New Research Article: “App vs. Website: Which Best Protects Your Privacy? It Depends”

From Northeastern University:

In par­tic­ular, the team inves­ti­gated the degree to which each plat­form leaks per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able information—ranging from birth­dates and loca­tions to passwords—to the adver­tisers and data ana­lytics com­pa­nies that the ser­vices rely on to help finance their operations.
The answer? “It depends,” says [assistant professor David] Choffnes, a mobile sys­tems expert in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence. “We expected that apps would leak more iden­ti­fiers because apps have more direct access to that infor­ma­tion. And overall that’s true. But we found that typ­i­cally apps leak just one more iden­ti­fier than a web­site for the same ser­vice. In fact, we found that in 40 per­cent of cases web­sites leak more types of infor­ma­tion than apps.”
The researchers will present their find­ings in a paper at the 2016 Internet Mea­sure­ment Con­fer­ence, in Santa Monica, Cal­i­fornia, in November.
The team’s aim is to help users make informed deci­sions about how best to access online ser­vices. To that end, they have inte­grated their find­ings into an easy-​​to-​​use inter­ac­tive web­site that rates the degree of leak­i­ness of 50 free online ser­vices, from Airbnb to Zillow, based on each user’s pri­vacy preferences.

Read the Complete News Article
Direct to Full Text Research/Conference Paper Discussed in Article: Should You Use the App for That?: Comparing the Privacy Implications of App- and Web-based Online Services (8 pages; PDF)

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