Section: Software and Platforms

Mobilitics

Mobilitics is a joint project, started in 2012 between Inria and CNIL, which targets privacy issues on smartphones. The goal is to analyze the behavior of smartphones applications and their operating system regarding users private data, that is, the time they are accessed or sent to third party companies usually neither with user's awareness nor consent.

In the presence of a wide range of different smartphones available in terms of operating systems and hardware architecture, Mobilitics project focuses actually its study on the two more widespread mobile platforms which are IOS(Iphone) and Android.

Indeed, both versions of Mobilitics software should provide these common requirements: Be able to capture any event about private data access such as User location, Device Unique Identifier, Address Book… Store these events in a local database on the phone for offline analysis Send this local database to Mobilitics server for privacy leakage statistics

A Mobilitics prototype for Iphone has been developed since January 2012 at Privatics. It has already embedded the features listed above and much more. However, a separate prototype for Android has been also developed since September 2012 fulfilling the same equirements listed above because IOS and Android are different in either software or hardware level.

Indeed, some live experiments have been conducted by CNIL with Mobilitics prototype for IOS with the help of volunteers equipped with iphones which they have used for a period of four(4) months(September 2012-January 2013). As a result, some visualization tools have been developed for the data collected in order to showcase private data leakage by the apps which the participants of the experiment have used. Therefore, a press conference has been held by CNIL in Paris in April 2013 during which Mobilitics results for Iphone have been published onto several French newspapers (see Section  9.3 )

Likewise, some live experiments will be conducted on Android this year in February 2014 for at least three(3) months with volunteers equipped with Galaxy Nexus smartphones on which Mobilitics will be deployed. As a consequence, a press release by CNIL will be scheduled for the publication of the results obtained for Android with a perspective of comparing Google privacy policy to Apple one.