ROI: A method for identifying organizations receiving personal data
This addresses the issue of user unawareness about personal data sharing in the digital ecosystem, though it is incremental as it builds on existing techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of identifying organizations that receive personal data from digital sources, proposing ROI, a fully automated method that achieved 95.71% precision in identifying these organizations.
Many studies have exposed the massive collection of personal data in the digital ecosystem through, for instance, websites, mobile apps, or smart devices. This fact goes unnoticed by most users, who are also unaware that the collectors are sharing their personal data with many different organizations around the globe. This paper assesses techniques available in the state of the art to identify the organizations receiving this personal data. Based on our findings, we propose ROI (Receiver Organization Identifier), a fully automated method that combines different techniques to achieve a 95.71% precision score in identifying an organization receiving personal data. We demonstrate our method in the wild by evaluating 10,000 Android apps and exposing the organizations that receive users' personal data.