During the JNIC 2025, held in Zaragoza from 4 to 6 June, Pablo Abel Criado Lozano, member of the Privacy Engineering Group (IngPriv) of the School of Computer Engineering of the University of Valladolid, presented the paper entitled:
The mirage of transparency: Discrepancies in privacy statements in mobile apps.
Many apps claim to collect certain data for specific purposes, but do they really deliver? Pablo Abel presented a PET (Privacy-Enhancing Technology) tool designed to check whether there is consistency between what an app claims to do with your data and what it actually does.
This PET tool performs a combined analysis of:
– The privacy policy of the application.
– The permissions it requests from the operating system.
– And the technical analysis of its actual behaviour during execution.
In this way, the tool can detect discrepancies and check whether the data an app collects is in line (or not) with what it claims.
The results of this work show that there is not always consistency: some apps collect more data than they should or do not clearly explain how they use it.
With this tool:
–Users can have a more transparent view of what happens to their information.
–Developers can assess whether their apps comply with privacy principles.
–Regulatory compliance and respect for digital rights is easier.