Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

In 2014, Jagdish Prasad Achara, Mathieu Cunche and Vincent Roca published with Aurelien Francillon from Eurecom a study on the Wi-Fi permissions used by mobile applications and their privacy implications. Two years after our research was published, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached a $950,000 settlement with InMobi for tracking millions of consumers’ locations, including children, without their knowledge. The FTC allege that InMobi abused the WiFi State information on the Android system to track the location of people without their consent, which is exactly what we showed in our research. Its policy prevents the FTC of releasing the sources of its investigations, therefore there is no way to affirm that our research triggered this investigation or was used during this investigation. We can only be sure that we identified a privacy issue that was serious enough to justify an investigation of the FTC and a penalty of $950,000. In addition to this, the company is under surveillance for their privacy behaviour for the next 20 years.

Awards

The software MyTrackingChoices designed by Claude Castellucia and Jagdish Prasad Achara from Privatics in collaboration with Javier Parra (former member of Privatics and now at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya) was awarded 'Data protection by design' award by the Catalan Data Protection Authority.