PrivacyMod: Controlling and Monitoring Abuse of Privacy-Related Data by Android Applications

The Android Open Source Project, currently managed by Google, provides a software stack for Android operating system. Despite the efforts to create a scalable and secure OS, Google is failing to deal with users´ privacy information. Any Android application (including third-party ones) can retrieve sensible data from devices without providing any notification to the user. This paper presents a new Android OS source code extension module to monitor and control relevant privacy data on third-party applications. Once a data operation of this type is detected, the user is notified in real time, creating a live history of use/abuse. Results showed many traditional applications making abuse of users´ device confidential information. Our proposed mechanism enables the user to be aware and manage the use of every sensible information on his device.