Introducing Privacy in Screen Event Frequency Analysis for Android Apps

Mobile apps often use analytics infrastructures provided by companies such as Google and Facebook to gather extensive fine-grained data about app performance and user behaviors. It is important to understand and enforce suitable trade-offs between the benefits of such data gathering (for app developers) and the corresponding privacy loss (for app users). Our work focuses on screen event frequency analysis, which is one of the most popular forms of data gathering in mobile app analytics. We propose a privacy-preserving version of such analysis using differential privacy (DP), a popular principled approach for creating privacy-preserving analyses. We describe how DP can be introduced in screen event frequency analysis for mobile apps, and demonstrate an instance of this approach for Android apps and the Google Analytics framework. Our work develops the automated app code analysis, code rewriting, and run-time processing needed to deploy the proposed DP solution. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that high accuracy and practical cost can be achieved by the developed privacy-preserving screen event frequency analysis.