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Is Your Surveillance Camera App Watching You? A Privacy Analysis

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Intelligent Computing (SAI 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 739))

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Abstract

Nowadays, smartphones are equipped with various sensors collecting a huge amount of sensitive personal information about their users. However, for smartphone users, it remains hidden, and sensitive information is accessed by used applications and data requestors. Moreover, governmental institutions have no means to verify if applications requesting sensitive information are compliant with the General Data Protection Directive (GDPR), as it is infeasible to check the technical details and data requested by applications that are on the market. Thus, this research aims to shed light on the compliance analysis of applications with the GDPR. Therefore, a multidimensional analysis is applied to analyzing the permission requests of applications. The use case of security camera applications was chosen, as they access highly sensitive personal information. Our results confirm that these apps suffer from serious privacy issues ranging from regulatory compliance issues to inappropriate design and development strategies that can severely impact users’ privacy.

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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Majid Hatamian for his great support and guidance throughout all the different steps of the experiments.

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Correspondence to Vera Schmitt .

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Schmitt, V., Nicholson, J., Möller, S. (2023). Is Your Surveillance Camera App Watching You? A Privacy Analysis. In: Arai, K. (eds) Intelligent Computing. SAI 2023. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 739. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37963-5_93

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