ABSTRACT
The current era of computing has shifted towards smartphones and tablets owing to the increase in storage space and computing power of these portable devices. These innovations in the storage capacity and computing power of smartphones have led towards a new age of application development, that cause millions of free Android applications (apps) to be available on Google Play Store and other Android app stores. These apps attract users because they are free. However, since nothing is free in this world, users may yield their privacy to use these apps. The privacy of users is breached as these applications require the user to give them permission to access their services. The permissions required by the applications are often genuine (such as GPS coordinates needed by Google Maps, etc.), but they also might require unnecessary permissions to gain access to additional users’ information. There exist encryption-based solutions to secure data residing on the smartphone, but it is intensive as regards processing on Android devices. Moreover, these solutions cannot prevent an app from getting data if permission is granted. These issues are taken care of in Android’s upgraded models (Nougat and above), which allows an informed user to withdraw unnecessary permissions. However, the proportions of these types of users are significantly less, and the number of smartphones is also small, that run the Nougat and above, version of Android. Additionally, having withdrawn these permissions, the apps sometimes won’t run or regain the permissions when updates are run. Therefore, the users’ privacies are breached, unknowingly, if they use these apps. So, in this chapter, we will discuss how privacy can be maintained using some additional techniques alongside the ones provided by Google.
