A Conceptual Framework for Improving Privacy in Mobile Operating Systems

Nowadays, smartphones have become low-priced, comfortable, easy to use and can provide almost all human desirable features through mobile applications. While using a mobile application, it may have access to some user data or resources. If the application is able to share data using mobile resources, it can be a serious concern for the end-users regarding privacy and security. Especially in Android, it may not be possible to detect if any software is uploading or sharing user data to the server without the approval of the user. Though a few apps exist to monitor user privacy and data sharing, these (monitoring) app itself has a chance to be dangerous for misusing user data as it must require access to sensitive data and accessories. Therefore, the objective of this research is to study and analyze the mobile data flow, resource sharing and mobile OS security, and to propose a conceptual framework to preserve user data and resource safety for improving user privacy. The proposed framework is also theoretically validated through an example case study.