Maier, Eva-Maria;
Tanczer, Leonie Maria;
Klausner, Lukas Daniel;
(2025)
Surveillance Disguised as Protection: A Comparative Analysis of Sideloaded and In-Store Parental Control Apps.
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
, 2025
(2)
pp. 107-124.
10.56553/popets-2025-0052.
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Abstract
Parental control applications, software tools designed to manage and monitor children’s online activities, serve as essential safeguards for parents in the digital age. However, their usage has sparked concerns about security and privacy violations inherent in various child monitoring products. Sideloaded software (i.e. apps installed outside official app stores) poses an increased risk, as it is not bound by the regulations of trusted platforms. Despite this, the market of sideloaded parental control software has remained widely unexplored by the research community. This paper examines 20 sideloaded parental control apps and compares them to 20 apps available on the Google Play Store. We base our analysis on privacy policies, Android package kit (APK) files, application behaviour, network traffic and application functionalities. Our findings reveal that sideloaded parental control apps fall short compared to their in-store counterparts, lacking specialised parental control features and safeguards against misuse while concealing themselves on the user's device. Alarmingly, three apps transmitted sensitive data unencrypted, half lacked a privacy policy and 9 out of 20 were flagged for potential stalkerware indicators of compromise (IOC).
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Surveillance Disguised as Protection: A Comparative Analysis of Sideloaded and In-Store Parental Control Apps |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.56553/popets-2025-0052 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2025-0052 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | application analysis, dual-use applications, mobile security, parental control, sideloading, stalkerware |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215194 |
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