Raising awareness on smartphone privacy issues with SASQUATCH, and solving them with PrivacyPolice

Abstract

Smartphones leak personal information about their owner when they use it to connect to the Internet. Despite recent coverage of these issues in popular media, raising awareness remains problematic since it remains largely invisible to the users. We designed a system, SASQUATCH, consisting of a network scanner and a public display, to draw the visitor's attention and inform them about these issues. SASQUATCH first gathers private information about previous whereabouts, and then shows an anonymized version of this data on the public display to draw the visitor's attention. Next, SASQUATCH offers an interactive component that allows people to view the information their own smartphone is leaking in private, and then provides solutions (including a fully-automated smartphone application) for securing against future privacy leaks. A set of initial field trails has shown that SASQUATCH is highly effective in raising awareness.