Third best student paper award “Study on privacy of parental control applications”

Abstract

Parental control applications are one kind of mobile software programs used by parents to monitor and control the use that their kids make of their cellphone. In this study we aim to learn about the privacy of these applications. We combine manual analysis of the Android marketplace with dynamic analysis of the application itself to learn about the ecosystem of these apps and their privacy problems. We studied 17 different applications of which 10 where fully analyzed using dynamic analysis. We found 11 privacy issues in 8 of these 10 apps. We also found that 17% of the permissions requested by these apps are not clearly mapped to any app functionality and that 50% of the applications do not clearly explain their communication model to users.