APK Falcon is a tool intended to help users make better decisions about mobile app permissions. App privacy is ranked using a metric based on permissions analysis. Users can search for an Android app and a full privacy report is displayed.
Privacy in mobile apps is related to access to personal information. More and more apps are asking for permission to access this information. In many cases, apps ask for unnecessary or overly intrusive permissions that they do not even need to function. This puts the user at risk, as they cannot really know (without studying tedious privacy policies) how their information is being used or with whom it is being shared. APK Falcon aims to shed some light on the permissions system by informing users what permissions an app is going to ask for and what its level of intrusiveness is.
This service is not intended to provide an absolute ranking, but to provide information for decision making. All analyses are performed statically (without running the app), so we cannot know if the information an app is requesting access to is being used properly or not. The objective of this service is to describe the intrusiveness of an application and therefore provide a broad understanding of the information an application is accessing. Users can identify potential risks or privacy issues before installing an application on their devices.
The metric is the result of privacy engineering research being developed in the Department of Computer Engineering at the University of Valladolid, Spain. More information will be provided in the future. However, you can consult its basis in this paper.