Privacy Risks in GPS Navigation Apps
A Case Study of Intra-library Privacy Issues on Android GPS Navigation Apps
The tremendous increase in applications with anextensive api that includes access to phone hardware, settings, and user data raises concerns regarding users privacy, as the information collected from the apps could be used for profiling purposes.In this respect, this paper focuses on the geolocation data and analyses five gps applications to identify the privacy risks if no appropriate safeguards are present.Our results show that gps navigation apps have access to several types of device data, while they mayallow for personal data leakage towards third parties such as library providers or tracking services without providing adequate or precise information to the users.Moreover, as they are using third-party libraries, they suffer from the intra-library collusion issue, that could be exploited from advertising andanalytics companies through apps and gather large amount of personal information without the explicit consent of the user.
