Should I Protect You? Understanding Developers' Behavior to Privacy-Preserving APIs. Jain, S. & Lindqvist, J. In Workshop on Usable Security (USEC), 2014.
Should I Protect You? Understanding Developers' Behavior to Privacy-Preserving APIs [pdf]Website  abstract   bibtex   
There have been many proposals and developments to improve smartphone users' location privacy with respect to mobile applications. These include user-centric application permission models and disclosures. However, little attention has been paid to how application developers could build privacy- preserving apps. In this paper, we present a laboratory study (N=25) to understand developers' behavior to enhanced APIs, which are a privacy-preserving modification of the existing Android Location API. In contrast to the existing methods, the studied API facilitates acquiring coarse location information without accessing the geocoordinates. Our results indicate that by offering a redesigned API, programmers can be nudged into making choices with their programming that help to preserve privacy of their users.

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