From Logging to Leakage: A Study of Privacy Leakage in Android App Logs

Android phones are among the most popular mobile devices today, providing users with a wide array of convenient services through various apps. These apps generate software logs during their runtime, which record their behavior, status, and error information. However, these logs can also inadvertently capture sensitive information and user privacy data, often without the developer's awareness. In this study, we constructed a dataset comprising 67,702 log records from 83 Android apps. Our analysis of this dataset identified 610 instances of privacy leakage, which indicates the prevalence of such issues in Android app logs. Additionally, our analysis identified characteristics of Android app logs with exposed sensitive information and revealed a gap between developers' awareness of privacy protection and privacy leakage in real-world scenarios.