PriGen: Towards Automated Translation of Android Applications' Code to Privacy Captions

Vijayanta Jain
Sanonda Datta Gupta
Sepideh Ghanavati
Research Challenges in Information Science, Springer International Publishing (2021), pp. 142-151

Abstract

Mobile applications are required to give privacy notices to the users when they collect or share personal information. Creating consistent and concise privacy notices can be a challenging task for developers. Previous work has attempted to help developers create privacy notices through a questionnaire or predefined templates. In this paper, we propose a novel approach and a framework, called PriGen, that extends these prior work. PriGen uses static analysis to identify Android applications’ code segments which process personal information (i.e. permission-requiring code segments) and then leverages a Neural Machine Translation model to translate them into privacy captions. We present the initial analysis of our translation task for ~300,000 code segments.