Reengineering the user: Privacy concerns about personal data on smartphones

Smart mobile devices carry an enormous amount of sensitive personal data of their owners. The access to this data by mobile operating systems and mobile applications is regulated by a corresponding security and permissions framework. In this paper we discuss the privacy and security concerns that have risen from the permissions model in the Android operating system, along with two shortcomings that have not yet been addressed up to date. We focus on personal data and propose a smartphone data taxonomy as a tool to highlight these concerns. Additionally, we study the impact of the applications’ evolutionary increment of permission requests from both the user’s and the developer’s point of view and finally, we propose a series of remedies to the privacy and security corrosion.