Identifying Organizations Receiving Personal Data in Android Apps

Many studies have demonstrated that mobile applications are common means to collect massive amounts of personal data. This goes unnoticed by most users, who are also unaware that many different organizations are receiving this data, even from multiple apps in parallel. This paper assesses different techniques to identify the organizations that are receiving personal data flows in the Android ecosystem, namely the WHOIS service, SSL certificates inspection, and privacy policy textual analysis. Based on our findings, we propose a fully automated method that combines the most successful techniques, achieving a 94.73% precision score in identifying the recipient organization. We further demonstrate our method by evaluating 1,000 Android apps and exposing the corporations that collect the users' personal data.