Evaluation of the adoption and privacy risks of google prompts

Abstract

Internet services struggle with implementing better techniques for making authentication easier for the end-user by balancing those traits without sacrificing their security or privacy. One very recent such technology is Google Prompts, where users can authenticate by merely tapping a prompt to their mobile phone. In this paper, we attempt to understand how Google Prompts work and the extent to which current users adopt them. To this end, we build a collection system for estimating, using a completely transparent methodology, the fraction of users that have enabled Google Prompts in their accounts. Our collection system can infer the adoption of Google Prompts in the wild. Most importantly, we can use the system for performing a preliminary study of the privacy implications of Google Prompts.