Yanyan Zhuang,Albert Rafetseder, Yu Hu, Yuan Tian and Justin Cappos
Due to their omnipresence, mobile devices such as smartphones could be tremendously valuable to researchers. However, since research projects can extract data about device owners that could be personal or sensitive, there are substantial privacy concerns. Currently, the only regulation to protect user privacy for research projects is through Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) from researchers’ institutions. However, there is no guarantee that researchers will follow the IRB protocol. Even worse, researchers without security expertise might build apps that are vulnerable to attacks.