At the end of September, members of the IngPriv Group attended the 30th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2025) to present their work PIM: A Metric to Empower Mobile App Users in Privacy Management, as part of the MIST workshop.
This research was presented by Amador Aparicio and Alejandro Pérez de la Fuente and was prepared in collaboration with M. Mercedes Martínez González and Pablo Abel Criado Lozano.
The Privacy Impact Metric (PIM) proposal emerges in response to an increasingly evident problem: mobile app users grant permissions without knowing the true impact these decisions have on their privacy. Given the lack of comprehensible and quantitative tools, this metric aims to take a step forward in transparency and control.
What does PIM offer?
- A quantitative way to measure how permissions affect privacy.
- The ability to compare applications and anticipate risks before installing or using them.
- Simulating the granting or revocation of permissions, immediately showing how the impact on privacy varies.
- An innovative classification of permissions, obtained directly from the Android code, which provides a transparent framework where Google does not provide official documentation.
In this way, PIM contributes to research in the field of privacy in mobile applications and also provides users with the ability to make decisions about their digital privacy.