APK Falcon

APK Falcon is a tool designed to help users make better decisions about mobile app permissions. App privacy is ranked using a metric based on permission analysis. Users can search for an Android app and receive a comprehensive privacy report.

Mobile app privacy is related to access to personal information. Every day, more and more apps request permission to access this information. In many cases, apps request unnecessary or overly intrusive permissions that they don't even need to function. This puts users at risk, as they can't truly know (without wading through tedious privacy policies) how their information is being used or with whom it's being shared. APK Falcon aims to shed some light on the permissions system by informing users about what permissions an app will request and how intrusive they are.

This service doesn't aim to provide an absolute ranking, but rather to offer information to help users make informed decisions. All analyses are performed statically (without running the app), so we can't determine whether the information an app requests access to is being used appropriately or not. The objective of this service is to describe the degree of intrusion of an application and, therefore, provide comprehensive knowledge of the information an application accesses. Users can identify potential risks or privacy issues before installing an application on their devices.

This metric is the result of privacy engineering research being conducted at the Department of Computer Engineering at the University of Valladolid, Spain.

This work is part of the activities of the Strategic Cybersecurity Project App-PI (App Privacy Impact): An ecosystem for evaluating the impact of mobile apps on the privacy and security of their users (C120.23_UVa). This project is carried out under a collaboration agreement between the University of Valladolid and the Spanish National Cybersecurity Institute (Instituto Nacional de Ciberseguridad de España M.P., S.A.) for the promotion of strategic cybersecurity projects in Spain, within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan funds, financed by the European Union (Next Generation EU).