Who knows What about us and Why?
Many smartphone apps gather and send sensitive data to third parties around the Internet. The goal of our website is to map out what kind of data is being collected by these apps, where it is being sent, and it is being collected.
What does this website show?
Collecting and Analyzing Data
As a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, we collected network traces from thousands of apps, and analyzed them into categories of data types. In this website we present data visualizations showing “who” collects our data, “what” data they collected, “where” do they send our data to, and “why” the data is being sent.
The most common way for smartphone apps to communicate with cloud servers is through HTTP(S) requests. Therefore, we built a custom VPN to intercept these network traces.
What can you learn about smartphone data?
Data flow of Top 5 Apps that collect the most data
