Beyond Permissions: Investigating Mobile Personalization with Simulated Personas
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | |
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| _version_ | 1866915592552841216 |
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| author | Khalilov, Ibrahim Chen, Chaoran Xiao, Ziang Li, Tianshi Li, Toby Jia-Jun Yao, Yaxing |
| author_facet | Khalilov, Ibrahim Chen, Chaoran Xiao, Ziang Li, Tianshi Li, Toby Jia-Jun Yao, Yaxing |
| contents | Mobile applications increasingly rely on sensor data to infer user context and deliver personalized experiences. Yet the mechanisms behind this personalization remain opaque to users and researchers alike. This paper presents a sandbox system that uses sensor spoofing and persona simulation to audit and visualize how mobile apps respond to inferred behaviors. Rather than treating spoofing as adversarial, we demonstrate its use as a tool for behavioral transparency and user empowerment. Our system injects multi-sensor profiles - generated from structured, lifestyle-based personas - into Android devices in real time, enabling users to observe app responses to contexts such as high activity, location shifts, or time-of-day changes. With automated screenshot capture and GPT-4 Vision-based UI summarization, our pipeline helps document subtle personalization cues. Preliminary findings show measurable app adaptations across fitness, e-commerce, and everyday service apps such as weather and navigation. We offer this toolkit as a foundation for privacy-enhancing technologies and user-facing transparency interventions. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01336 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Beyond Permissions: Investigating Mobile Personalization with Simulated Personas Khalilov, Ibrahim Chen, Chaoran Xiao, Ziang Li, Tianshi Li, Toby Jia-Jun Yao, Yaxing Human-Computer Interaction Artificial Intelligence Mobile applications increasingly rely on sensor data to infer user context and deliver personalized experiences. Yet the mechanisms behind this personalization remain opaque to users and researchers alike. This paper presents a sandbox system that uses sensor spoofing and persona simulation to audit and visualize how mobile apps respond to inferred behaviors. Rather than treating spoofing as adversarial, we demonstrate its use as a tool for behavioral transparency and user empowerment. Our system injects multi-sensor profiles - generated from structured, lifestyle-based personas - into Android devices in real time, enabling users to observe app responses to contexts such as high activity, location shifts, or time-of-day changes. With automated screenshot capture and GPT-4 Vision-based UI summarization, our pipeline helps document subtle personalization cues. Preliminary findings show measurable app adaptations across fitness, e-commerce, and everyday service apps such as weather and navigation. We offer this toolkit as a foundation for privacy-enhancing technologies and user-facing transparency interventions. |
| title | Beyond Permissions: Investigating Mobile Personalization with Simulated Personas |
| topic | Human-Computer Interaction Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01336 |