Nir Sivan, Ron Bitton, Asaf Shabtai
Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. 12 Dec 2018
In recent years we have witnessed a shift towards personalized, context-based applications and services for mobile device users. A key component of many of these services is the ability to infer the current location and predict the future location of users based on location sensors embedded in the devices. Such knowledge enables service providers to present relevant and timely offers to their users and better manage traffic congestion control, thus increasing customer satisfaction and engagement. However, such services suffer from location data leakage which has become one of today’s most concerning privacy issues for smartphone users.BGU researchers focused specifically on location data that is exposed by Android applications via Internet network traffic in plaintext (i.e., without encryption) without the user’s awareness. An empirical evaluation, involving the network traffic of real mobile device users, aimed at: (1) measuring the extent of location data leakage in the Internet traffic of Android-based smartphone devices; and (2) understanding the value of this data by inferring users’ points of interests (POIs).The key findings of this research center on the extent of this phenomenon in terms of both ubiquity and severity.