Is Your Surveillance Camera App Watching You? A Privacy Analysis

Nowadays, smartphones are equipped with various sensors collecting a huge amount of sensitive personal information about their users. However, for smartphone users, it remains hidden, and sensit- ive information is accessed by used applications and data requestors. Moreover, governmental institutions have no means to verify if applic- ations requesting sensitive information are compliant with the General Data Protection Directive (GDPR), as it is infeasible to check the tech- nical details and data requested by applications that are on the market. Thus, this research aims to shed light on the compliance analysis of applications with the GDPR. Therefore, a multidimensional analysis is applied to analyzing the permission requests of applications. The use case of security camera applications was chosen, as they access highly sensit- ive personal information. Our results confirm that these apps suffer from serious privacy issues ranging from regulatory compliance issues to in- appropriate design and development strategies that can severely impact users’ privacy.