PVDetector: A Detector of Privacy-Policy Violations for Android Apps

Abstract

Many Android apps heavily depend on collecting and sharing sensitive privacy information, such as device ID, location, and postal address, to provide service and value. To protect user privacy, apps are typically required by market places to provide privacy policies informing users about how their private information will be processed. In this paper, we present PVDetector, an automatic tool that analyzes Android apps to detect privacy-policy violations, i.e., inconsistencies between an app’s data collection code and the corresponding description in its privacy policy.