A Profile-Based Privacy Protection Method using Sandbox Environment and k-Anonymity: Computer Data Privacy

Android apps request excessive permissions to get the access of sensitive information, some apps request excessive permissions which creates a seriously threat to the user privacy and security. This research is based on profile-based privacy protection method for Android apps which integrate principle of sandboxing and data masking techniques. User can manage multiple profiles for different purpose as per requirement. Each profile has assigned a set of rules, permissions and data. They don't share data with other profiles. Sandbox environment help in keeping the each profile isolated from each other. To protect the data of each user, masking of data has been done using
$k$
anonymity. The proposed method has been assessed with different app categories and for different user profiles. The results shows that the method can effectively protect users' privacy and data, while introducing acceptable performance overhead.