论文标题
Android MHealth应用程序中GDPR合规性违规行为的经验评估
An Empirical Evaluation of GDPR Compliance Violations in Android mHealth Apps
论文作者
论文摘要
一般数据保护法规(GDPR)的目的是提供改进的隐私保护。如果应用程序控制用户的个人数据,则需要符合GDPR。但是,GDPR列出了有关如何开发满足要求的应用程序的一般规则,而不是确切的逐步指南。因此,现有应用程序可能存在违反GDPR合规性,这将对应用程序用户构成严重的隐私威胁。在本文中,我们将移动健康应用程序(MHealth应用程序)作为窥视孔,以检查Android应用中GDPR合规性的现状。我们首先提出了一个名为\ myTool的自动化系统,以通过识别应用程序隐私策略中声明的数据实践以及应用程序代码中的数据相关行为来弥合GDPR和APP实现之间的语义差距。然后,基于\ mytool,我们检测到三种GDPR依从性违规,包括隐私政策的不完整,数据收集的不一致以及数据传输的不安全感。我们对796个MHealth应用程序进行经验评估。结果表明,其中189(23.7 \%)没有提供完整的隐私政策。此外,59个应用程序通过不同的度量收集敏感数据,但是其中46个(77.9 \%)至少包含一种不一致的收集行为。更糟糕的是,在59个应用程序中,只有8个应用程序试图确保收集到的数据的传输安全性。但是,所有这些都至少包含一个加密或SSL滥用。我们的工作暴露了严重的隐私问题,以提高对应用程序用户和开发人员隐私保护的认识。
The purpose of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is to provide improved privacy protection. If an app controls personal data from users, it needs to be compliant with GDPR. However, GDPR lists general rules rather than exact step-by-step guidelines about how to develop an app that fulfills the requirements. Therefore, there may exist GDPR compliance violations in existing apps, which would pose severe privacy threats to app users. In this paper, we take mobile health applications (mHealth apps) as a peephole to examine the status quo of GDPR compliance in Android apps. We first propose an automated system, named \mytool, to bridge the semantic gap between the general rules of GDPR and the app implementations by identifying the data practices declared in the app privacy policy and the data relevant behaviors in the app code. Then, based on \mytool, we detect three kinds of GDPR compliance violations, including the incompleteness of privacy policy, the inconsistency of data collections, and the insecurity of data transmission. We perform an empirical evaluation of 796 mHealth apps. The results reveal that 189 (23.7\%) of them do not provide complete privacy policies. Moreover, 59 apps collect sensitive data through different measures, but 46 (77.9\%) of them contain at least one inconsistent collection behavior. Even worse, among the 59 apps, only 8 apps try to ensure the transmission security of collected data. However, all of them contain at least one encryption or SSL misuse. Our work exposes severe privacy issues to raise awareness of privacy protection for app users and developers.