Comparative Privacy Displays in App Marketplaces

Abstract

Android applications request permissions to gain access to system operations, an OS-wide attempt to limit the access of personal information by third-party application developers. Currently, before an app is installed, the system presents these permission requests to the app consumer for approval. However, this implementation of notice and consent is lacking in many ways. The presentation of permissions comes late in the selection process, uses jargon-heavy terms, does not show which permissions are not collected, permission “requests” are not optional, and comparisons are tedious and memory-based. Overall, this interface does not support privacy conscious decision-making. Our work proposes a conceptual shift in the way these permission requests are displayed. We propose reducing the amount of information shown and inherently facilitating comparisons by presenting privacy information relative to other apps. Specifically, by displaying permission differences between apps within a given marketplace search we can highlight the most currently relevant information. This focuses the user’s attention on the current action, their search, and displays the permission variance between applications that have the greatest likelihood of meeting their current goals and actually being installed. This short paper presents a new model for displaying app permissions, proposes a series of possible displays from the potential design place, and analyzes current market permissions to validate that this information is varied and rich.