[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/ skip to main content
10.1145/2646584.2646587acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmobicomConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Your installed apps reveal your gender and more!

Published: 11 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we highlight a potential privacy threat in the current smartphone platforms, which allows any third party to collect a snapshot of installed applications without the user's consent. This can be exploited by third parties to infer various user attributes similar to what is done through tracking. We show that using only installed apps, user's gender, a demographic attribute that is frequently used in targeted advertising, can be instantly predicted with an accuracy around 70%, by training a classifier using established supervised learning techniques.

References

[1]
Amazon mechanical turk. https://www.mturk.com/.
[2]
Application info: Android Developers. http://developer.android.com, 2013.
[3]
Language Detection API. http://detectlanguage.com, 2013.
[4]
D. Amitay. iOS App Detection. http://www.ihasapp.com, 2012.
[5]
B. Bi, M. Shokouhi, M. Kosinski, and T. Graepel. Inferring the demographics of search users: social data meets search queries. In Proc. of the 22nd WWW. ACM, 2013.
[6]
D. Bolton. Why I stopped playing Candy Crush Saga. http://news.dice.com, 2013.
[7]
A. Chaabane, G. Acs, M. A. Kaafar, et al. You are what you like! information leakage through users' interests. In Proc. of the 19th NDSS. The Internet Society, 2012.
[8]
A. Cocotas. Android grabs a record share of the global smartphone market. http://au.businessinsider.com, 2013.
[9]
C. Cortes and V. Vapnik. Support-vector networks. Machine Learning, 20(3), 1995.
[10]
S. Fiegerman. Apple's App Store tops 1 million apps. http://mashable.com, 2013.
[11]
S. Goel, J. M. Hofman, and M. I. Sirer. Who does what on the web: A large-scale study of browsing behavior. In Proc. of the 6th ICWSM, 2012.
[12]
M. Grace, W. Zhou, X. Jiang, and A. Sadeghi. Unsafe exposure analysis of mobile in-app advertisements. In Proc. of the 5th WiSec, pages 101--112. ACM, 2012.
[13]
M. Hall, E. Frank, G. Holmes, B. Pfahringer, P. Reutemann, and I. H. Witten. The WEKA data mining software: an update. SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 11(1):10--18, 2009.
[14]
J. Hu, H. Zeng, H. Li, C. Niu, and Z. Chen. Demographic prediction based on user's browsing behavior. In Proc. of the 16th WWW, 2007.
[15]
M. Kosinski, D. Stillwell, and T. Graepel. Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proc. of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(15):5802--5805, 2013.
[16]
R. M. Martey, J. Stromer-Galley, J. Banks, J. Wu, and M. Consalvo. The strategic female: gender-switching and player behavior in online games. Information, Communication & Society, pages 1--15, 2014.
[17]
eMarketer Inc. Driven by Facebook and Google, mobile ad market soars 105% in 2013. http://www.emarketer.com, 2014.
[18]
Ericsson Inc. Ericsson Mobility Report. http://www.ericsson.com, 2013.
[19]
M. Meeker. Internet Trends 2014. http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends, 2014.
[20]
A. Mukherjee and B. Liu. Improving gender classification of blog authors. In Proc. of the 7th EMNLP, pages 207--217. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010.
[21]
J. Otterbacher. Inferring gender of movie reviewers: exploiting writing style, content and metadata. In Proc. of the 19th CKIM. ACM, 2010.
[22]
J. W. Pennebaker, M. E. Francis, and R. J. Booth. Linguistic inquiry and word count: Liwc 2001. Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 71, 2001.
[23]
J. Schler, M. Koppel, S. Argamon, and J. W. Pennebaker. Effects of age and gender on blogging. In AAAI Spring Symposium: Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs, pages 199--205, 2006.
[24]
H. A. Schwartz, J. C. Eichstaedt, M. L. Kern, L. Dziurzynski, S. M. Ramones, M. Agrawal, A. Shah, M. Kosinski, D. Stillwell, M. E. Seligman, et al. Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: The open-vocabulary approach. PloS one, 8(9), 2013.
[25]
S. Seneviratne. Apptronomy: You are what your apps are. https://play.google.com/store/apps/, 2013.
[26]
S. Seneviratne, A. Seneviratne, P. Mohapatra, and A. Mahanti. Predicting user traits from a snapshot of apps installed on a smartphone. To appear in Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 2014.
[27]
K. Wagstaff. Men are from Google+, women are from Pinterest. http://techland.time.com, 2012.
[28]
C. Warren. Google Play hits 1 million apps. http://mashable.com, 2013.
[29]
J. Yan, N. Liu, G. Wang, W. Zhang, Y. Jiang, and Z. Chen. How much can behavioral targeting help online advertising? In Proc. of the 18th WWW, pages 261--270. ACM, 2009.
[30]
Y. Yang and J. O. Pedersen. A comparative study on feature selection in text categorization. In ICML, volume 97, pages 412--420, 1997.
[31]
J. J. Ying, Y. Chang, C. Huang, and V. S. Tseng. Demographic prediction based on users mobile behaviors. In Proc. of the MDC. Nokia, 2012.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Which Store Should I Choose? A Comparative Study of Third-Party Mobile App Store Based on Quality EvaluationAdvanced Data Mining and Applications10.1007/978-981-96-0811-9_24(345-360)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2024
  • (2022)Exploring Unique App Signature of the Depressed and Non-depressed Through Their Fingerprints on AppsPervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare10.1007/978-3-030-99194-4_15(218-239)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2022
  • (2019)You Are Not Acting Like Yourself: A Study on Soft Biometric Classification, Person Identification, and Mobile Device UseIEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science10.1109/TBIOM.2019.29058681:2(109-122)Online publication date: Apr-2019
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Your installed apps reveal your gender and more!
        Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image ACM Conferences
        SPME '14: Proceedings of the ACM MobiCom workshop on Security and privacy in mobile environments
        September 2014
        48 pages
        ISBN:9781450330756
        DOI:10.1145/2646584
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

