JoWUA

Abstract

The current mobile architecture design allows mobiles apps to have unprecedented access to sensitive user information. While users are concerned about privacy breaching, they may not be able to evaluate the privacy risk when downloading apps from smartphone application marketplaces. Currently, Android users only receive Android permission requests, which appear when an app attempts to access phone resources and the user can choose to grant or deny the requests. The current permission requests interface provides little information to help users understand the risk of granting those requests. In this work, we study how privacy notification interface can play an important role in assisting users in making informed decision regarding permission control. To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-view privacy notification mechanism that provides customized notification interfaces that help users obtain necessary information about the risk behind granting a permission. The implementation of our model includes a new design of User Interface (UI), interpreting apps’ activities risks, and users’ preferences adaption. We also propose a set of metrics to evaluate the usability of the notification system. To evaluate the usability of our mechanism, we conducted a user survey and analyzed users’ feedback.