EasyPrivacy: Context-Aware Resource Usage Control System for Android Platform

With the rapid development of the Android platform, numerous applications (apps) are developed to provide new or enhanced services using resources on mobile devices. On one hand, these apps can bring convenience for users in context which has little privacy risk. On the other hand, misuse of these resources by apps may result in privacy leakage in context which has strict requirements for privacy. Therefore, fine-grained resource usage constraint mechanisms that take the context information into account are in demand. In this paper, we present an enhanced context-aware resource usage control system (EasyPrivacy) in Android to provide adaptive resource usage control automatically when the specific context is detected according to the pre-configured policies. In addition, to facilitate users that have little domain knowledge in Android to configure policies reasonably, we have developed an application named TipsTool, which can guide users to configure policies step by step. The Experimental results show that users can easily protect their privacy on smartphones through this system.