        Sponsors

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 11 September 2014

        Permissions

        Request permissions for this article.

        Check for updates

        Author Tags

        1. apps
        2. inference attacks
        3. privacy
        4. smartphones
        5. user traits

        Qualifiers

        • Research-article

        Conference

        MobiCom'14
        Sponsor:

        Acceptance Rates

        SPME '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 7 of 12 submissions, 58%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 7 of 12 submissions, 58%

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • Downloads (Last 12 months)1
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
        Reflects downloads up to 23 Jan 2025

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        Cited By

        View all
        • (2024)Which Store Should I Choose? A Comparative Study of Third-Party Mobile App Store Based on Quality EvaluationAdvanced Data Mining and Applications10.1007/978-981-96-0811-9_24(345-360)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2024
        • (2022)Exploring Unique App Signature of the Depressed and Non-depressed Through Their Fingerprints on AppsPervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare10.1007/978-3-030-99194-4_15(218-239)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2022
        • (2019)You Are Not Acting Like Yourself: A Study on Soft Biometric Classification, Person Identification, and Mobile Device UseIEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science10.1109/TBIOM.2019.29058681:2(109-122)Online publication date: Apr-2019
        • (2018)Understanding the predictability of user demographics from cyber-physical-social behaviours in indoor retail spacesEPJ Data Science10.1140/epjds/s13688-017-0128-27:1Online publication date: 3-Jan-2018
        • (2018)On the Use of Mobile Calling Patterns for Soft Biometric Classification2018 IEEE 9th International Conference on Biometrics Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS)10.1109/BTAS.2018.8698591(1-6)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2018
        • (2018)Your WiFi is leakingFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2016.05.03080:C(546-557)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018
        • (2018)Privacy-Preserved Prediction for Mobile Application AdoptionCloud Computing and Security10.1007/978-3-030-00012-7_17(184-194)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2018
        • (2017)What installed mobile applications tell about their owners and how they affect users download behaviorTelematics and Informatics10.1016/j.tele.2017.05.00534:7(1153-1165)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2017
        • (2016)Impact of Individual Differences on the Use of Mobile Phones and ApplicationsMobile Web and Intelligent Information Systems10.1007/978-3-319-44215-0_32(379-392)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2016
        • (2015)Noise reduction of mobile sensors data in the prediction of demographic attributesProceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.5555/2825041.2825062(117-120)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
        • Show More Cited By

        View Options

        Login options

        View options

        PDF

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader

        Media

        Figures

        Other

        Tables

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media