US university develops Android privacy app for permission management

Carnegie Mellon University has developed an app that recommends specific application permissions based on users’ privacy preferences. This is to enable more effective control of app permissions.

The application, called Privacy Assistant, goes through a short questionnaire with the user after installation. This makes an inventory of whether the user is, for example, okay with a social media app having access to the camera, or whether a banking app is allowed to know the user’s location. After mapping out exactly what the user wants in terms of privacy, a list of recommendations is compiled. The user can immediately apply all recommendations. Therefore root is required; these are system settings. Even after the first set-up, during daily use, Privacy Assistant comes with recommendations if necessary.

According to The Verge, the application scans the source code of the installed applications to determine whether permission is required for the app to function or whether it is being used for purposes such as analytics or advertising.

During rounds of testing, it was found that 78 percent of users adopted the app’s recommendations. That may not show that the recommendations hold true, but it does show that users both have a need for stronger permissions control and would like help with that.

The developer, Professor Norman Sadeh, tells The Verge that he wants the app to do the heavy lifting for the user and that “there’s no reason why users have to specify their preferences again and again.” Sadeh also researched privacy settings on smartphones in 2014 in collaboration with Berkeley University.