Current understanding of mobile apps privacy is mostly based on studies conducted in markets with the highest penetration of Internet-connected mobile devices among the general population, such as the US. However, such studies may not represent well the mobile apps privacy situation in the rest of the world. For example, China and India have a lower penetration, but a higher number of mobile Internet users than the US, making them notable markets. To give an idea of how mobile privacy may be differently affected in other countries, we analyze the 100 most popular iOS and Android apps in India and China, and compare them with the US. Key findings from our analysis show that China and India have a worse overall privacy situation than the US, and that China has a worse overall privacy situation than India.
The network traffic we collected with the paper is here. The file name is organized by {country}/{platform}/{app_name}.pcap.
The dataset includes three countries (China, India, US) for both iOS and Android platforms. Each experiment consists of manually interacting with a given app for five minutes and test all the main features. For each app requiring a login, we created a new account using a previously unused email address. The traffic generated to create new accounts is not considered in our analysis.
Our experiments involved one Nexus 5 with Android 6 and one iPhone 5 with iOS 10 for apps in India and the US, one Nexus 5 with Android 6 and one iPhone 5s with iOS 10 for apps in China.
Please see the technical report below for more details.