Taming Information-Stealing Smartphone Applications (on Android)

Smartphones have been becoming ubiquitous and mobile users are increasingly relying on them to store and handle personal in-formation. However, recent studies also reveal the disturbing fact that users' personal information is put at risk by (rogue) smartphone applications. Existing solutions exhibit limitations in their capabilities in taming these privacy-violating smartphone applications. In this paper, the authors argue for the need of a new privacy mode in smartphones. The privacy mode can empower users to flexibly control in a fine-grained manner what kinds of personal information will be accessible to an application. Also, the granted access can be dynamically adjusted at run-time in a fine-grained manner to better suit a user's needs in various scenarios (e.g., in a different time or location).