Visualizing Privacy-Relevant Data Flows in Android Applications

Abstract: Android applications collecting data from users must protect it according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since in 2018 the European Union rolled out the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Since app developers are not legal experts, they find it difficult to integrate privacy-aware practices into source code development. Despite these legal obligations, developers have limited tool support to reason about data protection throughout their app development process. This paper explores the use of static program slicing and software visualization to analyze privacy-relevant data flows in Android apps. We introduce SliceViz, a web tool that analyzes an Android app by slicing all privacy-relevant data sources detected in the source code on the back-end. It then helps developers by visualizing these privacy-relevant program slices. We conducted a user study with 12 participants demonstrating that SliceViz effectively aids developers in identifying privacy-relevant properties in Android apps. Our findings indicate that program slicing can be employed to identify and reason about privacy-relevant data flows in Android applications. With further usability improvements, developers can be better equipped to handle privacy-sensitive information.