Abstract – In the past years we have experienced a fast
growth in the demand and widespread of mobile devices.
The evolution of wireless network technologies has
offered mobile devices direct access to Internet and so,
now, many applications allow users to interact with their
friends on social-networks, send emails, use internetbanking
services and more, while on the move. Because
of that, and the advance in hardware capabilities, end
users are increasingly relying on their personal mobile
devices to store and handle sensitive information. In
such context the privacy issues are quite concerning,
since is likely for vendors to access sensitive data
through their custom apps. Although several studies
have examined general privacy risks and solutions to
monitor, block or shadow personal data, few attempts
have been made to build a framework that profiles the
privacy impact of Android mobile applications at
installation time and afterwards. Hence, in this paper,
we propose an Android system extension that can expose
to users a series of information about the previous
concerns. We start by generating a high-level profile of
the application at installation time (short-term) and then
gather insights about it by monitoring sensitive data
flows during runtime (long-term). The result: users will
get the privacy impact knowledge needed in order to
make informed decisions on whether or not to install or
keep using an Android application.