Shame These Apps - The pitch

Does your flashlight app really need to know your exact location, all of your contacts, and have the ability to send that data anywhere on the internet at a moments notice? Of course not! Shame These Apps will tell you will tell you which apps are good and which ones are sketchy.

Shame These Apps - The fun part

There is clearly some cool computer security work that could be done in this project. For me, the most interesting part is the categorization and determining automatically what the minimal permissions are.

Shame These Apps - The growth potential

If Shame These Apps sold for $1 in each store and it actually gained popularity, it could make a few million dollars a year.

Shame These Apps - The monetization

There would be two sources of revenue. First, Shame These Apps would itself be an app. Second, if there are several ‘good’ apps in a category, then one of them can pay to be ‘promoted.’

Shame These Apps - The idea

Many apps in these app stores are borderline spyware. Most users of these app stores don’t realize what these apps can do with the permissions they have. What’s important is education, and maybe a little shaming.

The solution is to make a database of all of these apps. Each app with be compared with the most similar apps and the minimum necessary permissions will be determined. For the most popular apps, a by-hand approach can be taken.

To determine which apps are actually spyware, android emulators would download the apps with test e-mail addresses and contacts. If the email addresses started getting spam mail, it would be clear who the culprit is. It should also be possible to sniff the traffic coming out of the app to see what’s being sent back to the app’s servers. If the app developer doesn’t use encryption, it should be possible to do statistical analysis of the contents of the packets and see under different emulated conditions if addresses, geo info, and other phone info are harvested.

Though I’m mostly focused on how to find the bad apples, the good ones are also important. For every app category that has competition, the apps that don’t ask for unnecessary permissions would be offered as alternatives to the possibly more popular but scammy apps.

Shame These Apps - The motivation

The Apple AppStore and Google Play have become huge marketplaces for apps, and both are likely to have over one million apps by the end of the year.  Unfortunately, many of those apps ask for permissions that they don’t really need. For example, when I search for “flashlight” in the Play Store, 9 out of the top 10 most popular apps ask for permissions they shouldn’t need including access to my contacts, system properties, internet access, and fine-grain location information.