Beacon Alarming: Informed decision-making supporter and privacy risk analyser in Smartphone applications

Abstract: We are currently confronting with a large number of Smartphone applications, which are developed for different purposes that on the one hand, may benefit users by easing many of their daily tasks, while on the other hand, may threaten their privacy. An important issue regarding this situation is that, smartphone users are often unaware of the privacy risks or even of the data collected by applications running on their devices. For this reason, it is an essential need to make the users aware of the potential misuses as well as the associated privacy risk consequences. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called Beacon Alarming. Beacon alarming is introduced as a monitoring and permission manager framework to enhance the users awareness of data gathered by their installed applications. We further expand the functionality of our proposed beacon alarming system by employing fuzzy logic in order to assess the privacy risk score of each of the installed applications taking into consideration the information obtained from beacon alarming module. Accordingly, this innovative method enables users to make more logical and informed decisions.