MOBILESoft 2022
Tue 17 - Wed 18 May 2022
co-located with ICSE 2022

Privacy labels provide an easy and recognizable overview of data collection practices adopted by mobile apps developers. Specifically, on the Apple App Store, privacy labels are displayed on each mobile app’s page and summarize what data is collected by the app, how it is used, and for what purposes it is needed. Starting from the release of iOS version 14.3 developers are required to provide privacy labels for their applications. We conducted a large-scale empirical study, collecting and analyzing the privacy labels of 17, 312 apps published on the App Store, to understand and characterize how sensitive data is collected and shared. The results of our analysis highlight important criticalities about the collection and sharing of personal data for tracking purposes. In particular, on average free applications collect more sensitive data, the majority of data is collected in an unanonimyzed form, and a wide range of sensitive information are collected for tracking purposes. The analysis provides also evidence to support the decision-making of users, platform maintainers, and regulators. Furthermore, we repeated the data collection and analysis after seven months, following the introduction of additional run-time tracking controls by Apple. Comparing the two datasets, we observed that the newly introduced measures resulted in a statistically significant decrease in the number of apps that collect data for tracking purposes. At the same time, we observed a growth in overall data collection.

Wed 18 May

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

10:00 - 11:30
Session 5: Mobile App Qualit and Third-party Software + ClosingTechnical Papers / Plenary / Student Research Competition / Tool Demos and Mobile Apps at MOBILESoft room
Chair(s): Leonardo Mariani University of Milano-Bicocca, Ali Ouni ETS Montreal, University of Quebec
10:00
13m
Paper
SwiftDependencyChecker: Detecting Vulnerable Dependencies Declared Through CocoaPods, Carthage and Swift PM
Tool Demos and Mobile Apps
Kristiina Rahkema University of Tartu, Dietmar Pfahl University of Tartu
Pre-print Media Attached
10:13
8m
Paper
Mobile GUI test script generation from natural language descriptions using pre-trained model
Student Research Competition
Chun Li Nanjing University
10:21
20m
Paper
An empirical study of privacy labels on the Apple iOS mobile app store
Technical Papers
Gian Luca Scoccia University of L'Aquila, Marco Autili University of L'Aquila, Italy, Giovanni Stilo , Paola Inverardi University of L'Aquila
Pre-print
10:41
20m
Paper
Adoption of Third-party Libraries in Mobile Apps: A Case Study on Open-source Android Applications
Technical Papers
Aidan Polese , Yuan Tian Queens University, Kingston, Canada, Safwat Hassan Thompson Rivers University
Pre-print
11:01
19m
Other
Breakout rooms with the authors
Plenary

11:20
10m
Day closing
MOBILESoft Closing
Plenary
Leonardo Mariani University of Milano-Bicocca, Gemma Catolino Tilburg University & ​Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, Mei Nagappan University of Waterloo

Information for Participants