| Protect My Privacy (PMP) lets you protect the personal information on your iPhone. It provides a layer of security between apps and the operating system, thereby giving the control back to the user. When an app attempts to access any protected information, an alert is shown and you have the option to “Protect” or “Allow”. The software is unique in that rather than merely blocking access to the information, which could cause the app to have unexpected behaviour or even crash, PMP instead supplies fake replacement information, such as randomized contact names, or a location specified by you. You can quickly switch between real and fake information, even while the app is running. PMP also provides automatic protection using crowd-sourced recommendations, this uses information from previous manual decisions made by other users for the same app. In recent years, the phenomenal growth of smartphones and apps running on them has raised significant privacy challenges. In part these challenges are due to the millions of apps created for these platforms, by thousands of developers, not all of whom can be trusted. While OS manufacturers do have review processes in place, often they fail to capture privacy leaks such as have come to light recently. For example, the Path app accessed and transmitted its users’ address book, including names, email addresses and phone numbers, without permission. The use of this information could range from profiting from internet marketing scams, to detailed user tracking and other misuses. We believe that many such privacy invasions exist, and PMP provides the mechanisms to not only detect but also protect the user’s privacy from rogue developers by degrading their ability to profit from this information. PMP relies on individuals to make the choices of what information should be protected or allowed. This information drives our crowd-sourced recommendation feature that provides an automated way of making these decisions. In order to do this the only information we receive are the decisions you make about protecting or allowing to enable this crowd-sourced feature. Right now we can protect your Location, Identity and Contacts (Address Book). Future versions will protect even more kinds of information. PMP has been developed at the University of California San Diego, and is freely available for use by anyone. The research project is a collaboration between Dr. Yuvraj Agarwal and Dr. Malcolm Hall. Yuvraj is a Research Faculty in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UCSD and Malcolm is a Visiting Researcher in the same department. |
| When PMP detects that an app tries to access private information, it displays an alert to allow you to choose automatic protection settings based on crowd-sourced recommendations. |
| Bringing down the Notification Center displays quick access to changing the protection settings. The star in top left is yellow and the button labels are yellow which shows recommended protection settings are being used. If the star or a button is tapped it switches back to manual mode. NOTE: To enable this feature, from your home screen go to the Settings app, Notifications, scroll to the very bottom and you will see Protect My Privacy in the “Not in Notification Center” section. Tap it and turn it on. Then after you tap the back button, tap edit and drag it to the very top so it appears first like in the above screenshot. |
| The PMP app displays the protection configured so far. New apps appear in this list as information accesses are detected. |
| Protection can be configured per app and you can see what types of information have been accessed (in blue text). By resetting the settings, alerts will be shown in the app again when each type of information is accessed. |
| You can configure your fake location to be anywhere in the world, chosen using the familiar map interface. |
| An example of how protecting your contacts affects the Facebook app. As you can see the names, phone numbers and emails are all jumbled up. |
| This alert appears in any app that accesses one of the protected pieces of information. In the above image, PMP has detected that Flixster is trying to access contacts yet the box office feature being looked at has no obvious use for them. |
Version 2.3.3 :
-Fixed duplicate unique identifier alerts
-on iOS 6 fixes alert buttons not working when app accesses somehting before app has finished launchin.
-When resetting settings for an app it is now killed so it starts in a fresh state
-Support for iOS 6.1
You can find Protect my privacy on the BigBoss repo or you can download the .deb file
Download
You may view the latest post at
http://www.ihackstore.net/2013/03/12/protect-my-privacy-pmp/