobile apps they have downloaded.

This paper describes an empirical study of 1.6M deleted tweets collected over a continuous one-week period from a set of 292K Twitter users. We examine several aggregate properties of deleted tweets, including their connections to other tweets (e.g., whether they are replies or retweets), the clients used to produce them, temporal aspects of deletion, and the presence of geotagging information. Some significant differences were discovered between the two collections, namely in the clients used to post them, their conversational aspects, the sentiment vocabulary present in them, and the days of the week they were posted. However, in other dimensions for which analysis was possible, no substantial differences were found. Finally, we discuss some ramifications of this work for understanding Twitter usage and management of one's privacy.