Several members of the Privacy Engineering Research Group (IngPriv) at the School of Computer Engineering of the University of Valladolid participated in the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI 2025) at the end of November to present their pre-doctoral research work in the field of privacy assessment in mobile applications.
Specifically, Alejandro Pérez de la Fuente presented his doctoral thesis entitled ‘Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence for Privacy Assessment in the Internet of Everything (IoE)’, developed in collaboration with Mercedes Martínez González. This research proposes an innovative approach that combines ontologies and artificial intelligence techniques to improve privacy audit processes in the Internet of Everything. The work is based on the App-PIMD repository, which collects metadata from more than 13,000 mobile applications, with the aim of guaranteeing data quality, detecting conflicts and enabling developers to build reliable and reusable PET (Privacy Enhancing Technologies) tools.
For his part, Pablo Abel Criado Lozano presented his doctoral research entitled ‘Real privacy impact of mobile applications: checks through static analysis’, also developed together with Mercedes Martínez González. This work focuses on the static analysis of the code and metadata of mobile applications to identify discrepancies between the actual technical behaviour of an app and the information communicated to the user in its privacy policies. The proposed method makes it possible to detect real privacy risks, assess compliance with the duty to inform, and improve transparency in the processing of personal data, providing a systematic and automatable approach for both developers and advanced users.
You can view part of Pablo Abel Criado Lozano’s presentation in the video available on our YouTube channel.