| Title | Do partner apps offer the same level of privacy protection? The case of wearable applications |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Authors | Kazlouski, Andrei, Marchioro, Thomas, Manifavas, Harry, Markatos, Evangelos |
| Conference Name | 2021 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops and other Affiliated Events (PerCom Workshops) |
| Keywords | Conferences, data privacy, fitness trackers, Human Behavior, Law, privacy, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, Runtime, Scalability, security, social networking (online), wearable computers, wearable devices, wearables security |
| Abstract | We analyze partner health apps compatible with the Fitbit fitness tracker, and record what third parties they are talking to. We focus on the ten partner Android applications that have more than 50,000 downloads and are fitness-related. Our results show that most of the them contact "unexpected" third parties. Such third parties include social networks; analytics and advertisement services; weather APIs. We also investigate what information is shared by the partner apps with these unexpected entities. Our findings suggest that in many cases personal information of users might be shared, including the phone model; location and SIM carrier; email and connection history. |
| DOI | 10.1109/PerComWorkshops51409.2021.9431018 |
| Citation Key | kazlouski_partner_2021 |
Do partner apps offer the same level of privacy protection? The case of wearable applications