Privacy in Mobile Devices

Abstract

The mobile ecosystem is a collection of network operators, application developers, users, law makers, and associated technologies and policies. This collection provides the most prominent personal computing environment of the day. As application designers continue to innovate in this ecosystem, users are becoming more and more tempted to provide service providers access to their personal data. This chapter provides an overview of data collection, data leakage and data interception methods in mobile devices that make the user’s personal data susceptible to unwanted access. This brings forth the issue of privacy of the user whose private data is now open for analysis by unknown individuals, businesses with which the user has no trust relationship, and the prying eyes of monitoring agencies. It is hoped that awareness efforts and novel technologies will help eliminate the issue. We discuss how mobile application developers can follow best practices to control personal data collection, the options that users have to control how applications access their data, and novel privacy preserving architectures for mobile applications. Nonetheless, the challenges ahead of us are overwhelming, and call for another collective endeavor to prevent the mobile device from transforming into the tool that dissolved all notions of privacy in modern society.