Access to Personal Data is Still Tempting for Mobile Apps Even after the GDPR Implementation

Mobile phones have become a vital part of our daily lives with users relying on them for a variety of activities. Users don't hesitate to provide their personal data to free or paid mobile applications, in order to use them with no interruption. However, the amount of personal data being exchanged has raised concerns, resulting in the introduction of regulations for protecting personal data at many countries. A regulation in this direction that was enacted in Europe is the General Data Protection Regulation known as GDPR that came into effect in May 2018. This study examines the impact of GDPR on Google Play applications by comparing a dataset of metrics collected in 2017 to a post-GDPR dataset gathered in 2022. The focus of this research is to analyze the effect of GDPR on mobile app usage and its associated metrics by comparing the datasets of the two above periods. Our analysis shows that progress has been made towards achieving GDPR compliance, but there is still a considerable distance to be covered before reaching full compliance. A key observation is that the number of permissions used by apps has not been reduced even after the GDPR implementation.