About

What is APK Falcon

APK Falcon is a tool intended to assist users in making more informed decisions about mobile app permissions. Apps' privacy is rated using a metric based on permission analysis. Users can search for an Android app and a full privacy report is displayed.

Why APK Falcon

Privacy in mobile apps is related to the access to personal information. Each day, more and more apps are asking for permission to access this information. In many cases, apps are asking for unncesary or too intrusive permissions that don't even need to operate. This puts the user at risk, as you can't really know (without studiyng tedious privacy policies) how your information is being used or who is it being shared with. APK Falcon aims to shed some light into the permission system by informing users about what permissions is an app going to ask for and what is their intrusiveness level.

What can I use APK Falcon for?

This service is not intended to provide an absolute classification, but to provide information to take decissions. All analyses are made in a static way (without running the app), so we cannot know whether the information that an app is asking to access is being used in an adequate way or not. This service is intented to describe an app's intrusiveness, and therefore provide a broad understanding of the information which an app is accessing to. Users can identify potential risks or privacy issues before installing an app in their own devices.

Who may use APK Falcon?

APK Falcon is for everyone! This service is designed to be understood by all users, regardless of their previous knowledge.

How to interpret the report

There are two sections: a graphical section displaying information in a visual way and a detailed report shown bellow. The full functionality can be seen in the image bellow.

How does APK Falcon work?

After the user inputs the name, APK Falcon downloads the app in real-time from various app markets and analyses it in a static way (without executing it), obtaining the permissions it declares and using a metric to provide an overall privacy risk score.

Metric to rate privacy risk

The metric is a result from the privacy engineering research that is being developed at the Computer Science Department from the University of Valladolid, Spain. More information will be provided in the future. However, you can consult its basis in this paper (in Spanish).

Contact

This project has been carried out within the framework of a research study under a scholarship provided by a programme of collaboration between faculty departments and students funded by the Ministry of Education.
For further comments or suggestions regarding the web, please send an email to javier.crespo.guerrero@estudiantes.uva.es.
For comments regarding the metric, please send an email to amador@infor.uva.es.