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Mobile Privacy: Users' Expectations About the Behavior of Mobile Apps

Many tools have been proposed in the literature to analyze the behavior of mobile applications regarding user data collection. However, these tools do not take into consideration the users’ perception of what they think is collected and the purpose of such collection. In this sense, this paper proposes a privacy approach applied to the mobile context that considers the users’ expectations about their data collection and usage on smartphones. This work presents results of an experiment conducted with 163 Android users which goal was to understand the users’ expectations regarding the behavior of mobile apps and how that impacts their subjective feelings. Our results suggest that most users did not know which of their private data were collected by mobile applications and tended to be more comfortable when they were informed beforehand which data a mobile app would need access to and why.