Comparing privacy control methods for smartphone platforms

Nowadays, many important applications are performed through mobile phones. It is essential to ensure that users´ private information is not leaked through those applications. In this paper, we perform a comparison on privacy control methods implemented on the Android and iOS platforms based on the Bellotti and Sellen´s framework. The comparison helps understand the discrepancies existent between the users´ expectations for privacy and the privacy control methods currently implemented in Android and iOS. To better address users´ privacy concerns, we propose a programming model for platform designers to improve privacy. Our initial study on 60 privacy bugs show that using the proposed programming models, 14 Android and 5 iOS privacy bugs can be eliminated.