The challenges of smartphones and their capabilities to carry out more or less any Apps presents a lot of parents with a big challenge regarding appropriate Apps for children. Therefore providers introduced explicit marks of quality (“Family”, from 5 years, etc.) which allow parents to identify such apps that do not compromise the privacy of their children’s data. Unfortunately, however, it has become evident that apps in big app-markets are able to track children inappropriately in spite of the appropriate mark. Aim of this project is to make a better identification of such apps possible using means of automated analysis of software and thereby reinstall the trust in the respective marks.
However many apps opt for mechanisms which complicate an analysis. For example the original code are thus covered up that names in the code, which gives clues to the functionality of the apps, are replaced by an unintelligible character string. To be able to analyze the behavior the most recent research results are applied which allow them to identify the original code and consequently facilitate the analysis. Based on this it is then easier to determine whether children are track inappropriately (i.e., when they were where and with whim they are in contact, etc.) or whether children are presented with content that is not age-appropriate.

According to Google the funding allows one doctorate to work on the project for a whole year, furthermore the scientists of the research group of the respective universities are able to work directly with the Google scientists and engineers and thus make use of synergies.
Out of 1003 applications of 360 universities 152 projects were selected to be funded after various rounds of selections.

Further information on the Google Research Blog

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