Do Privacy Policies Match with the Logs? An Empirical Study of Privacy Disclosure in Android Application Logs
Privacy policies are intended to inform users about how software systems collect and handle data, yet they often remain vague or incomplete. This paper presents an empirical study of patterns in log-related statements within privacy policies and their alignment with privacy disclosures observed in Android application logs.
We analyzed 1,000 Android apps across multiple categories, generating 86,836,964 log entries. Our findings reveal that while most applications (88.0%) provide privacy policies, only 28.5% explicitly mention logging practices. Among those that reference logging, most clearly describe what information is logged; however, 27.7% of log-related statements remain overly simplistic or vague, offering limited insight into actual data collection. We further observed widespread privacy leakages in application logs, with 67.6% of apps leaking sensitive information not mentioned in their policies. Alarmingly, only 0.4% of applications demonstrated consistent alignment between declared policy contents and actual logged data. These findings highlight that current privacy policies provide incomplete or ambiguous descriptions of logging practices, which frequently do not align with actual logging behaviors.
Wed 10 JunDisplayed time zone: London change
13:30 - 15:00 | Security 2Research Papers / AI Models / Data at JMS 745 Chair(s): Minhaz Zibran Idaho State University | ||
13:30 15mTalk | Reassessing Dataset Quality and Fine-Tuning Practices for Vulnerability Detection on PrimeVul dataset AI Models / Data Norbert Szolnoki Sándor Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged, Gabor Antal Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged | ||
13:45 15mTalk | A Neuro-Symbolic Risk Calculus for Quantifying Security Posture in Microservice Systems Research Papers | ||
14:00 15mTalk | Insights into Security-Related AI-Generated Pull Requests Research Papers Md Fazle Rabbi Idaho State University, Asif Kamal Turzo University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Arifa Islam Champa Idaho State University, Minhaz Zibran Idaho State University Pre-print | ||
14:15 15mTalk | Do Privacy Policies Match with the Logs? An Empirical Study of Privacy Disclosure in Android Application Logs Research Papers Zhiyuan Chen Rochester Institute of Technology, Love Jayesh Ahir Rochester Institute of Technology, Ahmad Suleiman Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Kundi Yao Ontario Tech University, Yiming Tang Rochester Institute of Technology, Weiyi Shang University of Waterloo, Daqing Hou pc Pre-print | ||