Artifact for "The Price to Play: a Privacy Analysis of Free and Paid Games in the Android Ecosystem"

Paper by Pierre Laperdrix, Naif Mehanna, Antonin Durey and Walter Rudametkin published at The Web Conference 2022

Link to the study: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03559973/document

This repository contains 4 resources:

• app_ids.csv contains the list of game IDs we used for our study, and the source we used to collect the game files (either AndroZoo or Google's Play Pass).
• android-zoo-apk-collector.py collects the files of the games listed in app_ids.csv with the android_zoo source. The downloaded apks will be placed in the data/androzoo_apks folder. This script requires:
  • adding your AndroZoo key as an environment variable (https://androzoo.uni.lu/access),
  • downloading the list of apps contained in the AndroZoo dataset in a file named latest.csv that you place in this directory.
• google-play-pass-apk-collector.py monitors a smartphone via the adb tool to automatically install a game, download its files and uninstall it. The downloaded apks will be placed in the data/play_pass_apks folder.
• metadata-collector.py collects the information available on the Play Store page of the game and stores them in a json file. The generated json files are available in the data/json folder.