Mobile apps and data privacy: when the service is free, the product is your data

The mobile phone, especially in its latest incarnation "the smartphone", has become an everyday necessity to billions of users around the globe. Frequent use has rendered the smartphone a vault where valuable sensitive information is stored. On the other hand, mobile applications try to exploit this loophole by gaining access to data and consequently providing them to other stakeholders in the Internet economy value chain. The paper examines the extent of access to personal information required by mobile applications. More specifically, the most popular free mobile apps offered in Google Play store are analyzed in terms of the relation between the required phone data access and several other app related metrics. Our analysis shows that applications overly extend their reach on mobile users' personal data based on the fact that most users are not sufficiently aware that their privacy is compromised via the phone and thus has to be protected.