An Entropy-based Method for Social Apps Privacy Assessment Using the Android Permissions Architecture
Andrei Șandor, Eduard Simion · Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering · 2022
Android social applications tend to be more and more popular as smartphones became very important devices for most people. Social applications increase smartphone’s functionalities, enabling them with most of the features available on computers. However, the use of smartphone social applications introduces users a series of vulnerabilities and risks on privacy and data protection. We aim to increase awareness on this field and propose a method to make privacy assessments and offering insights on the security and privacy level of an app before installing it. This article has the purpose to offer a solution for this type of assessment, using information entropy. The concept, widely operated in information science, will be used in this paper to evaluate social applications from the perspective of the Android operating system permission-based architecture. Using calculations of the entropy, social applications can be evaluated as safe or dangerous from a privacy and data protection point of view.