On a (Per)Mission
Hannah Quay-de la Vallee, Paige Selby, Shriram Krishnamurthi · 2016
App-based systems are typically supported by marketplaces that provide easy discovery and installation of third-party apps. To mitigate risks to user privacy, many app systems use permissions to control apps' access to user data. It then falls to users to decide which apps to install and how to manage their permissions, which many users lack the expertise to do in a meaningful way. Marketplaces are ideally positioned to inform users about privacy, but they do not take advantage of this. This lack of privacy guidance makes it difficult for users to make informed privacy decisions. We present both an app marketplace and a permission management assistant that incorporate privacy information as a key element, in the form of permission ratings. We discuss gathering this rating information from both human and automated sources, presenting the ratings in a way that users can understand, and using this information to promote privacy-respecting apps and help users manage permissions.