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Chapter 6
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-2469-4.ch006
ABSTRACT
The development of smart phones and other smart devices has led to the development of mobile applica-
tions, which are in use frequently by the users. It is also anticipated that the number of mobile applications
will grow rapidly in the next years. This topic has, therefore, been researched highly in the past years.
Mobile applications gather user data and that is why privacy and security in mobile applications is a
very important research topic. In this chapter we give an overview of the current research on privacy
and security issues of mobile applications.
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this Chapter is to present the current research topics in the field of privacy and security of
mobile applications. Mobile technologies enable people to use mobile applications on their smart phones
and smart devices constantly. The main operating systems used in the majority of mobile devices are
Android with 70% market share and iOS with 23% market share (“Mobile/Tablet Operating System
Market Share,” 2016). Both most popular operating systems offer an app market for users with various
mobile applications. Android users can download their mobile applications on Google Play Store and
iOS users on Apple’s App Store (Degirmenci, Guhr, & Breitner, 2013). The app markets are centralised
systems that offer applications to users, which means that the users cannot download the applications
from other websites like they can on desktop computers, unless they change their security settings on
their mobile devices. The mobile device users have downloaded over 100 billion mobile applications
from app markets in 2015 (Statista, 2016). Mobile applications are usually put on the app markets by the
third-party developers and with different purposes of the applications. When an application is uploaded
to the Google Play Store it is not checked and usually the application is then available for download
Models of Privacy and Security
Issues on Mobile Applications
Lili Nemec Zlatolas
University of Maribor, Slovenia
Tatjana Welzer
University of Maribor, Slovenia
Marjan Heričko
University of Maribor, Slovenia
Marko Hölbl
University of Maribor, Slovenia