Assessing Privacy in Social Media Aggregators

Social Media Aggregator (SMA) applications present a platform enabling users to manage multiple Social Networking Sites (SNS) in one convenient application, which results in a unique concentration of data from several SNS accounts in addition to the user’s mobile phone data available to them. We describe a three-step methodology to assess how privacy is considered in these applications: 1) We inspect the mobile data and social media data; 2) we study any privacy policies and their compliance with respect to distributor’s vetting policies; and 3) we perform a qualitative assessment of traceability between privacy policies and the actual transparency and control mechanisms offered to users by the apps’ interfaces. We then present the results we obtained for 13 popular SMAs from 3 app stores, showing a variation in data accessed by the individual applications, an absence of privacy policies for 5 of the SMAs evaluated, and a lack of traceability between privacy policies and transparency and control of interface operations. After this, we report our experiences using the methodology and the lessons learned, together with potential future work to improve the methodology and its potential to also assess privacy in other mobile applications that also connect with social media.